Category: Poetry

At night

Julia M. C. M.

Trigger Warning: Grief, Suicide

I don’t know the night as well as I would like
But I spend all my time, staring at the sky,
And the Stars, and wondering if I’ll see wings or scars
Shoot in front of the Moon, to keep me company
On lonely walks, empty thoughts, memories lost,
And all the other wounds that bleed and burn
At night, or when the sun is high in the sky,
While I try to find reasons why,
Not to take my own life,
To finally close my eyes,
Only to open them,
And see you again.

Julia M. C. M.

The Chronic Void

Kate Gough

Trigger Warning: chronic illness and hospitalization

Poppy pills and hospital bills,
The void, she costs more than I thought.
As I cut off the paper bracelet,
I wonder when the prickly tenderness
will paint its pain on my organs once more.

And the others, they try to help, in their own narrow ways.
Cathedral thunder and chicken noodle soup,
they threaten and soothe in the same breath.

Alone, I am, as they forget soon enough.
Chronic, I am stuck inside, as the world breathes,
through coughing fits, I try to get some sleep.

And in my dreams the void, she sings to me.
She tells me how the world sees me.
Helpless, poor little thing, barely lives,
they gasp.
But she, she cannot judge.
She can only prance through darkness
to cloak the ever toxic positivity.

The void, she carries me evermore,
as I live my life in sick captivity.

I live in reality, denial cobwebs the streets,
and in them I sneeze.
Alone, I am, but the void is home to me.

Kate Gough

How to Run Away

Jesica Davis

Jesica Davis

Beginnings

Lynn White

I know that tomorrow will bring
a new beginning,
another new beginning
and I wonder,
when will I reach the end
of my beginnings.
The beginning and end
in harmony,
the end beginning
when everything is completed
and nothing left to be started.
This time will come.
It’s getting closer,
closer and closer.
Perhaps it has already come
and I haven’t noticed.
But I don’t think so.
So I will carry on
towards my new beginning
and cease to wonder
how it will end.

Lynn White

THE PROBLEM OF THE DARK

Rebecca Lilly

I trust life to finish the job somehow, sparing me histories in the netherworld (which I once thought would lift me out, but only confirmed my appointment with the devil). I’m always on the lookout for omens, lessons I can’t ignore, and dark coincidences. If deception’s the norm, it’s a guess if I’ve booked that appointment. While I’d rather not venture into netherworlds, I can’t simply disregard the problem of dark. Come hell or high water, I’m slated to write up this report for my memoirs (a foreword with cavernous tunnels, and sweatshops with chains and machetes, before the real horror starts!). I’ve a penchant to personify too much, but the devil’s not a person, and superstition is the enemy of attention no less than my ongoing dream of eating snowflakes off the street, desperately, to keep from overheating! If enough snowflakes go down my throat, my mouth mumbles out the cold eventually, the devil’s like the Wizard of Oz, just a hoax. If only what mindfulness teachers call the clear light mind took almost no effort! Unfortunately, a lie is insidious. The soul isn’t complicated, say the mystics. It’s just so close we never see it.

Rebecca Lilly