'The Death of Cleopatra'

My first published ekphrastic poem! Also, first published work in Asia outside the Philippines. This poem is really just me making peace with the fact that I couldn't go to Singapore and see the painting in the flesh. Hyperlink to my poem in this issue of Quarterly Literary Review Singapore.

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The Death of Cleopatra
Juan Luna (c. 1881)

"Luna depicted the Egyptian queen's suicide at the moment of its discovery: dressed in royal regalia, Cleopatra had just expired, along with a maid who just collapsed on the floor and another, on the verge of falling down. Barely seen at the foot of a pillar is the tail of a snake slithering away..."
--Philippine Daily Inquirer

She dreams in tongues. Words I haven't for the rich billow

of green and garnet robes splayed around her. Drunk

on the serpent's fond kiss, she feigns blindness,

pretends to be mute and deaf--inanimate, really. But I'm familiar

with the scrutiny of strangers, the kind she will never admit

she yearns for. Eyes tracing the tender curve of her breasts,

the waxen sheen of her arm, the concealed navel.

Long after the pyramids have crumbled and the great peninsula

spliced by a sliver of water, we will still think of her lovely

face, birthing maps in placid slumber: marble obelisks

carved from her cheeks, and the flesh of her lips

swapped for dunes stretching across Cairo's peripheries.

Speak up, darling, loud and clear. Is that a smile she's failing

to bury? Just the slightest hint of satisfaction, warm as venom

in her veins, the future grown soft in the folds of her palms.