Sigrid Bergie Feliciano is author of Turning Out The Lights nominated for the Minnesota Book Awards (Poetry).  She recently won a Naji Naaman Literary Prize (Complete Work) 2019.  Her poems have featured, appeared in The Talking Of Hands, ONTHEBUS, Icarus, Dacotah Territory, Studio One, Writing In A Woman’s Voice, The Great River Review…and many others. For 20 years a Poet in Residence for COMPAS Minnesota Writers & Artists in the Schools Program; The Minnesota Center for the Book Arts; The Loft. She lives with ancient oak and pine, coyote and mule deer and her husband in the foothills of Los Angeles. 

Fairytale

I want to live
where my eyes have power to see
snow purifying words of love
in someone’s half-opened mouth —
words ordered weightless,
a cloud of sound.
The dark beast moves his lips.

I want to live in a fairytale
where the jewels and glass of Cinderella’s slipper
are not boring and bright
but burn like frost
when ordinary people dance,
transforming dust to music.

I want to live,
gather strength in solitude
and awaken like Sleeping Beauty
from dream and shadow
to a resonant world,
time outside me, shifting and long.

Four Lip Poems

1

Lips come out of a dark alley
and talk to their faces.
open in red dresses,
they dunk wet kisses.

2

Lips stand alone at any moment
with a nose for an umbrella
after each cloudburst of imagery.

3

Lips stare back at the tongue,
slump around a spoon or fork,
absorbing memories of warmth.

4

Lips whisper, like sliced fruit,
of words coming to bed,
one behind the other.
Moss covers the thighs.

Just A Kiss

It’s not the operatic I Will Die For You or the suicidal I Can Not Live Without You kind of kiss.
Nor is it a kiss that plays or a kiss that summons fire.

It is just a sweet delicate manly thing humbly planted on the side of my unsuspecting face
gazing out my desk window with sunshine and my cup of coffee.

Your kiss is almost too little, too round, too soft. It is the most tiniest, most tenderest,
most secret part of your soul.

I ask you, “What kind of kiss was that?”
You answer, “It’s just a kiss. A morning kiss.”