The lassos fly in the air to catch you and pull you back into the pit. “Dance for me,” the captors say, stealing your clothes to replace them with a tunic and leather pads. No sword and shield to arm you. Just straps of sandals on skin tanning in the unyielding sun. Dance for the … Continue reading Song of the Gladiator
I built myself up from deep under ground but it isn’t enough to contend with night. The monsters and ghouls cannot bare the light of a new day when their eyes have been sewn shut for ages by their own hands. A needle to pierce the flesh of tender eyelids and turn them hard with … Continue reading Firebird
This fractured heart is a bane to the sweetness of new love. How can it mend if I can’t let him in? How do I allow him in my shattered spaces, stepping on glass and cutting his hands?How do I stop internal bleeding? Boundaries breached. Blood where it doesn’t belong, robbing my heart of the … Continue reading Floral Heart
TRIGGER WARNING: This poem may contain content that brings up unhealed material in those with trauma. Please take care when reading this and make sure you have supportive help to assist in your process when needed. What tragedy to be marked when scars become a part of you, like a different heart or lungs: a … Continue reading Cup of Life
Engaging with the outside world falls away like shells of walnuts cracked apart for the prize within. Could this be the skin of my serpent soul sloughing off in the violence needed for me to be truly free? To release the dead and dying threads binding me for ages so I may finally live? To … Continue reading Dream Girl
Don’t mind me, I’m just surrendering being broken calling back all the fragments of me throughout space and time, all the pieces that got lost somewhere, stuck in shock, orphans in stasis, hungry for a mother in perpetual wonder of where they belong. I felt their search for millenia and even made it part of … Continue reading The Seeker
In the wreckage of my heart can I open anyway? In the disaster land of the aftermath of choices can I open anyway? In the rubble of decimated villages ravaged tribes pillaged body can I open anyway? Lying on the ground bleeding from takers conquering can I open anyway? Can I open to be torn … Continue reading To Be Torn Open
The little deaths Winter brings; To ride them out 'til it's warm again, this is the task. The water is raging under this house on stilts. The rain is chipping away at all the vulnerable and thirsty things. Am I safe inside this box, kept warm by power that isn’t mine? Am I really secure … Continue reading Winter’s Little Death
Welcome to The Flipside, to The Upside Down. Here, everything is as it should be. Here, we live inside dark clouds. There is no sun in here, no days full of light. Here the shadows are more than echoes of a past we try to fight. Here there is no floor firm under your feet. … Continue reading The Upside Down
We try so hard to individuate, differentiate, emancipate. “Please don’t let me become like you,” we say. And she cuts her hair, like I did at twelve and sixteen, and so many more times to keep myself alone in my tower, and to scare away all the princes. Sometimes one is simply more comfortable with … Continue reading The Night Queen in Daylight
