In The Garden of Eden
I wanted to be touched
The worst part about God reaching inside of you and rummaging around is that he won’t do it again.
Adam, the first man, understood this,
God prodding into his ribs for something to take.
Such violation—
The universe is touching you and you have no recourse—
But the worst part, isn’t that your organs are being parsed over like fruits—no, poor Adam, the worst part is the first time is the last time,
Lie to me, please,
Touch me and make me feel like a person.
Ring of wasps, ice less sharp, and a fog up on the edge.
In one past 50, six writers rise to climb the side closer to 100, each with their signature work, each with their signature heart and mettle. You won't want to miss these minds in their elements. Positively fell in love with each of these pieces.
Here's the link to Prose. Radio.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOaO-9KYr6Y
And here are the pieces featured.
https://www.theprose.com/LDW
https://www.theprose.com/BurialandUtopia
https://www.theprose.com/nonzerospin
https://www.theprose.com/Erallie
https://www.theprose.com/Mariah
https://www.theprose.com/ModernAntigone
And.
As always.
Thank you for being here.
-The Prose. team
Time Loop: 1971, Saigon
Apocalypse at the edges of the eye
Fill my mouth with water and napalm
Strike me twice
And I’ll be yours forever
My favorite parasite
Oh you’re so bad for me, baby
Got eyes like bullet casings and twice as worse of a cigarette habit
¿Qué se hace, mi amor?
We’ve been here before
We’ve done this a thousand times and more
Orange and green and purple and blue smoke signals
Watch my insides explode like fireworks
At the end of the world, the smoke’s rising
But that’s okay
It’s all a meaningless loop anyway
a/n: apocalypse now playing in the background, rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead by tom stoppard and borderlands/la frontera by gloria anzaldúa on the table, random bruise on my thigh, tab on my laptop about parasitic mating and anglerfish from nat geo, water bottle on the table with a mr. orange sticker from reservoir dogs, ramona vance's ambient concept album 'this world is upside down', and the sound of gunshots down the street
If One More Person Says “God Doesn’t Make Mistakes” I Am Going To Beat The Brakes Off You In An IHOP Parking Lot
A man from my parents’ church was killed in a car accident yesterday.
I am thirteen years old.
I think I stopped believing in god when I learned why drunk drivers usually survive fatal crashes
It’s because their bodies are loose
If you’re going to be rear-ended, get loose
If you’re going to end up in a three car pileup along the unforgiving roadside, get loose
If you’re going to die,
get loose
The year he died the world got quieter when his mother picked between casket and cremation
The year he died the world got a little bit sicker
They rented out the town hall
Put his face on a projector
Ate M&Ms in the parking lot, angry at god
For a man I’d spoken two sentences to
For having to be at a funeral for the young
You reach a certain point of grief
where even your cells need consoling
Elbow to elbow
Melt into the mint green covered concrete
Must’ve been a thousand people mourning
Well over ninety percent believers in the omnipresent
‘God loves him’ - sacrilegious self-serving pat on the shoulder move your hands elsewhere
but he couldn’t save him.
why not?
he was only 27
Drunk driver, oh you motherfucker
Posted bail and with your loose loser body and scrubbed away every trace of yourself
And skipped town
When I graduated highschool, they held the afterparty in the same room
The walls were white now (get loose, get loose)
All the adults ate Safeway cookies at your funeral and sobbed the whole time
They will comfort themselves with copious amounts of religion and fucking and drinking in their cars when they think nobody is looking
We were pissed off at angels and circumstance and the universe and atoms and everything that had ever existed and nobody would admit it
Reception is in the same room
Lean up against a table in formal wear
There are tears and snot everywhere
Poor son, on a stairway to heaven
Stares down from the stars (that’s not what death is, it’s a cut to black, it’s one final dream, it’s the recycling of energy—get loose, get loose)
His mother still weeps for him but she doesn’t cry anymore
She’d like to be angry
But she doesn’t have it in her
Instead, she will sit with the crumpled black and white pamphlet of her son’s face in the hallway
and breathe
First her husband
Now you
(Later, her second son will join you)
You died in 2019 on the 101
In a head-on
Your mother
Dreams of seeing you in paradise
But god keeps on taking her babies away
Hello again, Mavia: Silk Reads and the Villanelle.
Mavia sends in episode 48, with a beautiful read, as she always does. Sit back and grab something to drink, and settle into her groove... From the Challenge by CKMunsell, Mavia reads the entries in her signature sound to soothe even the most caffeinated human. Good way to start Friday.
Here's the link to the show.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWb4K_iM5i0
And here is the Challenge to read them.
https://www.theprose.com/challenge/14592
And.
As always...
Thank you for being here.
