When I was writing for my audition, I came up with something called “10-minute-poetry,” where I just let my fingers go and wrote in my notes app whatever came to me, see what I made with just that time, then make some titles after the fact. That’s the basic gist of what happened here.
tw: body horror, implied suicide
Beyond Imagination
The earth shatters under my heels, the blood twisting out of my arteries makes it’s way onto the ground and I breath. Shallow and afraid.
Never have I been this afraid before, this terrified, as I stare into the open maw of a creature with jagged edges and overbite, claws carved out craters on its tongue, and a ferocious smile. By God, a ferocious smile.
It licks its lips, its slimy tongue coating the outside of its fur, before it starts. Its feet will pound the pavement enough to shake the entire city and the chase to kill me ensues.
“You know you’re tired of running. I can always smell you.”
My vision spins and my heart bursts out of my chest and I look back at the creature as it licks up my spilled arteries and the hole it dug itself out of, and I know I’m screwed as I’ve stopped running.
It looks up. It smiles.
“You know you’re tired of running. Don’t you want to die?”
I wake up.
And I won’t go back to sleep.
the color outside
There’s snow outside my doorway.
It’s white, it’s a flurry, it’s beautiful.
I close my blinds.
There’s rain outside my window.
It’s pouring, it’s monstrous, it’s destroying everything within its wake.
My mother leaves town without a note.
It’s sunny on my porch.
It’s breaking across the grass, it tears apart shadow and dawn, yet it burns my skin all the same.
My brother parks his car. He’ll start to talk about how nice it is outside. I won’t go.
Clouds hang onto the sky.
They’re threatening rain, thunderstorms, hail, but the weather forecast says we won’t be seeing either of this.
My father walks to the sky and sips his coffee. He wishes something would happen.
We both know it probably won’t.
your headstone is not poetry.
I think I will die
Scatter my seeds across tilled soil and expire
Watch from the heavens as the crows pick apart my body, and know this is poetry.
But it’s probably not.
There’s no poetry to a funeral, that’s for the living
There’s no poetry to weeping mothers and siblings and fathers.
There’s no poetry as freshly dug graves are made in the ground and they bury
someone young.
Poetry is bled from tears.
And the dead cannot cry.
These are all so powerful! Really amazing job!