March Literature Daily Deviations

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Hello Everyone!

So another month flies past, but another month showcasing your wonderful literary works! Please keep sending in your suggestions as we really appreciate them!


Featured by BeccaJS

anemic, broken, and growing up anywaywhen my sister was five, she dictated a letter to me in her strong little voice
while dust drifted in the sunshine
of our creaky old room.
dear me [she said],
barney is the best. i will wear blue all the time even though i'm a girl. my heart beats without me telling it to and that's pretty cool. i think people always feel better if you tell them you love them. i will always smile because i have dimples when i smile.
love,
me.
"did you write it?" she asked, and i told her i did, every word
with the chunky yellow pencil i'd fished out of my school bag.
i handed her the letter, and she folded it up carefully
and she smiled.
when my sister was fifteen, she was a little bit broken
anemic and pale, with unsure hair and shaky hands.
when i came home to visit she whispered to me that
she didn't understand
and when i asked her what she didn't understand, she said
"everything."
she wrote another letter that night.
dear me [it said],
this isn't a suicide note. this isn't another angsty poem. this
ApparitionsI was nervous when I arrived.  Had my information been right?  Was she used to trans patients?  Would she be supportive and helpful or weirded out? Would this be a waste of time or the freeing experience I hoped it would be?
I looked around the lobby. It was small and well furnished. A large coffee table occupied the center of the room, surrounded on two sides by a small sofa and an armchair, which for some reason made me think of my grandfather. On the opposite side of the room, there was a water cooler and several large unopened refill containers.  On a table near the door was the item I was looking for.
"Matt 12:00, 6 pages," read a yellow sticky note affixed to some papers clipped onto a clipboard. Yellow seemed like a bad omen, sort of a boring choice of office supplies.
The name on the sticky didn't have the same pang of regret, didn't leave the bad taste in my mouth that it usually did. It felt more like a farewell to an old friend an
Sing-Song, Stumble SlurChasing fire works, fire flies,
these fucking lies through urban sprawl and graffiti scrawl,
fingers locked, heart thumping in my throat like the bile I can't choke down.
It tastes like Vaseline and ashes,
a mouthful of proof of my cystic demise.
The clumsy stumble roar,
beasts with cherry-flavored foam leaking through their teeth,
and how much more skin can be chewed from my neck?
Skyscraper mazes and the pain-and-memory hazes I live and breathe
like it'd literally kill me to let it go.
Let it go.
Time slips and slides,
ice and lies,
love-dipped fallacies that hide
chrome and Vodka-bottle teeth.
Survive for the fight,
for the knuckle scabs and the dirty rainbow bruises.
Merit badges stamped into my chest.
I love you. I love you. I love you.
Blunt instrument know-it-all,
but you're dumb as a brick and I'm feeling sick,
stomach churn, eyes burn,
and the crepe paper, purple spider leg memories eat at me.
Oh, you dog.
A year worth of your life and I've learned the bliss
of scraped
End of the World?"End of the world?"  Richard looked up from his newspaper.  "Bollocks!  The world will always be here.  What you really mean is it's the end of humanity!"
Dumping the paper down on the curb next to him he got to his feet.  "If the crazies with shotguns or the blasted zombies don't get us all, this waiting will!  I say lets go out with a little style!  What d'ya think, Mertle?  Shotgun or chainsaw?"
Unfortunately for Richard, the voice he heard answer him was nothing beyond his own mind because Mertle was in fact, an old microwave sitting on the street, with a smile drawn on her glass face in bright red lipstick.
"You're right!  Let's take both!"
Rap vs. poetryMost writings about the difference between rapping and poetry are merely an artificial opportunity to note the difference between Snoop Dogg and Edgar Allen Poe or some such mismatching. Of course, we should look at the two art forms with a fair, levelled comparison, or at least objectively.
Just as raps have a stereotypical subject matter, poetry could be thought of as being solely about crying, love and over-dramatic metaphor. Let's pluck a poem from the depths of deviantart.com:
"And the sun peeps over the horizon
where the sky meets earth
her rays stretch out and
caress Your face
i look down and marvel at Your
Perfection"
(Sic).
Of course, having been written by an unskilled poet with sub-standard grammar (that is, there is no significance of the grammar used in the poem), it's not really better than Snoop Dogg. If we compare it to a rap by a skilful rapper:
"Right before he pulled the trigger and ended her life,
He thought about the cocaine with the platinum and ice
And he felt st
Happy HollowLook:
I found him in Happy Hollow, the woods that's on the outskirts of the city. He was a little ways off the path me and my sister, Nahla, take to school, 'cept Nahla was sick that day so it was just me by myself. It's not the fastest way to get to school, but we can't go through Northampton or else the bullies that live there will throw dirt clods at us. After I found him I took him to this old shed out there. It's got a hole in the roof but I figured the little guy'd be safe there on account of it's a good ways away from the Northampton houses; plus you can't hardly see it through all the leaves and branches and stuff. His fur was real white and real soft, just like snow 'cept it wasn't cold. It was warm and fuzzy so it made you wanna squeeze him real tight. I liked playing with his ears cuz they was all floppy, 'cept when you made a weird noise, then they'd stick straight up and he'd tilt his head sideways and look at you funny. He had a long bushy tail and sharp little baby teeth
