Tag Archives: prose

Poetry, Prosetry

You Like to Play with Danger, Don’t You? – Brooke Safferman

You like to play with danger, don’t you?

Sexuality undulating like the ocean’s waves, wit as sharp as the scissors in your back pocket

Of course, you say, I like to be hands on, you say as you cut open the package with

One single line of bad intentions.

My eyes drop down to the dirt beneath the plot of grass, and

The toe of your left cowboy boot’s digging in to the very earth that birthed you

Mother, oh Mother, where are you now?

The entirety of my mind is a word-search puzzle,

Full of the words I cannot say because they’re all scrambled up hopelessly,

Like the eggs your papa used to cook for us when we were still just sleepy kids

But over the years I’ve learned the hard way not to hold your hand for too long because

You like to play with danger… don’t you?

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Essay, Flash Fiction

My Favorite Place to Be – Alex Esterline

As I walked up to the brick building in the sweltering heat of the summer, I stopped on the hill to take a look around. I was surrounded by busy French streets and the smell of a bakery torturing those who passed by. Looking at the building, I saw a sign that read “Auberge Internationale de Québec”. When I walked inside I was greeted by a building as warm as the heat outside and with a glossy wooden interior. The building, itself, was an adventure. With no signs, except those in foreign script, each room was a mystery. After checking in, there was a strenuous trek up three flights of narrow, wooden floors that creaked endlessly. I endured as my suitcase became heavier, heavier, heavier, and lighter, finally. That night, after having reached the end of the hallway and located my room, the walls became illuminated by only the city lights and the glow of the moon. The buildings seemed to breathe and come to life with their phosphorescence. And although I had to get up early the next morning, I saw on my bed that faced a tall window. Through that window, the city lights could see my legs curled up into me as I watched without blinking. A bridge cast its glare on the river below. As cars passed through the city, their noises were barely audible over the music that blared from a stadium nearby. The city spoke to the music, as it’s heartbeat became the pulsing bass that could only be heard by those who were truly listening. Warm summer air poured through the windows and my eyes couldn’t part from the current view. Hours passed and sleep still eluded me. But I did not care that I had to wake up at six in the morning, because I was with my best friends- the stars. I did not care that I had to wake up at six in the morning, because the city wanted to see me. I did not care that I had to wake up at six in the morning because I had found complete comfort in this youth hostel 945 miles away from my home. 

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Poetry

Through Their Eyes – Poppy Lam

Through their eye’s everything is magnified,
A light touch is a mighty blow,
A flick of a switch is a raging storm,
A small ember is a seething hell,
They feel the need to convert experiences into masterpieces
Be it photos, drawing, music or writing
It may just be a snap of a camera but it’s their way of capturing their life and seeing it from a new perspective
It may just be a few sketchy lines but it’s how they portray their emotions and discover themselves
It may just be a few notes but it’s their sole way of communicating with the world
It may just be ink to a page but it’s their emotions soaring over the white landscape
The need to fill the obsidian darkness which lingers within
To drop the mask, stand back and watch it shatter
So you go and judge but we won’t be the one’s coughing up the ashes of a burnt out flame.

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Poetry

The Artist – Brooke Safferman

16 colored pencils lay before your handsthey are trembling with anticipation;

you are trembling with anticipation

 

a masterpiece waiting to be revealed

but you are the only one who can manifest it

and make it come to life with the power of your genius mind

 

the clock ticks on and suddenly you shake your head

there’s too much pressure to do the things that must be done

but the desire of making, of creating, of bringing to life, has begun to overtake you

 

dancing, your fingers are dancing as they slide the pencils across the page,

shapes and shades being formed by the colors of passion rather than that of the lead

I, too, originated as one of your masterpieces – and for that, I am forever grateful.

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Poetry, Prosetry

I’m Sorry – Alexandra Mayer

I am from a defeated town
with deadbeat afternoons,

lawn chairs and lemonade,

and church clothes that cling in the heat.

Our bones are heavy.

 

I told you, I loved you like

the shimmering but separate rainbow fish swirl of oil in the puddles of asphalt parking lots.

And then I left.

 

You told me

you wanted to get closer, closer

so we could breath each other in.

 

And then, like that, three years went by

without you.

 

I was in Philosophy of Ethics when I read your facebook status:

“I LIED. AND SO I’LL BE FERRYING THOSE OF YOU I CAN WITH ME TO THE NEXT WORLD. I’LL POST A BRIDGE BEFORE I LEAVE.”

The Professor went on.

Heraclitus once said, “Everything Flows.”

Plato revised: “Everything changes.”

 

I called.

Your voice sounded like a meteor tearing into earth.

