The Fall
Creativity, loved
bled, and bloody
left me,
autumnal winds
stretching out
my draft deafening door,
swinging low
with lament:
...you used us
like a drug,
and now
we're fully wasted...
useless body! and breath what
could have been made, cohesive
for consumptive ritual,
you slaughtered
and butchered--!
with Life seeping out
its shell casing, housing
this bullet, aimed falsely
in vigilance, of a second helping
...eating is nonsensical
...and sleep is a wake
for grieving demons,
their gnashing of teeth
foretold
in Revelations!
for those who long buried
with primitive spade and hatchet
the half-spent core, reactive
that which sprouted fevered
exponential saplings, of temptation
blotched green and gold and red...
fading to russet,
brittle and deadening...
an ache I'd hope to feel again
shedding this blanket of snow
Two people can keep a secret of one of them is dead (Russian saying)
It is an ongoing joke between my husband and son that I am probably in the CIA, living undercover in the suburbs of New Jersey with my Russian immigrant husband and son as cover. I’ve never understood what they imagine my assignment to be; nor what about me encourages their thinking. I am an African-American educator with a PhD in Hispanic literature. I am a devoted wife. An adoring mother. Indeed, it is so unlikely as to be far-fetched albeit quite amusing.
Until it wasn’t. I mean, if I tell you, I have to kill you is not merely a line of fiction.
It’s my life.
And so, the day they made the joke in front of my husband’s worthless half brother, Aleksandr, (“former” KGB, ha, unbeknownst to his family), and his gaze sharpened on me, and I knew he knew that I knew that he knew. And he had to die.
And it had to be quick, fatal and undetectable.
My specialty.
“I’ll be right back, guys,” I said, getting up from the dining room table. The cookies should be done.”
“Chocolate chip?” my son asked. I nodded. “I hope you made at least three dozen. I could eat them all. Although Anna’s cookies are great, too,” he added about his girlfriend of the moment.
“I can always bake more, sweetheart,” I replied over my shoulder as I went to the kitchen.
After removing the cookie sheets from the oven, I placed several cookies on three dessert plates: one for my husband, one for my son, and one for Aleksandr. Grabbing a small brown jar from the back of the spice cabinet, I added a drop of the contents to the top cookie on Aleksandr’s plate. I replaced the jar before I picked up the plates and re-entered the dining room.
“Here you go guys! Let me know if you want more” I said, placing an identical plate in front of each of them. “Milk?”
Mouths full, I got a nod of yes from my son, no from Aleksandr and my husband. I could feel Aleksandr’s eyes following me as I left the room.
Back in the kitchen, I took a glass from the cabinet and milk from the refrigerator. As I poured, I heard a chair scrape the wood floor and fall in the dining room.
“What are you three doing now?”
“It’s Aleksandr!” my husband said. “Something’s wrong!”
I ran in the room. Aleksandr was on the floor, clutching his chest. He looked at me in pain and bewilderment. “Oh my God,” I screamed, kneeling next to my husband. “Call 911!” I said to my son.
The EMTs arrived within five minutes.
He was dead within three.
The medical examiner’s report ruled it a heart attack.
My secret is safe.
Her blood, soft. (audio link below the words)
Chapter 38
Out of the quarter. No feeling of change as it had been, the stranger,
when they had passed the café, the lights were off in back.
No feeling of change.
What that did mean, the seams blending for those to enter.
One of the last lines written to make way for the quarter to become
what it would. The work of them.
This, out of his thoughts, for Aria alone.
His mind for her tonight, only for her.
Where she would be the time after the next dusk, he would only
hold on to hope.
Up the street, her hand in his. The beauty of the city.
Love shining down.
Into pubs, into the cafés.
Live music of the free.
A thought from her, while they listened to the saxophone of a man
to play. The quarter, a change. Passing the tattoo shop, the only one
she would go, one artist inside. Boarded up now, dark. When they had
walked past. Her thoughts, further back in the quarter. The floor of the
building, their floor. They were the only two on it. The rest of the
tenants below. The quiet of them.
In the room, the sounds of music. Out the windows, a filter for neon.
His kiss to her neck. The applause between songs.
The people in the room. She had not seen them in the quarter. They
lived in the true city, graced by chance to not know the pull of the
quarter. Her mind, understanding more from the body of the stranger.
Pieces of mystery, they floated upon strings in the night. Her man, a
man she would kill to die for, the crescendo of song on the stage before
them. His hand holding the two of hers.
The love between them, strong
throughout time.
When the stranger thought of this. Something inside to take him
deep down into the past, into the changing of heart at the table.
It creeped upon him there, held his heart.
Encased in her stomach, what he would feel under the night. The
stars above. A celebration of swirls, the love from there.
Come what would, between death and the time before it.
What he had with her, the time from their first night alone to what
was waiting after the dusk of tomorrow.
Aria, her long ghost. From a hole in a door, he had waited for her,
to let her know who she was for the time fixed ahead.
He was successful in the dream of it.
Her hands in his, what he saw.
Something he would know and she would not believe.
What the quarter had done to her. How it had moved in, through
her skin. What he knew from their first drink outside the quarter, in
the place across. The table by the window.
