For David
This piece gets me. It is the ice at the bottom of the whiskey sour, what remains after everything else I've written on Prose.
It is the first entry, the first piece I ever wrote on here.
The below is actually the edited version, which I submitted to another challenge many months ago. This is its third time seeing the sun.
On a hot, lonely day in April three years ago, this is what I had to give.
I hope it glows in your eyes. It glows in mine.
xx
David has round eyes. And right now, they are full of sadness and deep concern.
“This makes me realize,” he says, “that it’s in the cards.”
David is legitimately crying. Tears are seeping into the top of his buttoned up collared shirt. By day, he works at the largest insurance firm in the greater Boston area. A job he loves. But he has admitted that when he leaves his office, he blasts jazz in his car to prevent panic attacks and crying jags.
I stare at the floor. It’s like watching a stranger cry on the bus. I wonder what happened.
David says, “It makes me realize that Abby, one of us, could not show up here one day. It would be over.”
The group leader finally turns to me. Abby, how does that make you feel?
I don’t know, what would it be like to feel anything right now?
I hate this question.
David, in some twisted way, is getting to the Heart of Group Therapy. Suicide is always lurking in the back of our mentally ill minds. For some reason, I always think of my insurance company here, checking the box of: Ok, Abby is suicidal, coverage is approved.
But is this more than money? I think back to the aftermath in the ER, after the Ativan. I apologized. To everyone. My body on the hospital bed. Taking someone’s place.
We don’t pump stomachs anymore. Too much damage. We wait it out.
No matter what?
My war is against my very being, my soul. As I watch David cry, I retreat to a familiar place.
My body is sitting and staring, not looking or fighting.
A Girl of the Limberlost
I was the first born child. A step daughter to my new bi-polar, alcoholic father by the age of three. A half sister to the two girls that would come. A shame on my mother.
Books gave me a haven. A place to escape the harsh reality of my young life. To know that I was not alone. That my need to question things and disbelief in the cruelty of man did not go unmatched nor call for the punishment I received for such thoughts.
Sometimes he took my books from me. His face twisted with rage, a being not of this world. I would cry myself to sleep as silently as possible to avoid stepping on the proverbial egg shells.
For fourteen years I survived by entering the minds of others. The day he tossed my meager belongings into trashbags and littered the frosted grass with them was the day I became free.
I'd spent 17 years on this rock we call earth but I had not known freedom like that since my first few years of life. Sleeping in my car was a small price to pay for such joy. Had I known that graduation from High school would emancipate me I would have applied myself more. Has potential, does not apply herself.
The very first book to touch my soul wasn’t the first I’d read, my world had been filled with reading from the start. This special gift my Mother gave to me will never be forgotten.
The first book to speak to my soul was “A Girl of the Limberlost” by Gene Stratton-Porter. Even in my time this was considered a very old book. Maybe some well meaning faerie left it for me as the means of my obtaining the book remain a mystery to this day.
Like my life, I inadvertently read the second book prior to the first. If you knew my life story this statement would make more sense.
I related to the heroine. She too was poor, unwanted and raised on sadness. She found her true self in the forest. Nature and a violin to guide the way. To my childs mind this remedy was bliss and I yearned for such a path.
It opened my soul to possibility and for this I shall ever be grateful.
America
America,
Your rotten core,
Built of blood and tears,
And a veneer of good intentions.
America,
You came up from nothing,
A bunch of religious runways,
Yet now you scorn the other runaways.
America,
Your blood is boiling,
Polluted with plastic and grease
America,
Your heart is breaking,
Smashed to bits by rioters waving flags.
America,
Your throat is tightening,
Knelt on by your own people.
America,
Your skin is peeling,
From the sunburn of progress.
America,
Your cancer is growing,
Fed by the flesh of
Childhood obesity.
America,
Your Miss America Models are crying
Because they're starving
For the love they can't give themselves.
America,
Is this what you wanted?
America,
I think you need to sit back.
Restart.
Let your body heal itself
From these self inflicted wounds.
America, you are more than this.
America, don't drown in this.
America,
If you want us to heal,
You need to start with yourself.
Published
I wasn't even allowed to drink in January because my friends and I had declared it "dry January." I was bored and sadly sober one night when I saw that a literary journal I sometimes submit to had submissions open for their March issue. Free of charge, just send the editor an email.
I wrote in my new crooked, fragmented style - something I hadn't published on Prose, because it has to be previously unpublished. I laid out my childhood and my awful ex-boyfriend like they were being hung out to dry.
I couldn't have even summarized what I had written after the fact, I had submitted it close to midnight and am usually forgetful of what I write anyway. Something about trauma, etc. etc.
7:54 a.m yesterday: an email from the editor. 'It is our pleasure to inform you...'
Wait, what?
Sipping coffee slowly, and then more quickly. This was my second submission to a publication outside of Prose since the year started.
Perhaps no one had submitted?
It feels good to be recognized, as mortified as I am that I laid my past bare, a midnight submission I had emailed for the hell of it. Now it will be spelled out to the world, trauma and my name together, separated by only a comma.
You never know until you try.
thorns, roses, and falling stars
A wilted rose, strung over a dagger,
I solemnly watched the petals fall.
Don’t think, for a moment, I didn’t see it,
I saw the crimson writing on the wall.
You waited, quietly, for perfect,
the moment from lingering dreams.
But as you got down on one knee,
you saw the look of broken regimes.
I shook my head, stars crashing around us,
waves decimated the shore line.
But where was all the blood coming from,
Impossible to tell, your heart or mine?
I took the rose, you felt the thorns,
embedded in our diverging hearts.
The ringing of the world, loud in my ears
They said, as we scavenged for the lost parts, :
She could have had it all,
If she didn’t chase the dream in her head.
She could have played the part,
rather than blood only tears to shed.
under a summers day,
the pale moon in the velvet sky,
you approached my darkened smile,
and quietly asked me why?
I said, I could have seen it all.
Our life, from now til death.
It was so easy to picture,
and simple, like my breath.
There was no great unknown,
rather a white serpent of a dress,
it would have been unbearably mundane,
if I, like a quiet rose, had whispered yes.
but that was the biggest problem,
That I saw the life you called our own,
but darling, I want the grand adventure.
and I am only scared of the known.
#poetry #poem #fantasy #prose #rose #dagger #love
skull eyes
a skeleton key
clenched in fleshless hands
a shadow of whim
whipped by petulant sands
a gold ruby crown
worn by red-beaked crows
a wicked dimpled grin
dipped in crimson rose
a charade of a cape
torn bone by bone
the last of the skin
drowned by the throne
a skeleton key
picked raw and true
the forsaken spoils
relent to your last debut
