Young Writers Society

#14

Sadness lives inside me.
Sadness made her home in my hollow bones
and filled me up.
No longer marrow and bone,
I am a force of nature cracked in half,
I am a geode made dull in the middle.

On my tongue is every word I have ever spoken
and none of them will ever be enough.

What I want to say is that I love you.
Unconditionally and unendingly.
I want to wrap my words in cotton,
quilts made from every moment
that is part of our shared space.

Our hearts are not in our chests,
they are in our hands and we are painting with them.
Globules of magnetic red shrieking
to come closer, be nearer, envelop us.

But we are memory and sound,
letters by hands we forget are ours.
When I tell you I love you it is conditional,
sluggish behind the vehicle
I use to express it.

We are in many ways stars
slowly jettisoning our light
until we have nothing left,
we have touched those never seen.
How much does it mean to us,
when we are already passed on.

#15

I fell away from myself easily,
as though peeling skin after sunburn,
I shed and suddenly: elsewhere
with my tongue between my teeth
and pliers at my tears, joint by joint
I found myself.

#16

Claw handed creatures pluck dust from my skirt at night.
I cannot see them in the black hole light,
but I feel the scrape of their insults picking my skin.
They hold memories and dreams
wrapped in that feeling you had yesterday or the day before.
a forgetfulness forgiven by time and fear.
They hold my hand when the nightmare hits,
deep blood licking their teeth from the underbelly of my wrist.
They are there and not, alive and not,
just like me.

#17

I left spare numbers all over my floor.
And not the good kind, the kind
where time ran away from me.
You grind the small numbers into carpet,
threading seconds into the fabric of my room.
I can't pick them from the wool;
a minute is too small, a second is impossible.
Hours indent our knees as we fumble
them into jars and jackets,
temporary bindings as numbers eat away the seams.
This too strips the print from my fingers.
It takes longer than I thought to save time.

#18

I am cocooned,
heart beating slow
like a dark river
covered for winter.

Each breath is drawn
from a spring held under,
bubble gasps through
thin lined teeth.

#19

Lightning makes home
behind my eyelids
as darkness falls.
White hot flashes
are dashes on the road,
guiding me back home.

Waves like tremours run
in the aftermath of the mainland,
they echo green swell
and aching glass sea.

I can hear the thunder
of the water beyond my earphones.
It bellows into my chest,
steam solidifying the bronchioles.
I am foam.

#20

This is how the earth breathes,
clustered waves choking down the scrub.
Silt washes the grass and the roots taste salt.
I have come to leave on the edge of a cliff
not yet eroded. The sound of it is in my tongue,
the evidence between my toes.
I am not allowed to leave
and so I do.

#21

Where is your voice, little poet,
have you forgotten it again
lying against a telegraph pole
or by the post office front door?
Does it lie along the ivory keys
you haven't touched in a year?
Little poet, don't mime at me;
Break the bones in your hands
and start again.

#22

I gave up to you the first time we met,
my hands cloistered in yours.
I didn't know then, dark shadows of love
finding their way into your throat,
but I lived too hard, a common invincibility.
In dreams you took apart my skin,
a mortal sin lying beneath sinew and loam.
In day dreams I fostered your hands
like orphaned birds, creasing the callous clean.
But your eyes were not mine and the thick loss of you
was numb in your lungs, I was a number in a line
on your way to someone else.

#23

Have you found what to think
when the dandelions drink
from our half submerged well?

We carved them there,
petals long and lithe, divided by a hair,
stem to stem in the dying light,

If I had a dollar to write home,
I would wax about a feeling shown
when the dandelions drink.

By the well in the summer heat,
the flowers flow, ready to greet
autumn's coveted cold.

If I had the words to explain,
I'd write of when the dandelions drink.