I heard wisps of gold cloud your eyes, when you said,

“I’m high. I’m high. If you don’t love me, I’ll hang myself from the rafters of hell.”

 

Silence dangled over us.

Later you told me you could feel it

wrap around your neck

like the noose used on your Grandfather.

 

I didn’t think of that.

I called the police.

I wanted you to be okay.

 

The officer was kind to me.

His voice sounded like velvet.

 

Then, for six nights, the stars dried out my eyes.

They warned me–

‘Only the dead shine.’

 

You called,

finally, from Silver Hill Mental Hospital.

It was your Mother’s Bipolar Disorder that got you there.

But it was your Father’s black skin

that made the officer with a velvet voice

think it was okay to hurt you.

 

I’m sorry I didn’t believe you when you told me

he pressed his fists into your gut

and plunged his hands around your neck.

I’m sorry, you had to send me pictures. I still can’t believe you did.

It looked like Jupiter’s rings tried to split you in two pieces.

I’m sorry that I can still drag my fingers across your scars.

 

I just wanted you to be okay

because I saw a life like hydrangeas and summer sunsets in your eyes.

and I remembered the elm tree where we took branches for seats and traded secrets.

And I knew just segments of your soul,

but I could see you’re bursting with a history and a story.

I just wanted you to be okay.

 

But he just saw a black body,

said you were a ‘dangerous madman resisting arrest.’

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Uncategorized

Sleeping with God: “Minnie” – Danielle East

I remained too much inside my head; I began to lose my mind. –Edgar Allen Poe

 

The Antebellum

 

I

“Would you marry me,” I begged him to say yes. I spoke the request I had been wanting for so long.

The more the world wanted us apart, the more we gravitated towards each other. The world hates what cannot be comprehended. Beasts and human? An abomination, a sin. The Lord clenched his chest and fell to his knees at the sight of such an un-Godly social experiment. Yet it was not our fault that we fell in love. Like Adam and Eve, we knew right from wrong, but it was temptation that brought us upon one another. It was always temptation that made the most bias and greatest fall and lose strength.

I didn’t care if it was morally wrong to fall for whomever I loved. With all the wrong gone on in the world, how could true love fall in this category? It was only hypocrites, self-loathing hypocrites that defiled everything that was good in the world. Oh how I hate people like that. They go around living their lives with their heads held high, nose at an angle and spiting on everyone who they think is beneath them. It’s just child’s play for them to detest me. I know God hates ugly, but you don’t even have to dig deep in my heart to know I have no love for them.

“Don’t you love me?”

Anyone might think I just hate white folks, except my lover, because they are white and the world is hateful, but I don’t too much like black folks either. None of us will ever leave slavery if we don’t all band together. You don’t need to be self-educated to know right from wrong. Right and wrong ain’t something them book with them English words in it can teach you. Yet, some even know right and wrong, but can’t live by it.

Despite my hatred for the world, there was only one true person that held my heart. My Clarence dear. So loyal to me he is. Greater than any man in the South. I can hardly remember a time when I did not cling to my lover. He always gave me that feeling of hope. Something in him always told me, even though we were in the midst of a troubling time, there was still a beating heart in the world.

But don’t none of them Negroes like me since I have been with Clarence. To what I suspect, it may be jealousy at the least. I believe many of them desire to be with him or if they have to, be raped by him, just something to make them cry at night and wish even more they were dead. Even if I tried, I wouldn’t be able to hold a nice conversation with one of them. My whole race card had expired. None of them merely talked to me. I am a black sheep, exiled by my own kind. No one to relate to, no one to braid my hair and discuss whatever the hell with.

“Would you marry me if I was white?”

I burst out with a different approach to make the question more suiting. Clarence I knew loved him. Although he was taller than average, blond-headed and blue-eyed, he had my heart. I know, slave masters kept wenches all the time, but our relationship was different. I was more than just a bed mate. He wasn’t a racist bigot. How unusual and unbelievable it was, it had been too long under his protection to know him in any other way.

To be a person born into the slave trade is as like being conceived at the gates of Hell. My burnt crisp skin that which was cooked by the devil’s roasting pan. The way he fiddled at my hair with his pitchfork to conduct a nappy mess on my head. And the way he placed me in the world at such an un-Godly time.

Being black in America when a system constantly works against you is a curse. My appearance was not a choice but; white folks treat us as though we willingly picked to jump into this lake of fire. Unfortunately, my outward appearance will not change in the years to come. Nor will the way I and all the other Negroes are treated because of it. It’s preposterous that at this time a white man can steal a horse and be hung because of it but kill a black person and live.

