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 Dec 2014 m
erin barton
habits
 Dec 2014 m
erin barton
habits
like how i lock the bathroom door
when i'm the only one home
habits
like how i run my tongue over
cuts at the roof of my mouth
like how i drop my front hand
when i'm boxing
like how i fold down pages
of a book
like how i turn off plug sockets
when nothing's plugged in
like how i bite my nails
how i slouch
how i run my fingers over old scars
habits
like how i reach out for you
even though you're gone
 Dec 2014 m
MP
Get back to the story
 Dec 2014 m
MP
I was buying coffee in the morning, by myself as ******* usual, when I realized what we had got into the night before. In a haze I’d woken up with blood on the pillow from my disgusting cracked dry split aching slurring ******* singing ****-teasing foot in between my teeth spitting pulling bleeding stinging lips, and you were gone again. All cause these days I drink more whiskey than water. Because I saw it in a movie with a cute little proper British girl in a tiny dress order it. Whiskey gin-jah, she said to the fictional bartender. But I haven’t drank ginger ale since I was a sick complaining little eleven year old goblin who thought that *** was for people in love and that they just lay there naked and married each other or the movie ended or something. Now I’m only left with half the equation. Whiskey. Sometimes when I’m really bored with my girlfriends I tell them I want to get drunk and smash glass bottles in the street. They smile with their lipstick teeth and talk about their college degrees. Usually I just **** myself. So I wake up with cracked lips and a hangover and I walk to get coffee or water or new shoes or something, and then I stop and I remember what weird things we said to each other last night. After we didn’t make love, we ******. After we ****** and we didn’t get married and the movie didn’t end or whatever, after that. It was really cold so we stayed in bed and you held your cell phone open waiting for your ex girlfriend to call and say oh I need you I need your **** oh please come back. She won’t ever call, I hope you realize. She won’t call like my ex won’t look me in the eye, like he will tug and grab and whisper in whatever ****’s ear at the bar when he sees me. He won’t call and I’ll ******* run like hell if he tries to say hello so I don’t slip and fall on the way his voice sounds. On the feelings of his breath on my shoulders in the morning and the way he says tomato or how he always said, oh you’re so wet right now after he just came in me and he wanted to have *** again. No, what? You just came inside me you ******* idiot. God I hated that. But I miss the smell of his tee shirts and his box cutter toenails scratching my legs while I fell asleep. And maybe how he said to me, everything happens for a reason. But I don’t know. So I’m laying there and you’re laying there and you’re unpeeling my stupid ugly naked skeleton body with your eyes in the dim light of your cell phone that has no messages. And you said to me, I remember it now, that you wanted to play my ribs like a piano. You pressed pressed pressed until I thought I would have bruises. Like I was your property. You *******. You wondered aloud in your dumb voice with your dumb thoughts how hard you would have to press for them to break. And now with my coffee half spilt on the sweater covering my bent up/almost broke up ribs, that coffee that will never make it to my horrible gross decomposing bleeding lips, I imagine if you had actually done it. I imagine the sound of the late night phone call to 911. When you would have to dial my mother and cry into the phone, I did it I did it. I finally broke her. And she would ask, who the **** is this? And say, don’t call here anymore. And roll over and go back to sleep. You could have watched the sunrise on the roof of my apartment with my ex and passed the half-empty whiskey bottle back and forth talking about my crooked teeth. Two boys and their broken doll. That’s the kind of ****** up weird **** we got into last night. And the man behind the counter wants to know if I need change.
 Dec 2014 m
mzwai
There is no whiskey in his room tonight...

Instead,
There is a half-empty glass of-
Rock shandy, Pepsi-cola, Dr.Pepper,
Or something black.
Something minuscule,
even though he has not sipped from it.
He has not looked at it- his tongue
Was only dry for two minutes before he
Locked the door.
For the only presence that made it hard for him to swallow
Was in the form of something that he was still trying to release...
at 2AM.
Release at 2AM.
There is a typewriter in front of him and he is feeling as permeable as
The glass that is sitting next to it.
'as permeable if it had a closed lid made up out of carbon' he thinks.
'Closed lid', 'Carbon',
'Closed lid'
He does not know what to type.
As distance diminished it's existence throughout the years,
He began to realize that Letters were starting to transform themselves
Into Diary-Entries and vice-versa.
The art of belittling seclusion through the method of fictionalizing himself
Was turning more into a hobby than an art and
he did not know what to do except to accept it as a tragedy
That nobody else needed to know about.
"Tragedy:" he types.
"I don't know how to forget about you."
'And etcetera,' he thinks.
In his minds eye he sees a girl in a school far away.
She's holding a camera and a textbook and a picture of a boy
That isn't him.
She's walking into her new life and one day she will go a week without
Thinking about how it feels to know interest and feel it shared
from someone who thought it never existed.
One day she will go a week without thinking about the boy who stared at empty pages
And wrote letters about bitter meals that his tongue thought could never be tasted.
One day she will go a week with just the thought of how glamorous a life spent alone is...
Before she meets someone there...
Who will make her taste something that is less bitter than him himself.
'I hope that's where my story ends.' He thinks.
And then imagines himself embedded into
Dark bitter things.
(Tobacco, caffeine, dark chocolate.)
He sighs and stares at the words he has already typed.
He can imagine these bitter things spilling into his glass and changing its taste with each
little drop.
"You were dead to me before you even walked out of the door..." He decides,
And puts it onto the paper.
He lifts the glass and takes a sip and then puts it back down again.
'One day she will go a week without thinking about me..."  He thinks.
Release at 2AM.
 Dec 2014 m
Harsh
Spelling
 Dec 2014 m
Harsh
I spell “I love you” on the lines of your collarbone

and I always try to go from one end to another,
brushing calligraphy strokes with my tongue
and blotting your skin as a page with my lips.

