"A holstered product secretly hunts after its own end product-"

                    "-not metal targets nor flying geese, but mortality."

A man, with graying hair and pursed lips, told me this. A well-trained and prayered piety had crept along, pounced, and overcome him. Like Edison, a creative obsession gripped his spine and puppeteered the entire body. It was a plague, he called it, or something like that. Even at a young age, gaurdian 1 & 2 lulled him to the steeple's hiding. He noted how the steeple was always at mast. His children would observe the same detail, live the same routine. I studied the curious character for weeks. A facsimile of the Word seemed permanently pressed on his brain, trapped behind devout eyes- For weeks I studied him, give me more time! Each biblical page was scribbled and creased, share and reused. -no longer. "My holster found its mortal tonight, friend. I'll raise the barrel and create a grand scene."

Slight pause, heavy breathe, slow speak. "Colossal at best."

by Kendra Cook

When I was younger
I prayed to be
A forensic pathologist

When I was a teenager
I prayered that
The racism and bullying
would stop

Present day
My prayers
Are dedicated to love
Of another.

All the he's are gone.
And I am left with
Me. Mum and dad.

I'm about to run away again.

Just me and an expired car

It's been a hard year..
I have had the best *** of my life
But found no love
Never allowed to lie in the arms of the strangers who use me.

The one I long for
The one I cry for
And the one I pray for

Has blocked me everywhere. .

Now I am alone.

I feel like a cheap ****.
I never cheated but I tried to replace him to soon

I should have just waited prayered harder that he would change his mind

I hope his new lover is kind and smart and beautiful.

I feel like trash
Surly it gets better than this.
Or was that my day in the sun

Away are the mangled yellow rose
Tangles wilt into a little pray pose
Handled mist by wind and wrangled
To many a large little yellow rose pile

So too is the tree’s scatter sprawling
Hung onto branches’ leaf fall so causing
Their sweep between the mote debris. Float
Down as remnants of another sunless home

Eccentric, as time always throws with an ease
Centrifuge gently ordered around by the breeze
Sorts the bark from the copse to the outermost trough
Around concentrical cycles of rose petals doffed

Cry, little backyard grove green poplars
Growing backward so grass under prospers
Will sun now posture itself down with passion
For its green poplars die, distant, forgotten

Supposing which nature itself would have spoke
Which oak, and which posey can’t patter for hope
Symposing; the whole forest arrived in a room,
Blooms, and as such is giving birth to a tomb

Away are the ranges of colors of yellow
Rose-stained by little backyard grove cell’s throes
Ere charnel, with fits, all bled and divided
Planted upside-down so life fades skyward

And admitted into brickle cracks in its space
That enclosing trim, divorcing light from embrace
Like Methuselah in-negative, in retreat
In hymns spinning sap down a spiral of heat

Emaciated, strangled, so close to summer
Dry, little grave rose seeds, up from earth
Plume per some bracharchein-must despite
Succumbing to a simple sort of chaos of life

Cry, little backyard grove, don’t falter
Or falter, but make of your tears water
For creating, on other backyards, targets
Still sun, revolting and drifting like Argus

On pasture whose grass is a leaking function,
Incarnal fire, nulls, and its desperate induction
Implanted aen rayrounds aimed as devils did
Before this great plain, in its nucleoid, spread

Away basks creation that is happened, at movement
At once, and the gray roses too are a plumage
Their stems so simple at the simple end
Of winds-sent saccharine a brittle blend

Will whittle brown like solar lentils o’er a frond’s
Neck, face, its whole supple being peppered into yards
Of poplars, and all that life that all fades around them
Prayered, packed, all stacked: all grownup to heaven

All but the kindred, petrified, indenting pith’s jut
Being what the generations call silent. Be what
Some tree’s failing structure, botuled and pious,
Might impress in the mass ailing under its guidance

Cry, little backyard grove growing on
Top of, and little furtive leaves’ abscond
May, from many an old rose pile
Carry, till sun, onto fields not defiled

Releasing their collective last spray. A cork-
Like works in the shriveled bed of the world
And the trees can’t believe it comes down to the grass,
Their tension, dew marking green upon a new path