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 Jan 9
Emma
The sky folds itself into a bruise,
spilling red streaks like arteries unzipped.
A comet breaks,
its ribs dragging fire through the dark,
and she swallows her wish,
a coin sinking in the throat of a well.

Her hands—
sharp vowels of bone,
cracked knuckles learning
the grammar of pain—
pounded earth
like it owed her a name.
She made fists out of her loneliness
because no one ever taught her
to bloom.

Mistakes:
the geometry of hurt,
a language she spoke fluently.
Once, she carved shame
from a girl smaller than herself.
But wasn’t that just a mirror,
a lesson she couldn’t unlearn?

**** forgiveness,
**** the easy absolutions.
Her body was a script no one read.
Her name was a slur
the world muttered in passing.
She carried choices
like glass splinters in her lungs,
each one cutting
when she tried to breathe.

Whiskey breath,
a kiss smeared on the lip of a bottle—
she called it love.
They called it sin.
Disposable girls
folded like paper swans
in the flood of a system
too tired to save them.

When they found her,
her body curled into itself,
a fist unmade—
the river murmured her elegy,
pulled its fingers through her hair
as if apologizing for the weight
it couldn’t carry.
 Jan 5
Caroline Shank
She tripped over you in a
final wave of surrender.

You said
   meet me where

The white cloth waves

in the air,
today's laundry.

Time's stretch limp

       unworn

clock’s hands.

Future stopped in the
U.nticking

The lie in bleach is

rinsed .

Love lives in the

shadow....

Tomorrow.will be
a
      concept

w.rapped in a

fantasy.


Caroline Shank
January 4, 2025
 Dec 2024
Sean Fitzpatrick
The arms of eternity open,
like a sentimental bolero played
at some in-between place,
they open lazily
and incandescently,
encircling the comically and silently raging,

Poetically, and gently,
the phantom draws her wings towards forgetfulness -
at the eye of the temple -
distant,
full of guidance
and potential.
The profound silence of bitter lives.
 Dec 2024
Emma
Her beauty, desire,
chased cheap thrills, fleeting pleasures,
dreaming she deserved.

Always tender eyes,
saw her as a rare black pearl,
glowing, ocean-born.

Her worth unspoken,
eclipsed by waves of longing,
yet she still shone bright.
 Dec 2024
nivek
stepping stones for words
across the waters you venture

into the beyond you disappear
to re-emerge the other-side of tomorrow.
 Dec 2024
Carlo C Gomez
It blew in off the sea

It went out on a limb

And broke the olive branch

Do you hear the wind through the hair of revolution

--black raven hair--

Bone straight and frayed

The split ends of society forging separate paths

Progression at their tips, regression in their roots

It makes a sound akin to the back of an old haunted house settling

It wandered here in due season

It's about to be cut short

It's about to be swept away
 Dec 2024
Emma
He said we were like a supernova,
the sudden explosion, white-hot
and loud in the body of the sky,
the kind of light that burns
through the eyelids,
leaves an afterimage etched
in the retina of the universe.
Seen for three days straight,
sunlight and starlight fused
into one unbearable glare.

He told me love is the reset button,
the way a star collapses to begin again.
He said, I could survive alone,
but chose me instead, as if survival
were not the easiest answer,
as if being with me were a decision
made in a moment of stillness.

I doubted him—
his quiet strength, the way
he could carry the weight of silence
as if it weighed nothing,
the way he didn’t sway
when the winds rose,
when I unraveled, my edges
fraying into the thin air.

I need him to hold the center,
to keep the world from tilting,
but he doesn’t need like I do.
He lives in wants stripped clean—
no hunger, only fullness,
no chaos, just the brushstroke
of a steady hand.

And me—
I am the opposite of steady.
I am a gust,
a whip of color staining the canvas,
a metamorphosis that never lands,
forever on the verge of becoming
but never quite there,
a creature of motion, a hunger
that doesn’t know where to rest.

Still, he stays,
his calm like a gravity
that pulls me into orbit.

The supernova burns out.
The light goes dark.
I want to ask him,
What happens after?
But he looks at me—
the way he always does—
as if the question isn’t necessary,
as if we were already
the answer.
I'm so grateful that he found me, so grateful that he loves me. It's been a rough night so I'm trying hard to be positive after being tormented by memories of past abuse.
 Dec 2024
vienna bombardieri
Conquistador your stallion is unbridled longing for
the company of an angel's            touch to brow
I see your breast plate armor has lost its sheen
but in your face I see the sign of cuts real clean
Conquistador, did you find what you were looking for

Conquistador, a vulture sits upon your silver shield
and though I searched for you inside a maze
I found no door ,no inner room
you were ready far too soon
Conquistador, did you find what you were looking for

Conquistador, there is no time like now so
raise your rust scabbard and take a newborn stand
I know your jewel-encrusted blade cannot lay still  
always ready for the action always ready for the ****
Conquistador, did you find what you were looking for

Conquistador, I came to jeer at you, with no regrets
and as the gloom begins to fall I see there is no, only all
I know you came with sword held high
although you came to conquer, do you want to die?  
Conquistador, did you find what you were looking for
 Jul 2024
Carlo C Gomez
~
Sun drips
on leaves

not the backyard variety
but the trembling kind

the kind
that weld night-time
intermissions to
the roof of the mouth

sonnet-filled
evaporation
reveals
the timely concealment of
a very, weary
inanimate object
at the brink

just enough hip
to be woman

just enough wild
to be frontier

~
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