I never really have finished saying it,
and I guess I never will

my motions are lost among your curves
and my lips almost always end up
meeting yours somewhere in the middle.
 Dec 2014 m
Jh
Untitled
 Dec 2014 m
Jh
I don't know when and where our intimacy turned into strictly contact but
Its been years and I'd still prefer to shuffle barefoot along broken glass
Because I don't remember the last time you kissed me goodbye.
You've never asked me to stay the night
And your bed is starting to feel more like a concrete slab
But your hands are a prison I haven't been able to escape.
No matter how much you love someone
You can't make them love you back
I can't ******* bear to think of you leaning into anyone but me and
Now all I can do is speak goodbyes to everyone I meet because
Every time I've spoken the word "love"
And genuinely meant it
It's started to sound more like an apology.
I once opened your door to tell you I could not kiss you anymore
But you swallowed the words right out of my mouth.
Remember the time you told me
You wanted to witness a train wreck?
Well, look at me now
Look at me now.
 Dec 2014 m
wordvango
I am ink faces
 Dec 2014 m
wordvango
I am ink faces and paper traces
vowels and consonants arranged
in molecules and red splotches
vascular and musculature
an anthem to all of us.
Homonym hymn religious
syllables silliness
nouns non- meaning
me
I am composed and disarrayed
like an alphabet scattered into a wind .
A Bic pen running out , skipping,
writing, for a lack of paper on the back of
poems written before,
I need a Quill and inkwell,
one thousand trees
to reach my destiny.
 Nov 2014 m
Tom Leveille
here's how it happens
the morning after
you reach into the drawer
where the your t-shirts live
to find it austere
you'll shrug because
you're still drunk
& you can't remember
when last it was
that you had something wet
or how long it's been
since you made the floorboards blush
or why the carpet is upset
who wouldn't be
the contents to the upended ashtray
strewn around the apartment
resemble the aftermath
of the smallest war
to ever take place in norfolk
some midnight thief
must've made off with the lighter
because it isn't in
any of your favorite spots
maybe you chucked it
along with a hundred other things
that make noise when they land
in the neighbors yard
you won't remember putting
the refrigerator's belongings
in the bathtub
or scrawling a buzzard
on the bedroom door
but then again who would
you'll pretend it's spring again
before putting on your winter coat
to go out front with a cigarette
in your mouth
you'll hope for a passing stranger
to *** a light from
or drag yourself to the corner
with couch cushion change
to buy a new lighter
and on your way
you won't bother looking back
this is just another day
on eggshells for no reason
another november
choking on birthday candles
on your way home
you step over beer cans
the kind you fell in love with
and wonder who
had the last laugh last night
or if anyone said a word at all
it might've been another
moment of clarity
it might have been some idiot savant
any adjective that feels like home
anything that keeps you thirsty
 Nov 2014 m
Vivian
I remember:

you, in black lace ******* and
little else, crushed close
by gravity,
weak winter afternoon sunlight
streaming in and out of your car,
HD Netflix in your backseat.
my fingers drumming insistently
upon your collar bone,
my mouth pressed against your shoulder
as I sing so softly in your ear,
a concert for one.
((only you're invited))
your hair all over your bare
back and black
lace wedged up tight against your
muscle. your lips are
cold against my skin and our feet
are ******* freezing and the heater is
all the way up but not nearly enough.
I let my fingers parse through your
vertebrae, Dr. Lecter planning
a meal; slice here,
cleave there, remove viscera, season and
cook: magnifique.
time and history are
mercury in my clenched fist;
my nails are biting into my skin, and
liquid silver moments gone by are
flowing freely from my slackened grip.
 Nov 2014 m
Moon Humor
Modern Morals
 Nov 2014 m
Moon Humor
First glance, I’m a good Christian girl. But dark purple flecks decorate my neck.
In leather and lace I forget to pray and let you do what you want with me
because pain is complex and melded with pleasure.

Do you know what they say about girls that enjoy ***?
They never dare to say it to my face but I can feel them staring from the pew
at the dark purple flecks that decorate my neck.

Your hands, more powerful than God, make the earth of my body quake
while I draw fault lines down your back with my nails under the broken
crucifix above your bed. The pain is complex and melded with pleasure.

Deep, growling voice shakes the dusty rosary on your nightstand when we ****.
Your handprints are left on my flesh and the hand around my throat
leaves the dark purple flecks decorating my neck.

Coffee in the narthex and I’m labeled a harlot. Sinner. Sacrilegious. Branded as freaks…
Brush it off. I know what you like and how you like me. God will have mercy.
Sensations blend because pain is complex and melded with pleasure

and I can’t have one without the other. To reach our peak
you leave me red, marked and breathless, gasping, “Oh my God.”
Questioning my beliefs with dark purple flecks to decorate my neck,
I know pain will always be complex and melded with pleasure.
A relaxed villanelle
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