Fragile Bonds and Lipstick Smears

Deceived by a cancerous two-faced moon,
I believed in the thickness of blood –
until she broke the fragile bond of sisterhood.

Nothing can stop these grief tides,
the splash of sorrow
and its constant ebb and flow.

In the density of salt water,
on the tempest of my grief,
my heart is tossed like a leaf.

With her glossy slick of lipstick,
a disparate blood hybrid, the darkest sibling
is a monstrous mermaid, a seductive siren.

She launches a smile on wind-tossed sea,
but it takes more than an oil slick of lipstick
to save a sinking relationship.

Kim M. Russell, 29th August 2023

Free image found on Wallpaper Flare

For this week’s Poetics at the dVerse Poets Pub, Punam wants us to write about siblings: ties that bind and gag. She says, ‘there can be no quibbling that siblings are both a bane and a blessing. They can be our best friends and our worst enemies… Shared childhood, shared family and shared memories make this bond unique. Siblings are friends foisted on us but this bond usually lasts a lifetime.’

Punam would like us to show some love to our sibling(s) through poetry, but we are also free to complain and rant, as long as we share with our thoughts on siblings. I have taken a couple of old poems and re-worked them.

39 thoughts on “Fragile Bonds and Lipstick Smears”

  5. This is really heartbreaking. Such sadness, anger, resentment and frustration in this – a very strong poem! This made my throat constrict. I am so sorry you had to – and have to – experience this. So brave of you to go back there. Thank you for sharing such a beautifully raw and painful poem.

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  11. Right away your start of the “cancerous two-faced moon” stirred my interest more. I cannot imagine the feelings of sadness, perhaps relief, when the sisterhood bond is broken. I can’t remember knowing of that happening to anyone I know, I know it has to be sometimes, human mixtures of personalities.
    ..

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  13. Familial love is shadowed by familial hate, unreasonable and strange either way. “I believed in the thickness of blood – / until she broke the fragile bond of sisterhood.” The resulting creature – smiling so ferally lipsticked – is “a disparate blood hybrid, the darkest sibling / is a monstrous mermaid, a seductive siren.” Growing up with my older brother we were bound by both emotions. Smeared by that lipstick, only with brothers it was blood and farts. Good work here Kim.

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  17. Pingback: The lightest note breaks – writing in north norfolk

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