But there was no need for me to complain. Unlike my other equals that produced their only means of surviving in the field, I did not work. My master, he did not pay attention to if I got the work done or not. An unusual black woman I was, but I did help out in the kitchen. My hands had not touched a crop since I was eight years old. This is when I took to the kitchen like my mother and those mothers before her.

This is also when I took a liking the Master Clarence; who I only called Clarence. And when he would call, “Minnie, Minnie… You stay out that field. They don’t need you. Too pretty to crop, to pretty to pick.” So I say he took a liking to me too. Harmless or not, his heart was set on me. That’s why I’m set apart from the rest of the Negroes.

To say I was in love with Clarence was just an understatement. What would I do without him, and him without me as his companion? Being with my love Clarence was like sleeping with God.

“Answer me!”

His silence left me with the question of whether he loved me at a different level than he had before. Laying in the lush that be in his master quarters was where I stayed. The rest of the Negroes were outside in the slave quarters. This is where they stayed at night but, many of them did not remain in the homes. But none of them were stupid enough to run away and not come back. Just recently, many that choose to roam the land at night did not come back.

“I…,” he said.

Lying next to Clarence was like being closer God. His whole physique and personality is the opposite of me. The way his hair flows from his scalp to create the cows lick at the front of his forehead. I always wondered why the white man’s hair came out all straight like grass and got real oiled up. And the fact that my hair was dry like all the other Negroes. I prayed for hair like his.

His fair skin that contained little patches of freckles on his face and arms. His jaw was cut and structured like the no one other. His high cheek bones looked like they begged for me to rub my lips upon them. And I enjoyed them, even though sometimes all I could taste was sweat.

His height is what set him apart from the other white men I Knew in Forees County. His height, counted from the scratches marked beside the barn in the field were higher than any man on the plantation. I had never actually measured him but by the height of other men I had seen, I guessed her was seven feet. His bulky body and the awkward way he walked was much different than those of the Negroes. The cotton picker men smelled of hard work and hard days gone by. I preferred Clarence’s aroma to theirs.

He completes me. Whether be a good or a bad thing. His love matters much more.

“How would they react, “Clarence asked as he pushed his hand into my grasp. His eyes my caught my glance and I could see the sparkle in his light brown eyes. “When the time comes and we can. Don’t over think things. Good things come to those who wait Minnie.”

The sound of his voice alone was comforting…But his answer did not relive the empty hole in my heart. I rolled over in bed. Facing away from Clarence. Screeching voices, horrible moans, scratching at the roof of the home and my beating heart were the sounds that filled my desperate soul. I couldn’t stand the sounds, especially that out my heart, but I had too. I starred at the blurry wall. I could not let him see me cry myself to sleep.

 

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Poetry, Prosetry

Perspective of a Man – Karlee Sanders

every sunrise,
every sappy love quote,
could never be as beautiful
as the words her fingers wrote—
in the sky
connecting constellations
to the moon.
maybe it was the way she looked in the night air.
the picturesque white light on her face,
she was all things innocent and as innocuous as she could be.
but when the moonlight fell upon her fair skin,
she was a wildfire of blue and purple mixed with the almost fluorescent light and soft brown in her eyes and hair.
she could’ve outshone the sun.
not a soul on this planet could ever convince me that she was flawed in any way.
the way she touched my hands ever so carefully made me feel intoxicated with the inane butterflies she always rambled about.
when our eyes met that night, we were a part of the same dark sky we wore on our shoulders.
we were stars.
and nothing else mattered.
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Poetry

rain & i – Elena Barrera-Waters

it’s 5:56 in the morning

(on a weekend)
and the rain is pounding
and it’s loud
and the windows are shaking, even if only a little.
it’s funny because
i’m always so eager to go to sleep,
to stop the world for just a while,
to escape the noise of yesterday
and today
and even tomorrow.
but right now,
i’m up
and alive
and my heart pounds with life
to the same beat as the rain pounding against the pane of my window
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Flash Fiction

On A Delayed Flight to DC – Iman Messado

x) Nails growing from having been chipped for too long
x) Youtube playlists blowing a crackle-pop low quality rendition of the Black Keys into the rounded curves of my ears
x) My brother’s sweater, because you never know what is golden when it’s hidden in the dark dank musk of your teenage boy closet
x) Gummy worms with loud colors and quiet flavors and squirming bodies and flaccid hearts – you can’t help but feel like a reptilian predator when you gulp one down
x) A conscience lathered firmly with a lukewarm potion of guilt and disappointment with an almost negligible splash of I REALLY DON’T CARE ANYMORE
x) Tired teenage girls v. the rest of the world.
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