Veiled in nocturnal opulence, she sways—
a specter of dusk wreathed in abyssal silk,
her beauty a chiaroscuro of ruin and divinity,
where the fabric of night quivers against her skin,
a tremor between creation and collapse.

Her lips, smeared with the ink of oblivion,
part like a fault line spilling whispers of dissolution,
drinking the hush of a waning moon,
where silver tongues unravel dirges in the wind.
Her gaze—twin cataclysms of obsidian and opal—
devours the marrow of time,
hollowing the cosmos with the weight of her quiet ruin.

She unfurls like velvet hemorrhaging silence,
the air trembling with the ghosts of forgotten incantations,
stitched into the sinew of midnight’s elegy,
where time convulses, folding into the iridescent wreckage
of her shadow-drenched grace.

i told him when he asked about dinner
with his sister
we laughed and the wind blew things
away

Lips cracked like old riverbeds,
skin paper-thin, torn at the seams.
I move through the world like a ghost in glass,
a hush beneath the sirens, unseen.

Hunger is a slow-burning fire,
a feast of absence, a quiet war.
Only the hollow-bellied know its song,
only the lost keep score.

Mama’s love was a blade in the dark,
a cipher I could never break.
I ran with the wild ones, teeth bared,
spelling my name in scars and mistakes.

But I am done with waiting,
done with the hush and the shame.
Let the dirt take me in,
let the roots whisper my name.

I was a bullet—
cold, waiting, silent steel.
But before the light fades,
his hands find me, real.

Love like a fever, love like a flood,
a martyr’s kiss, too good for my blood.
But his voice pulls me back,
his voice makes me stay,
before the night swallows me whole,
before I slip away.

The numbers of sin’z
scales written ,
of
her inequities is
like bells on
Christmas
morning.

Never silent She (I)

is
capable
of great

misunderstandings.

Tomorrow's multiplying
the rotations
around the

streetlamp.
Kids we were singing
And cLapping

Every time today is
crumpled.

Lights on the ground.

Not forever (me)
Again.

Sing a song of
Six
pence

inevitably.

And she died of
bleach.
Scrubbing Hands burn.

He left on a
weekday.

Today
when I was
Young.

Tomorrow and tomorrow
and tomorrow

was a play

after all.



Caroline Shank
2.18.2025

The clouds look old today, grey and sagging.
They hang lifeless, bringing everything down with them.
I shiver not with potential but with bitterness
About the bleak foreboding that looms.

They spoke my name in tongues of dawn,
before the world was cast in hues—
before the red could kiss the rose,
before the sky first bruised to blue.

I was the shimmer ‘twixt the stars,
the breath between the night and morn,
a hush of light not seen nor mourned,
a ghost where spectrums are stillborn.

The prisms wept, but left me void—
a sigh unbent by mortal sight,
a whisper lost to time’s embrace,
unwoven from the loom of light.

Yet once, I danced on dreaming lids,
in eyes that dared to look beyond,
but now—I pale, unseen, unknown,
a phantom shade, a severed bond.

So tell me, when your colors fade,
when all grows dim, and light departs,
will you recall the one who lingers—
the color buried in your heart?

They will tell you there is a right way.
They will hand you a torch and call it the sun.
They will roll their words in raw linen and whisper:
"This is what poetry is meant to be."

And you will nod.
Because they have made it so that not nodding feels like blasphemy.

But listen—
the ink does not check your credentials.
The meter does not ask if your suffering is organic.
A line does not collapse because it was crafted instead of bled.

They will tell you a poem must be naked, barefoot, aching—
as if there is no beauty in a well-cut suit.
They will decry the temple and build a pulpit in its ruins,
preaching freedom in a voice that allows no dissent.

Good poets are cult leaders,
and the first rule of the cult
is that they are not one.

So write the sonnet, carve the sestina,
sculpt the page in iambic steel.
Or break it, shatter it, scatter its bones—
but let no one call your wreckage untrue.

And if they do,
smile.
Because poetry does not kneel to priests.