hannah-southardWhisper

29 / American
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The BarIf life were a dive bar, / and fate her cruel tender, / I'd sit top my barstool,
35
Sep 8, 2025
To the future, with loveTo the days where the sun has not yet risen and the waves have not come crashing to the shore, in my mind you are shining with gold and flickering in the opalescent glow of hope. / You are both incredibly large and shockingly tiny. You are everything and more just outside the reach of my outstretched arms and I run to you eyes closed with reckless abandon. / You are the softest place to rest while I look back at the tears I shed in anticipation of your coming and to laugh at how they could fill oceans and streams to float on and on towards the every fainter horizon oh solid land.
6
May 20, 2021
One DayMy breath is caught in my throat. / It holds back a scream so guttural that if it were to escape it would echo in the mouths of caves halfway across the country. / It keeps in the words that I see tattooed on the backs of my eyelids as they repeat over and over, the ones that get twisted if I focus on them too hard.
10
May 13, 2021
FatePeople like to believe that they are both what is inherently wrong and what is blessedly right in this world. Inside our brains lives both a God complex and the most crippling anxiety to have ever roamed the face of the Earth, constantly battling to keep us walking down a tightrope of morality suspended over the eternal threat of damnation no matter if we believe it or not. / We are born uptight, pretentious creatures, and spend our years trying to paint our beings in the most perfectly haloed light, while trying to make it look like we are not holding the paintbrush for ourselves, but for those around us. We can never be truly selfless, to be completely and utterly so we would have to break our own necks, peel back our own flesh, sacrifice our own immortality (if one can call it that), and be forgotten. To be truly selfless is to take yourself out of the equation all together. To recognize both the significance and insignificance of the sparks flying around your body and mind. / ***
5
Aug 15, 2019
An InvitationI am hosting my own funeral today. / Everyone’s invited. / Come watch as I dance around the flames that turn the broken pieces of my being into ash and take a handful with you. Fling my dust to every corner of the earth with as much force as you can muster from hatred, or love, or both.
12
Apr 8, 2018
SoftSomething inside of me is broken. / Some piece of the machine has cracked, the gears in my mind have come to a stop, rust has begun to collect. / Some days it feels like I might be dying, or that I may already be dead.
28
Dec 7, 2017
FearI don’t feel anymore / As a child I know I must have felt something / Sadness, happiness, love, anything
31
May 8, 2016
AshesI have lost my strive for greatness. / The piece of me that wanted so badly to make something of life, has withered away, / dried up from the restless nights where my mind wouldn’t quiet down so my eyes could sleep.
6
Nov 24, 2015
SeasideDo not fear the lion breath. Let your cheeks sting with the power of it, let the tears drip from your eyes as the cold whips across your face. Feel it rush across your bare arms and legs, across your torso, your soul. Breathe it in, deeply, the salt burning as it surges into your lungs, slowly spreading throughout your body, filling every empty space. / Do not fear the lion breath. As you look into the deep dark mouth of the beast, white froth swirling on its surface. Do not flinch when its echoing roars crash upon the shoreline, breaking against shattered but smooth pieces of earth. Instead, listen closer for the purring it makes as it recedes back into itself, pulling at your toes, urging you to follow. / Do not fear the lion breath. Jump into the mouth of the beast, let the cold rush over your head, feel the waves at their birth below the surface. Let it wrap its overwhelming power around your arms and legs, around your torso, your soul. Let it into your mind, replace your thoughts, memories, everything you’ve known to be real. Replace it all with cold truth. Reset your mind the way we do clocks after the power fails us and we are left in the dark. Shock your heat into beating a new rhythm, in time with the crashing of waves and the roaring of beasts.
4
Apr 29, 2015
BookwormShe donned the hats of worlds / that she so was desperate / to be part of that she became lost.
39
Apr 27, 2014
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