Category Archives: Prosetry

Poetry, Prosetry

superfluous. – Brooke Safferman

I gave you a nickname but you didn’t give me one (yet)
I can picture you fingers, tender but unfaltering, plucking the strings on a blue guitar
You always had a knack for adopting things out of the ordinary,
Myself included.

I never found my place of belonging in this world
Until you showed me how I was wrong about home
Home can be a person, not a place.

Let’s circle back:
A meeting of chance,
Two broken hearts:
one fractured from infidelity but still pressing down on the gas,
the other from an Illusion of the Ideal
The latter was my own, yet you told me how I was always so
Grounded in Reality.

Your eyes were depthless, a safety net of compassion
That I never knew how to provide for myself.
You taught me what it means to trust
In the universe
In the truth
In another human
I would thank you for it all but you would call it superfluous.

The way each and every day
Brings us closer together
(And you love it)
Is hopelessly optimistic.
We are a paradox by nature
Because she found you first.

Hey! I found a nickname.
You can call me superfluous.

Standard
Poetry, Prosetry

Generation Y+Z= Love – Ugonma Ubani-Ebere

 

But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks?
It is social media, and Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram is the sun
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious Myspace
Who is already sick and pale with grief.
That thou her maid art more fair than she.
Love they said. It will make the world go around they said.
In a world where chivalry is replaced by thirst.
A virgin now wears a Scarlett Letter with a V, because she is a rarity in society
Sex is as casual as a conversation.
Body counts are the new public relations.
A relationship status means more than “I love you”
While some are content with just being a side chick or boo.
We argue through 140 characters instead of actually talking it out.
And words can only be expressed through texts instead of our mouths
Flirting has now evolved into multiple likes on Instagram.
Intimacy is shown through FaceTime.
It is now easier to find a hot date on Tinder in the palm of your hand.
Self pleasure comes from a selfie as we kiss ourselves through lenses.
Waves of materialistic pleasure wash away our expenses.
No longer do we value relationships, but put our hopes in “situationships.”
Social media is becoming a sanctuary, where we worship celebrities as Zeus and Aphrodites.
Morals come from Worldstar, as we wish upon it to make us famous.
We are walkers, walking dead in barren land of lost authenticity and insincere affection.
Social media has become our generation’s predilection.
We have fallen truly, madly, and deeply in love with our soul mates.
If you listen closely, you can hear the soul chant:
Oh Social media, Oh Social media! wherefore art thou Social media
Deny thy maker, and refuse thy name;
Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love
And I’ll no longer be a Human.
Standard
Poetry, Prosetry

Our Now – Harika Kottakoka

Now, we must stand!
     stake our lives
for equivocal things
that our hearts certainly
   Revere.
But our gazes steady,
our triumph ordained in diamond
     even the finest
edges of terror
         Will shatter.
Now, we must choose!
        between eternities
embalmed with reticence
or seconds of compassion,
a sparkle of
          Fulfillment.
Standard
Poetry, Prosetry

The One Who Knew Me Best, The First One I’d Never Lose – Brooke Safferman

My dreams are haunted by

The loss of you, The One Who Knew Me Best.

 

Golden hair thicker than the forest

That we took a walk in that first time

You kissed me

And I vowed you would be

The First One I’d Never Lose.

 

Here I am, a year later and still scratching

My first two initials with that of your last name

Onto my notebooks like some 10-year-old in puppy love

Onto my desk chair like a punk who sits in the back of the classroom

Into my heart with each and every memory

 

Of the way your face lit up when you bought me tiny sunflowers,

Of the earnest sound of your laugh when I told old jokes

that weren’t even funny,

Of your whispering breath when you told me how I was

The Girl You Had Always Wanted To Find.

 

Time is a funny thing I’ll never understand;

The older it grows, so does your soul.

 

But mark my words:

No matter how many days and

Hours and

Minutes and

Seconds tick on by

On the retro cat clock with the scanning eyes

(Back-and-forth, back-and-forth)

That you had given to me as our last anniversary present,

Well,

Just know that there will never be another you.

 

You and me, we were burgled that night.

A hit-and-run,

A drunk driver and his equally drunken friends,

Robbers.

They stole your life,

And they stole you away from me.

 

So rest in peace,

The One Who Knew Me Best,

The First One I’d Never Lose.

I will Love you always.


-The Girl You Had Always Wanted to Find

Standard
Poetry, Prosetry

Chance – Harika Kottakota

An old, innate love replaced me–
Scissored the silver nylon
Connecting our shoulders like
Twigs scattered on forest floors
Robbed of light, of fortitude
How venerable this bondage
Seemed within the storm’s eye
How easily, how wholesomely it
Deceived my butterfly thoughts
So naturally, you faded from
Dreams that once consoled me
Yet hubris stops intervention
I simply begin walking again
Standard
Prose, Prosetry

Respiratory Arrest – Samantha Forsyth

Mother is dying and you’re watching her. You’re left sputtering, coughing up tarred lungs in sterile hallways. Meanwhile, your face is tearstained, spilling out faster than it can dry. The back of your hand wipes across your face hard and the air is thin with anesthesia and disinfectant. There is a responsibility in your asphyxiation, an obligation you’re held to.

Last night, you went to bed without dinner, without saying goodnight. You knew you’d be sorry by morning, but it was supposed to be because mother would stay up worrying about you. Who will drive you to school tomorrow and who will yell at you for coming home late and who will you steal cigarettes from anymore.

