RAGANA: LORA BLOOM

Lora Bloom is a poet, musician/songwriter and spoken word performance artist. She is the vocalist of the experimental theatrical band Radio Eris who wrote and staged the rock opera “Eurydice” at the Rotunda in 2019. She is the author of “Poking Through the Fabric of the Light that Formed Us” which won the Blood Pudding Press chapbook contest in 2013. She was an owner and founder of the historic West Philadelphia venue Eris Temple Arts.

Lora’s work is diverse in theme and format and seeks to explore connections between the mundane, grotesque, surreal and transcendent.  Her writing  explores  the mirror world and slips through boundaries between inner and outer spaces, dream states and raw existence, hope and despair.

 

Cat Thing

You walk on fallen needles

soft as your fur and sharp as your claws

You try to get closer, to find where the shaft

of sunlight is coming from

At each step, insects crunch under your bare feet

death throws tiny creatures

You don’t even notice

 

Your yellow eyes peer through cracks in the dense growth

where the green is darker and brighter

turning yellow and blue towards the sky

You can’t see the sky

You just know that if you don’t

pour your heart into something

a towering sunburnt tree, a ray of impossible light,

a broken hammer, the sharpest knife in the world

You will go very slowly

Each day becoming more unbearable

until it is just too much of a struggle to eat or breathe

 

Instead, you walk some more

stalking the green infinite

Each precious, delicate branch

the sharpest knife in the world

cuts you as you cut it

 

 

Self Contained

 

we feel complete now

in the bed with the door closed

you and me naked under the thick blanket

so early in the morning that we

are not yet awake

and no longer sleeping

and nothing we need to do today

with the door closed

with all of our 6 cats

and a young ghost cat

in the room with a warm fall wind

blowing in from the window makes it feel

like we could just throw out our clothes,

our tv and phones

and float out, self contained

out of this window, this house, this place, this time

 

Space in Between

For Dre and Corey

 

Now we fall

Out of gravity for the first time

Comforted by the mass

Of our loss

 

There is no single point

Where the body no longer

Can survive

 

The creatures