:thumb268016406: Sweetheart in A-Sharp"You're the knife."
Words. Clumsy words. Taught to me by my father, and his before, and worn into my skeleton like a bad habit. This was a bad habit, and still is.
"Be the knife."
A hoarse whisper in the dark against the swinging, hanging light. Ten competitors, thirty spectators; all losers. Two in the middle. All my life I've practiced and trained and pained for something so much greater than this. Means does indeed, unfortunately, make the man.
As I grip the soft leather of the knife handle, circa 1909, I hope these letters find you well. I hope they find me well, too, and I'm sorry for the three of us that it's come to this, cher. I'm sorry that every night for the last eight months I've promised I would come home, but haven't. I can't. Every penny here is ten dollars at home, and ten dollars we need. Every scar over my cheek a simple victory. Every meal is a regret. Every night is goodbye. I miss you. I've never said it, and I can barely think it. Now it's time to set these heavy,
Sage
One morning she awoke to find workmen in her garden. They had already pulled up the sage bush, dumping it unceremoniously, root side up atop the rosemary, atop the basil so that it looked like a miniature baobab, or whatever they call those trees in Africa with the habit of growing upside down. She wished she could shrink down and scurry off into that diminutive landscape. She wished she could call to the workmen and tell them to get out of her yard, to tell them that sage could be burnt to ward off evil spirits. Instead, she let her teacup slip through her fingers. It greeted the floor with the expected crash, a hundred tiny shards singing and reveling in newfound freedom, tracing wet trails across the tile.
She stepped over the puddle and pressed her forehead against the kitchen window. One of the workmen was standing in the corner of the yard, conversing with the policemen she knew would be there. Another trekked slowly around the yard with a metal detector while two more stood wais
Tragic BeautyI remember lying in my hospital bed at the physical rehabilitation facility, far too many years ago,  staring at a picture of a little girl. Someone had brought it in for me, though I didn't remember who or why. In the picture she was wearing shorts, and leaning to feed bread to the ducks gathered around her. I stared at the little girl's legs and cried. She was beautiful.
"I broke you," I whispered to her. "I'm so sorry I broke you. I never meant to. Please, forgive me." And she did, of course. But I'm not sure if that made it better or worse.
There was a poet staying in the room next to me. He was a brain trauma patient, unlike me. For some reason they'd moved me out of the spinal cord injury section of the hospital and into brain trauma. I never actually met the man, and yet some days I can't stop thinking about him. My mother brought me a book of his poems, a little pamphlet made of thick, sturdy paper. She said she thought I would like them. And I did. They were so hopef
the artist.01.
the sky was earl grey
and the clouds were steamy sips
and i wanted to drink it all.
02.
the leaves were star yellow
and the bark smelled of coffee
and the bakery was selling a moon made out of cheese.
03.
there was an old man on a bench
he threw his wedding band in the sewer
i cried for him.
04.
the birds were dreams
and the mountains, my obstacles,
tally ho young adventurer tally ho
05.
i ran into an artist today
he drew signs on corner post buildings
but he also gave his lunch to a homeless boy.
06.
my mom holds black holes beneath her eyes
and for the first time in days, she spoke to me,
"i'm worried about you. try to make some friends?"
07.
dear mom, i am trying
i played chess with a man in the park
i helped a girl find her parents
i am content with who i am, mom,
now i am just trying to help others achieve the same.
08.
i ran into the artist again today
and he taught me how to paint
and then he smiled at me and said, "you're different than the rest."
09.
we made plans, me and
The Instinct of CellsThe Instinct of Cells
beauty softens each of us
like an egg soaking in vinegar,
but I have always been soft,
soft as baby fuzz,
a flabby soul
stuffed into my skin
like sausage meat inside a hog casing.
I have no idea what it’s like
to have to kill,
to jump out of an airplane,
to learn I have cancer.
I spray lavender-vanilla mist on my pillow
to help myself
sleep.
the hardest thing in my life
was when my dad died. they tattooed
little dots on his head
to help them aim their rays. his hair
started to fall out. luckily,
he didn’t have much to lose.
I correspond over the Internet
with a young woman
in England. she takes shape
as if from memory—
out of digitized snapshots
and sound bites
and emoticons
and words. her long hair once shimmered
under a fading
sun. she writes soft
poetry and reads it into her computer.
her breath whispers
in the microphone
like the sound of television snow.
I remember the look on my dad’s face
as he hung up the phone
and told

