Apryl Skies, "Elements & Angels"

Apryl Skies is a California native, an award-winning author, filmmaker, and founder of Edgar & Lenore's Publishing House. Skies’ writing is highly aesthetic, lyrical and provocative. She now resides among the ancient saguaros, colourful street art and opulent monsoon skies of Tucson AZ.

About Elements & Angels, by Apryl Skies
Elements & Angels is a wildly imaginative collection of poetry by award-winning author, Apryl Skies. Like snapshots capturing memories, past lives, Skies draws a full spectrum of emotion from each sacred moment, moulding them into cinematic poems, dramatic recollections and gritty vignettes. Skies navigates her way through an uncertain world recognizing the magic of the mundane. These poems are time capsules and the messages within overflow with thought-provoking metaphor. Long-awaited and epic in scale this collection reads like a survivor anthem.

From Elements & Angels

Poems inspired by Los Angeles

LosT Angeles

City to cinders
Buried beneath soot and ash
Paradise wounded

Fire at the Midnight Matinee

The entire southern California coast
bursts into flame

Radioactive egos tread water
exploding into a sea of cinder

centerfolds and cardboard cut-outs 
with their manufactured smiles, 
flailing arms, and yoga mats
rush toward a painted 
Hollywood horizon 
scraping the gum from their heels.

Ushers rip perforated tickets,
viewers take their seats
awaiting the next Black Dahlia

Mouths agape
full of popcorn
and imitation butter.

Poems inspired by Tucson

Tucson Landscape

Mai tai sunset sky
Over desert horizon
Coyote and moon


Oracle Starlings

Starlings in flight 
their peculiar formations 
mingle with the ghosts
above the cemetery on Oracle Road

a choreographed birdsong,
a dance with the dead
at twilight

here on Oracle road
the sun sinks
beneath the Tucson landscape
into the shadows of ancient Saguaros

where no one is less alive 
than the living

115 Degrees Fahrenheit 

I tickle Mexico 
to return to you
across desert horizons 
of saguaros and mesquite
miles rippled with heat
trundling onto this tired highway, 
my bridge back home …

And I could not love you more
as I lean heavy into your indifference,
once my soft place to land
now a shattered citadel 
of infinite distances

And those raw truths 
that continue to burn and consume
our existence, and each of these
haunting stars above
revealing all our unremarkable postures

How very foolish we are 
to think any one of us 
worthy of crown.