-The Prose. team
Litany I & II
The following is based on a true story:
In 1969, the bridge hadn’t been built yet
Poor Araceli, mother of five
By the time they pulled the third child out of the river
She had collapsed,
Clutching at her chest
Clawing at the skirts
Betrayal of a sinking truck, a selfish impatient man, and a husband
Poor Araceli, mother of five and three dead bodies
Back then, it was only a trail down the mountains from El Salvador down to Tequila
Only burros and donkeys and horses alike—maybe a truck sometimes
Three hours wayside
Husband hitched a ride, told his wife and children get inside
Piled into the cab next to the smoking driver
When they called in divers, we smelled it first
The smell of rot
Of the third son, so young
Ay, the six month old, the one she had last summer, widow next door whispers
As they dragged his bloated body through the street
It was only a raft in 1969
Poor Araceli gone to church
Whole town’s come to pray
A thousand hail marys
We will pray until we are sick
We will pray until those poor children are in heaven
One person goes first—ninety nothing prayers—the next starts to lead
Lord bless these poor babies
All we had was prayers to give
Baptized in the rivers of Amatitán
Raft unbalanced as it tips over the side
Sending the family of seven wayside still inside
When they announced it on the radio that the divers found the third child
And Araceli looked at her two young children left in guilt
And stood quiet as they told her, we found his head stuck in the back window of the
This is punishment for surviving
This is the punishment for living
Lightning’s struck twice and god’s abandoned poor Araceli
Come town crier,
She’s a victim of a man’s hurried desire
To get across a river
Whose bridge had been embezzled and immolated seven times over before it was born
Bribe the priest
To bless the funeral and bury an unbaptized baby
Husband sits so perfectly, so angry as they lower them in their final restings
Poor Araceli,
Sits vacant-eyed
Husband can no longer speak to her
Mother in-law combs her hair, ushers her here and there
I’m afraid there’s just nothing that can be done here
Mother of mothers could not save her
We buried her about a year after.
Litany II
In 1969,
The truck driver fled
Scared of being strung up for his ways
Returns
After the family is long gone
They are all publicized relics now
Twists his foot inside the widow’s door
My love, mi amor
Fucks her while guilt or maybe narcissism or maybe the fact they should've gone one by one—family first, then the truck, then continue on—eats him from the inside
Smoking rolled cigarettes and drinking a fifth
He's got a scar on his lip
From the last man's wife
Son plays soccer outside
So childish and so immersed in violence
Teenage boys getting drunk under orange trees and fighting and crying like lost babies
They have all seen men die before the age of eighteen
It’s depressing, really
Sitting in a sleazy bar,
Drunken, bragging about all the girls he’s done before
Son sits with his friends
Listening to his unrepentance
Oh look, here comes the widow’s name
Out of his mouth
I wonder what the son will do now
Get my mother’s name out,
Laughter
Carries on talking about the boy’s mother in this manner—
Storms out
He’s hotblooded and he’s got the anger and the firepower to prove it
Cantinas carry a collection of bullet holes around these parts
Today, there’s another one
Marking the spot in the bar
Where a son shot the truck driver
We ducked beneath tables and watched him bleed.
Ojo por ojo.
Diente por diente.
Dead daddy’s pistol served its purpose
And so the son flees
And the world continues on, furious and bloody
Families fractured, saints delivered, guilty guns and well-loved widows
Mother of mothers, come save them
Pray over each of their caskets
May they each find their way to damnation
May they each find their way to salvation
Mother Mary, if we are born to die,
please let it be nice
In the early 2000s, the Puente de Amatitán-El Salvador was finally built.
Today there is a dam. Today there is a road. Today there is a bridge.
This does nothing for them.
James-Webb Telescope
Light takes time to travel.
To some stars, you are still four years old, you are still in the backyard in the yellow sun, drinking hose water that tastes a little bit like god.
Modern telescopes puzzle piece together large million-dollar mirrors to see deeper into space,
to see the photons that haven’t reached us yet.
Often they image nebulae and supernova remnants caught in time—
burning bright clouds of gas and dust and particles pressed upon by gravity and dark matter until they will swirl together to form a protostar.
The deeper they go into space,
the deeper they go into time.
Somewhere out there, you are a baby and nothing bad has happened yet.
Like The Aztecs Used To Do Babe
my body is desperate for violence
when hunger is in your blood,
when your ancestors once drowned the world in it,
i suspect it carries on
here, slit me open here
you see? the sharp edge of my ribcage?
take your forefinger and just fucking tear
my people cannot separate love from hate
i worry we were born this way
Scorpions, hands of emptiness, iron seas, glass roof, and No One Like Hoo.
A desert rat blasting Scorps made way for episode 44, where a fistful of writers back up the band with their brutal and beautifully told pieces of writing, to follow in the wake of the electric axe echo. Huckleberry_Hoo closes the show with another instant classic from him, a true piece of literature, like the other four before, led by frankgainey, and backed by LDW, parachute, and some new blood with the handle of ClarkDesklamp.
Grab a mug and hit play.
Here's the link to Prose. Radio's episode 44.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BeZ8ojWeow
And here are the featured pieces:
https://www.theprose.com/post/817826/to-whom-it-may-concern https://www.theprose.com/post/817823/death-by-television https://www.theprose.com/post/817817/killing-time https://www.theprose.com/post/817813/box-of-glass-ceilings https://www.theprose.com/post/817912/a-perfect-garden
And.
As always.
-Thank you for being here.
-The Prose. team
Crave
You loved me enough to kill me. Enough to grieve me.
(heretic love / i, the slaughtered dove)
Dying stag slowly heaves in its last breath,
You and I, interconnect
Bloodbath. This is you and I. This is how we are intertwined. Skin to skin. Vein to vein.
(i know you better than anyone else / there can be nobody else)
Crucified by my own affection. Trapped by discretion and misdirection.
The steady discordant pump of my heart. I hear yours, thumping back, in the meat of your chest. Buried in the sinew of me and you.
You and I, implies that we are separate concepts. That we can exist apart. But this would be foolish.
(it is reflexive, instinctive, to crave you the way i do / it is repulsive, unnatural, and wrong)
Lumbar lordosis,
is the arch of the back.
The curving of the spine.
(Oh god, you are mine)
Twisted tight, wrapped around your jawbone. There is a word for this. There must be a proper word for this.
I want you, is different
from
I need you
Absolution tastes like your blood between my teeth. Condemnation tastes like you. I’ll wear your bones like a crucifix. Slip inside your skin and never let go.