One might question your upbringing, leaning in doorways like that. Waiting all hated and damned in intensive care, the ending won’t come easily for either of you. Tracheostomies are trying to heal behind gauze thick and damp. Blood spreading from behind, ugly and scarring and not how someone should look before they die.

But she was a daughter once too, wasn’t born into the poison skin she’s in now. Stealing cigarettes and smelling like smoke must have been hereditary, handed down and yours for the taking. That’s all you’ve ever been good at. In between the flatline tones and your first breath afterwards, the smoke hits back hard.

Lungs wrung out, you’re the only one left with chest heaving and breaths struggling. They soon surrender to sighs set so deep inside you, they once were your mother’s ashen inhales. But you don’t have to share those with her anymore, don’t have to tell anyone how you really feel about your mother’s death, and now you’re both feeling better.

Standard
Poetry, Prosetry

Natural Disaster – Maria Gray

i. my best friend tells me
she is a misprint in her own life story
because no one has ever told her
she can narrate it herself
ii. at age twelve, the lightning
stretching across my hips demands
more attention than any other natural disaster
and even holding my skeleton together
seems like more trouble than it’s worth
iii. i am helping elementary schoolers
during their quarter-hour break
from a theater class, making sure
they fill up their water bottles
and nibble on their graham crackers
when one dark-eyed little girl
confesses she thinks she is too big
to let anything past her crooked teeth
iv. every magazine i’ve ever read
tells skinny girls to wear large shirts
to create the illusion of a bust
and tells larger girls to don
vertical stripes and straight cuts
to form a shrinking silhouette because
no matter a woman’s size
the most beautiful part of her
is always the negative space
v. i may usually be terrified of heights
but i don’t get vertigo when i look down
and see where i used to be because
it’s no secret: i am better off where i am
Standard
Prose, Prosetry

Sacrilegious – Reilly Wieland

You’re the proverbs in my mind, the John 3:16 that turns over inside of me- even if that’s

sacrilegious

I am religious in a way that my god does not wear white,

but drinks his coffee black because his lips are like sugar

 

You are the sin I am confessing, the word that comes to me in my time of need and the being I say my Hail Marys for

Your lips are like wine, blessed, and they are mouthing something to me while I scroll through the pages in a fruitless attempt to find parables that justify this

 

I’ve found Eden in your breath, and it feels like my skin is etched with gold, like North Star of your love.

I am not a saint, but a martyr, and even when I fail to find my faith, you resurrect like on Easter Sunday- gifting your wisdom that reeks like like gold, frankincense and myrrh.

The letters according to you stating that it will be okay have been written on my mind in permanent ash, running deep in my veins with the way that you make me feel like I could turn water to wine.

 

When you’re around me I feel sacrilegious, the way you have your hand wrapped around my thoughts makes me question my beliefs because

 

the facts aren’t as easy to fall asleep with as heaven is, sometimes

and I don’t want to ever read scripture again if it isn’t about the way that you look during the summers

 

My church has no damnation or forbidden fruit, it has stories and you, and the prophetic power that I felt when you asked me who my god was

Standard
Prosetry

1953 – Casey Miller

Bronzed skin spills over lounges with a heated sun
Melting them into the white Aegean landscape
Sun hats are the only shade in these areas
Aristocrats basking above cliffs thousands of feet below
Women fawning over Hepburn’s eyebrows, claiming to spend
Thousands on their own mien frons
Men like body builders with tanning oil slipping off their figures,
Like kings diving into the lagoon
As their queens gush over engagements,
Marriages occurring a thousand miles away
Or a jaunt to the next island
And the pool boy observes, he watches
As the young, rich and famous and younger, richer and famouser
Spill posh secrets and spend high numbers
On rounds of Greyhound cocktails
As they gossip about Eisenhower’s hidden agenda
And the new British Queen’s past love affairs
But they certainly were not prepared.
Neither the pool boy nor the rich and famous
expected what came next, as the Yenice-Gönen
quake struck, and shattered their very existence.

Standard
Prosetry

His Internal Valor – Bryn Bluth

Note from the author: “I wrote it after finding out a close friend had HIV (the title is an acronym, and the “red banner” I talk about in the piece is a metaphor for HIV)”

This boy I know, wears a red banner over his heart. It is hidden below the many layers he wraps himself in, exposing it to no one. I’ve unwrapped him though, many times, felt the bare skin of his vulnerability, seen the reality of it all. He brushes it off like it is nothing, preferring not to talk about it, covering up again, quickly, pretending the red banner isn’t there-
But it is.

I wish I could take the red banner away from him, take its place, mend the scars with hope, but that won’t happen, he is the only one who can do that. All I can do is keep his company, play along with his masquerade of denial. I sometimes wonder what he was like when he was younger, carefree and unable to comprehend the significance of the red banner. “Never grow up,” I want to tell the younger him, “never lose your spunk.

I knew, somewhere in me I just knew, the second I first made eye-contact with those verdigris eyes of his, that he was here for a reason, that is, in my life. I knew in that instant, that he had something under that grayscale expression of his- something I had to find. I don’t think the red banner is all I had to find though, it came too easily for that to be true. In all honesty, I believe I’ve just hardly scratched the surface.
He’s a diamond, hard to find, hard to crack, but energetically scintillating from each quirk, flaw, and facet-

Red banner and all.

Standard