There used to be days
where the sea met my toes
and my hair would tangle
and salt would stick to my skin.
I would lie down along the midnight shores
and listen to the echoes of madness.

The darkness
would swallow me up,
its soft, feathery insides.
I remember tears,
my throat closing in,
silent, static.

Cold air would seep into my bones.
Wet, distant, lonely.
A permanent malignity sifting
through the chaos of my mind.

Tonight, in the darkness of this dimly lit earth,
The infinite stars burn with a translucent color of yellow
resembling the
bulbous moon
shifting, watching.

The trees stretch their willowy spines
over sprouting flowers
against a backdrop of watercolored silhouettes.
A cold rush of air trickles through
leaving behind drops of dew;
lilies, laburnum, larkspur.

Dawn, with her elongated fingers and wispy breath,
steals away into the night.
Patterned and fixated on the early hours of
rose colored reveries when all the earth
bows to the morning star.

And here we lie.
Broken people eclipsed
with secrets, wishes, dreams.
Waiting for our chance
to mask, to revel in the beauty
of a single muse.


Kara Troglin

A ghastly Japanese orchid thrives with engulfing stems.
This night flower pierces itself into the black earth.
She is layered with thick soil that gives way
to the forest of frost, swallowing the green weeds beneath.
The Atlantic sea shifts itself to the pattern of fixed stars and chaos above,
there will always be drops of sadness falling to the earth.
Somehow they make their way into the sunrise,
mixed in with the rain that I can taste in my cup of black tea every morning.
A hurting brain that molds itself into the pattern of mundane phrases, my head a moon.
Mania and depression consuming this red heart.
A stolen life with shifting moods. Always changing. Never constant.
Perhaps I consider myself lucky when love finds me
sleeping in the corners asking me to simply wake up.
So I will open my eyes and just exist.
Filling the lungs with whole breaths.
Letting the warmth of my existence radiate.
Believing in the surrounding beauty of a green earth that always survives the magnitude of the storm.