O' SisterStart with something, whether it be words or thought or action.  Just do something, anything to avoid this dissipating grey matter, neurotic erosion.
"I don't exactly remember everything."  My words are timid, pensive.
The moments revolve, coil and ignite; flashing images with no particular order.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
i.
I scrunch my iceman toes, attempting to conserve heat, but the cold still surpasses the fabric of my Converse.  My muscles tense against abrasive arctic gusts.  The bitter wind raises bristled hair above goose bumped flesh.
These pink fingers quiver in the grasp of an 'I heart New York" shot glass.  I guzzle down Stolichnaya.  The vodka is dry-ice against my tongue; molten silver.
Blurred peripherals detect a lone ember drowning in the ashtray, a Marlboro Smooth choking beneath garish glares of moonlight.

ii
"And this kinda s
Tree by AbCat Mud by lluviosa fresh baguettes and used cigarettes ~a sestina~Scene setting: the Paris Hotel, as I fold
the corner of a page from my Brit Lit
textbook -- story of a boy with French
lips & a Japanese heart.  god, how I miss
his Spanish smile; each dimple, a match-
ing tattoo.   Twice,  he touched my hand
with his heaven-sewn skin.  On the other hand,
my bare body lay on a hotel bed.  Alone.  I fold
my mannequin skeleton like origami   to match
the paper cranes swimming in his Neon eyes, lit
like European stars—Oh, Nostalgia.  how I miss
getting Lost in those foreign eyes during French
class.  Lust in translation.  Lost in a faux-French
Fantasyland.  I want to hold his shivering hand.
Kiss him atop this Eiffel replica.  Alas!  I missed
my chance for our Souls to tango—crashing into the fold
of his hips.  I'm not fluent in body language or candlelit
cuisines or Romance. I can't even strike a
The Fat Buddha Smiles At MeThe fat Buddha smiles at me
As I sit in the Vietnamese nail salon,
I wonder if he realizes that
The incense in front of him is electric?
And I, paying money to sit
And have my feet bathed by a lady,
Am bowed to far more often, with
Sacrificial poses, and softly spoken words.
I wonder what it must be like
To be so enlightened that
I could be satisfied with plastic.
While the lady asks if I prefer
The blue or purple polish?
RopeHe studied the body on the table,
how the hair grew clockwise
and tried to guess her name.
Maybe Linda, like his sister -
still in school and studying
how men dealt
with the end of the world.
Perhaps Jenny,
demure with eyes
that never gazed past her yard
or guessed how much
the sun weighed.
Or Saroya, as exotic
as the indigo blouse
open and gasping at the ceiling.
There is no life
at the end of the rope
he thought,
his hands deftly rearranging
the color of her cheeks
into something almost living.
Just guess work and apologies
and too many hours
left for someone else
to clear away.
Masquerade Villanelle IILife is a masquerade.
You're only safe when in disguise.
Remove your mask and be betrayed.
There's every reason to be afraid—
A stranger's frozen face, flashing eyes,
Life is a perilous masquerade.
A look sharp as a tempered blade.
Honeyed words—do not listen to their lies.
If you remove your mask you'll be betrayed.
Dance, smile, and nod; a silent shade,
Hide deep your heart and beware of spies.
Life is a dance, a whirling masquerade.
Difficulty comes with your temper frayed—
Take courage, and let no one hear your cries.
Dare you remove your mask, risk being betrayed?
Discover who you are, before you fade.
But keep part of yourself secret, if you are wise.
Life is nothing but an unending masquerade
Remove your mask and be betrayed.


