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  May 2017 Traci Sims
Sylvia Plath
Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.

God's lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees! -- The furrow

Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,

******-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks ----

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.
Something else

Hauls me through air ----
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.

White
Godiva, I unpeel ----
Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child's cry

Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,

The dew that flies,
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.
  May 2017 Traci Sims
Paige Ashley
We built our new compartments
We don't know where we've been
We've come a product of our lies
An even bigger lie

I don't see you in the same light
Most likely I'm blinded by my own darkness
Our souls lost the fight

My vision can no longer decipher
What is imaginative and what is just too clear
Far too realistic for me to comprehend

But I saw a glimpse of light last night
I'm resurfacing, It's alright
It'll all be coherent soon
I'll help you out of this hell of a cocoon
  May 2017 Traci Sims
Paige Ashley
I've grown tired of this
surreal, trying-to-run-underwater paralysis
My thoughts will not expire,
even though I harshly insist
It's time to redirect my energy back to the war
The one I began waging over two years ago
I'll keep struggling against this innuendo
All for the hope to destroy my incoherency
Yet somehow still possess my secrecy
  May 2017 Traci Sims
Paige Ashley
Skull etched of flowers
Bones white as snow
You fell in love with the marrow
Listened to the mouth that told you to go

Repetitive are your words, your ways
Many creations helping convey
To be truthful, it all means the same

Go to her
Don't listen to that mouth
Speak, "Home is where you are"
I didn't fall in love in the South
  May 2017 Traci Sims
Pablo Neruda
There are cemeteries that are lonely,
graves full of bones that do not make a sound,
the heart moving through a tunnel,
in it darkness, darkness, darkness,
like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves,
as though we were drowning inside our hearts,
as though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul.

And there are corpses,
feet made of cold and sticky clay,
death is inside the bones,
like a barking where there are no dogs,
coming out from bells somewhere, from graves somewhere,
growing in the damp air like tears of rain.

Sometimes I see alone
coffins under sail,
embarking with the pale dead, with women that have dead hair,
with bakers who are as white as angels,
and pensive young girls married to notary publics,
caskets sailing up the vertical river of the dead,
the river of dark purple,
moving upstream with sails filled out by the sound of death,
filled by the sound of death which is silence.

Death arrives among all that sound
like a shoe with no foot in it, like a suit with no man in it,
comes and knocks, using a ring with no stone in it, with no
     finger in it,
comes and shouts with no mouth, with no tongue, with no
     throat.
Nevertheless its steps can be heard
and its clothing makes a hushed sound, like a tree.

I'm not sure, I understand only a little, I can hardly see,
but it seems to me that its singing has the color of damp violets,
of violets that are at home in the earth,
because the face of death is green,
and the look death gives is green,
with the penetrating dampness of a violet leaf
and the somber color of embittered winter.

But death also goes through the world dressed as a broom,
lapping the floor, looking for dead bodies,
death is inside the broom,
the broom is the tongue of death looking for corpses,
it is the needle of death looking for thread.

Death is inside the folding cots:
it spends its life sleeping on the slow mattresses,
in the black blankets, and suddenly breathes out:
it blows out a mournful sound that swells the sheets,
and the beds go sailing toward a port
where death is waiting, dressed like an admiral.
  May 2017 Traci Sims
Mary-Eliz
A gathering
of elfin elders
perched
upon the branches

their grizzled beards
hang down
and
sway

as the breeze
around them
dances
  May 2017 Traci Sims
Mary-Eliz
The sun
shook in laughter
scattering
tiny pieces
here
and
there
amidst the grass
and leaves
now swaying in the breeze
still laughing all the while
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