I only spoke in moans. My forehead was so sweaty and every part of me burned. My eyes couldn’t stop themselves from spinning back and forth into my head, so one minute it was all blank, the next I could see her and only her.
Cherokee Summer
“This isn’t love. It’s merely an infatuation.”
You physically pushed my body away from yours. I tried explaining my desires and all of my dreams to you, but you gazed into my hollow eyes and laughed.
“You’ll never be a poet.” Your words were like spit. “You lack an imagination.”
offbeatjim wittenberg
She looks at the crimson liquid in the sink, both repulsed and fascinated. She should have quit the pills months ago, when she started vomiting blood. She knows it’s wrong, but she won’t stop. It makes her feel like Keats, like a tragic, beautiful poet, dying of love.
Charlotte Victoire
The flaming object was thought to be a shooting star.
The villagers were rapt by and in its glow.
The shell, suddenly in their midst.
Afterwards, what should have been done was not.
There had not been time.
There had not been light.
There had not been the will.
Dawn was undecided: appearing, disappearing, reappearing.
The sun hesitant to reveal splintered frames, blackened shards, and protruding carmine streaked arms.
Finally, the golden beam between the night and sand lit three shrouded figures, throwing shadows into infinity as they walked away.
Townsend Walker
I saw Suzy again making her way to Caesar Chavez Blvd. in her sweats and Raiders hoodie. She and Rob must’ve made up.
That shiner, though, seems to have opinions of its own. Researchers say if you study something long enough, you can predict future behavior. I sure hope they’re wrong.
Michael K. Gause
She smiles over cramps through the meeting.
“We’ve decided to go in a different direction,” the bosses say again.
She shakes the new hire’s hand, winks, says she looks forward to
working under him.
She keeps her spirits up. “I’m still young-ish,” she says. “There’s time.”
Then her appendix bursts.
Elizabeth Licata
The ceiling fan bends the artificial light. When I look at the fan I see the wooden paddles, but shifting my eyes I see a translucent whirl of brown, light flashing as demons dance across the ceiling. I watch the light bounce off my knife, absorbed by the natural splatter of your blood.
Emily Fink
Lay the bedding in such a way that your lover loses track of where she’s been sleeping. Keep her pills close to her head. Build a nightstand if one does not already exist. Keep one lamp on and one lamp off. This will provide for a dreamy aura.
Josh Thompson
Defiance wasn’t in me.
Cigarette smoke and anger exited passed his yellowed teeth. “This isn’t poetry!” His sallow complexion reddened. “I can write this way, but I choose not to write this way. I’m a poet, you’re a poseur.”
Inside myself I was weeping. This was how our friendship ended.
offbeatjim wittenberg
I stand here staring down at you, my eyes and brain aching. You stare back at me unblinking, full of contempt at my ineptness. I want so much to pull the plug on your life, to reverse your interpretation of me, but I need you…to finish the story.
Dave Barber