To understand the lengths of what the quarter had done to her,
blocked from him. If she would go west, he knew their time together
had meant as much as the love from soil to the space above, the swirls
of dust and dream.
---From The Velocity of Ink. I read from it this morning for my channel, if you want to listen. This is just a small part of this morning's session.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8O5H15bsUGg&t=1354s
fin.
[used to have an account on here last year by the user ‘strawberry’ ,, going to repost some of my writing on this new account :) ]
so, what now?
i told you i loved you and you clamped your hand over my mouth.
i still love you; my mouth is still sealed.
will that change if the sound of trains racing across tracks drowns out the confession?
will it cease to exist if you turn up the music in the car when my tongue wraps around the last syllable?
i still love you; you still know of it.
is there no hope for us, after all?
your teeth marks are still imprinted on my clavicle,
your hands still bruised against my hip,
your saliva still mingled with the bile from my vomit —
do you truly think if we pretend to be shadows in the night, the sun will forget we burn as fire in the day?
Of jagged teeth, concubine of catastrophe, mark of midnight, and rivers of honey.
Four writers were approaching, and the wind began to howl...except replace wind with bloodletting of words, and ink into veins from these authors blessed and crazed with no other way to let it out, than to put it across a screen, and into our hearts with only pure aim.
Here's the link to the show:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s3J_TYQqaM
And here are the pieces featured.
https://www.theprose.com/post/828745/king-of-california https://www.theprose.com/post/828053/the-drug-in-me-is-you https://www.theprose.com/post/828235/mile-run https://www.theprose.com/post/828263/the-only-shore
And.
As always.
Thank you for being here.
-The Prose. team
Night Eats Day
Tonight
Sadness pours thickly cruel
7 shades of 7 evening screens,
That spill their witch capped clouds
Upon my tear stained sheets,
Seeding gnarled tree dreams
’Round the heart’s mummified leaf.
Beware the watchdog of night,
Whose nerve shredding barks
Are black knives that bite.
Tonight
Sleepless desire
Sweats out blood droplet stars
To provoke a rupture of colour
Upon the inky nether’s funeral bedspread.
Beware the watchdog of night,
Whose nerve shredding barks
Are black knives that bite.
My portentous hope for daylight’s torch
Is a lip swollen cage of grimacing want,
Where the floodgates close earlier than I can rise.
I loathe your phantom embers.
the drug in me is you
everything is so volatile
in this halfway house
where we push and shove
until the plaster collapses.
you shoot up your veins
and i finger the needle
after you fling it away,
toeing the line between
wanting to puncture you throat
and lick the rust clean.
do you even see me?
between the hot flashes
and raging calamities,
do you see me as i am?
could i ever see you as you are?
could i ever see you as you were?
i pull you towards me at night
on the air mattress
where you lost your virginity
for the cheapest high of your life.
i retreat into the familiar fantasy
of a time
where your mistress never existed;
a time where i never had to share you
with this concubine of catastrophe.
the night always ends the same way;
you sleeping through the sounds of my sobs.
i hover my hands over your throat,
wanting to press and twist
until your eyes bulge and pop.
i think killing you might be worth it
if it means she’ll die with you.
but she never will.
she travels through your bloodstream;
i never even cross your mind
when you’re doped up
and choking on lust
for the whore who frequents your body.
you will take her to the grave
and she will lie with you in your slumber
whilst i live in hiding
from the ghosts of your infidelity.
all i ask is that you promise me one thing –
that in the next life
i won’t have to see her claw marks on your skin,
and i won’t have to soothe your sweats
when she leaves you aching for her touch,
and i won’t have to sell myself to bring her back to you,
and i won’t have to clean up the reminders
of the nights you share together.
it will be just us.
it will be just us
Abyss
I have had a firm belief that the construction of ones mind is a mere product of its decomposition. Spending years plummeting into a self sustained abyss hoping that one day there will be an emptiness waiting. A freedom from conscience. A nothingness that marks the morsel of being I have so often longed to be. However this barricade, something I have never reached, is something that appears to be suspended in the depths of madness. The freedom from emotion, rather a curse, a defiance of humanity. The freedom I longed for in reality a disconnection from natural order. However this abyss was not a linear creation, the end could never be reached. Instead it had become a concordant loop hole. Each member of humanity circling its grounds, some hiding in the crevices of the soul sickened dirt, begging for safety. Others marching through in aims for an end as if a lieutenant disillusioned by battle. All striding for an escape, an escape that provides a promise greatness. An escape that no one will reach. As the end is merely a delusion people allow to consume them, their bodies pursued by this insanity so well cultivated in the ground beneath our feet.
From Grain to Flour
She arched her back one more time, before bending back down to her task. She thrusted the large pestle round and round, thinning the grain few at a time. The granite mortar screeched as she mixed again, round and round, for what felt like hours. After a moment, she let go of her tight grip of the pestle, and gave an appreciative sigh of the beautifully thinned flour that lay before her eyes.
"Yara!"
While pushing her matted hair off her face with the back of a hand, she turned her head at the sight of the three men, coming in their cavernous home with large sacks balanced on their shoulders. "More wheat for us, mama," the boy said with a grin. Yara closed her eyes and groaned.