“Why don’t you let me float away, deep into a profound vastness?”
A portfolio of my poetry + prose.
Catalina graduated from the University of Houston in May 2014 with a Bachelors in English Literature. Originally, she was pursuing a degree in Creative Writing with a concentration in Fiction but changed her major thanks the guidance of a Creative Writing Professor. She attended her first writing workshop in the summer of 2018 and plans to pursue more in the future. In the meanwhile, browse through her work. This is a combination of personal pieces and those commissioned by clients.
“In order to master the art of writing, you have to master the art of reading.”
UNTITLED
I beg You
to hear my howl
slice through the calm
of Your wind.
I shred
my withered tongue
to sift through
sunken syllables
and piece together
a broken hymn
out from my abandoned mouth,
to have my voice
join the chorus
of earthly song
praise Your name.
Remember our promise
forged long ago
when we met in Your
milky star pool
of Creation?
Should I have been born a dove instead?
Frankfurt, 1976
Maybe there’s still a footprint beneath the snow,
saturated with a longing to flutter,
across the charcoal sky.
To meet the family of birds with silent wings,
left undetected,
far beyond the weathered barbed wired wall,
beyond its grisly, rusted grin.
His mother never knew that her son’s trail disappeared
with no blood and no bones and left behind
just a putrid wooden casket brimming
with metal shards.
An explosive protest by an angry landmine between two worlds.
untitled
I pluck each chord
to hear the hum of my voice
trembling in unity
with the crash of the waves
you hear when my lips are pressed
against your ear.
Pursed lips, a sculpted opening
like an opalescent conch shell
lulling the rhythm of the sea.
For Alice
By: Catalina C
It’s always night here and I spin dreamless
with one foot in and one foot out,
with half-shut eyes
peering outward
into that drunken smear
of city streets adorned by neon signs
whining their OPEN cause
Like in the depths of a black ocean,
I’m dragged along by
pressure that show no mercy.
There is no light down here
and I drown on street signs, graffiti that strikes jealousy in Socrates,
peculiar small-talk, cigarette smoke,
fights, and tantrums.
Human nature that binds us down here
in a hysteria
of never-ending spirals
like the fish that swims in circles.
But when I shut my eyes,
the nightmare stays down here
and the sun lifts me up
in a golden elevator
to float in victory on
Aphrodite’s sea foam
waves.
WITHOUT // UH Workshop
-Catalina C
I breathe deep beneath, buried,
fixated within earth –to a borrowed old age.
It ruptures through hollow frames
of sober memories,
a moving collection of dead devotion. Of my family hanging
lilies, daisies, daffodils
along our corridors
but my mother
storing a golden apple
behind a closed bedroom door.
In mournful solitude,
I wrap my loose skin around me, fragmented with wild, estranged cracks. Like sudden earthquakes
laying catastrophe to rest
to let a secret wake.
A new spirit
detached from a strange and youthful barbarism.
It thrusts an eager ode to Forgiveness, the sweetest flower.
Even my most wearisome nightmares deserve to fade
into enduring specks of gravel.
Like my mother’s jagged stones arranged neatly
outside an empty house.
The Empty, Empathetic Room with the Mirror
Who could believe my past pierces through me with its hollow eyes?
It looms across my mirror,
brazen and undisturbed,
within this black and white, insular room.
Just calmly roll your eyes back into your skull,
and you’ll find your entrance too.
This amorphous giant leeching onto
my bloodless mind, knocking it, punching, devouring it.
It’s ambitious to taunt the past forward,
while it drowns my lungs on black-tarred
remorse.
And at my knees, I worship its smug betrayal above me
through the mirror’s reflection.
Its admiration thickened with ruin.
There is a storm of envy for the timid seeds, sprouting,
through my open chest.
This past can no longer grip onto
this ripened flesh.