Featured by ikazon

:thumb278686748: how lilies weepobstacles
are a kind of faith, 
bleeding through
intention
as if through some
amorphous skin,
red silk,
a bruised clock 
covered in 
veins and cloaked
with skin,
timed to burst.
i am nothing
if i am not a dream
of yours, waking
from the geometric light
of my window
into a shimmering cup,
poured full of your words
my hips dripping
their tiny mechanisms,
whirring impatiently
my mouth
made raw,
swirling in incense,
growing new teeth,
finding ulcers
to bleed through.
i drip and cough
and sleep and bleed
and hope
that i am strong enough
for someone like you.
i am taped
and bandaged
and covered up
blindfolded
but you can still see
the endless flaws.
i watch the trees break,
embryos shivering,
wolves chewing,
the elastic stretch between moments as
one thing lives and another dies,
as each day i create my chances,
i hold my deck of cards and slice two in half,
i eat one, i rip another,
and i still win the game.
you are the card i never play,
the one i hold on to,
the lucky coin
I Guess We'll Live To See ItYou should start looking
for a place we can make our last stand.
The dawn is breaking:
Every morning, a little less light,
and the end
is not as close as you think.
Love is not enough,
and wanting
is not enough.
The desert is coming.
The sea is coming.
God forbid
they find us holding our thirst
in both hands.
Instead,
instead;
No,
There is no
rescue.
You should start looking for a place
we can make our last
stand.
Take my frenzy for resignation, put your boots
on. I have a lantern. I have a little
knife. We have so much still
to survive. Open
your hands
and let the thirst out.
Build. We will stand
until the dawn breaks- and you do not believe
in ecstasy, so we will know,
at the end.
a memoryI remembered the afternoon I called you,
curled on my bed with someone's good book
in my palm, nestled softly in the waning light
and under my gently roaming fingers
the baby moved – not to my hand-touch,
but inside, an insistent flutter,
not like the swiftly beating heart
on the doctor's monitor, not like the slow
appearance of a plus-sign on a drugstore test.
I called you, my gently rolling daughter's
mother's mother. I called you like the woman
standing at my back while I held the kite string
on a pushy spring day, the diagonal shape so
far above us I could only feel the jerk of the
cord around my fingers, holding us to earth.
l'hiver.(you can't tell the birds and the snow apart in the sky:
the grand church of dizzying space - )
and the trees are yellowed in cowardice, raking the sky
to the ground and around and around.
listen to your organs: the almost grand piano of the
churches i'd never attend.
and never mistake the courage of the sky for the cowardice
of the ground. never frown, never frown.
listen to your palms: the salty swing of the old snow
burning up on silk and splendor.
and visit the dying snow birds in their graves of the
ground, and they drown and drown.
(you can't tell the birds and the snow apart in the sky:
a grand church of dizzying space will reply. why. why.
would my white birds die.)
:thumb76528780: LevitationObserve.
This is how women walk away.
In broken heels
and secondhand jackets,
cigarette smoke in their hair
and no kiss goodbye.
Do not mock.
It is what it should be.
A girl in a car,
hanging a u-turn
on a glistening, empty street.
Her body is a road to be traveled.
A shipwreck to be plundered.
She does not know how she got here,
and she does not care.
And it does not matter.
This is how women smile.
Knowing, secretive,
though her cheeks are sore.
Though the wind
is blowing right through her clothes.
Though there is no good music
on the radio, and no food
in the refrigerator.
This is just an impression.
An idea of nirvana.
A slice of real, live ecstasy.
But do not give it a name.
Just show it, wear it like
designer jeans.
Tight against the skin.
She is ivory, she is easy,
and it is not love.
It is something better,
fermenting at the
backs of her knees.
Flooring her.
Bleeding from her fingerprints.
It is a devastation,
seven ways from Sunday,
but that is how she likes it.
It cannot hurt
:thumb288445576::thumb261282160::thumb192974744: My Other NameMy Other Name
Sometimes it is to set out forks
           beside each plate,
                                       or folding shirts first,
                         dryer hot in the A.M.
                                half-dark.
Less often, thirsty from cutting trees
    back away from the roof edge,
                       
Splinter helixEMBRYO
a derelict building shifts its swollen form
wire cage elevators moving carefully as it swallows
nestled in a womb of fragile concrete fibres
the child of paint and pastel colours stirs
searching blindly for that energetic outside world
it stretches its delicate arms like an earthquake
SAPLING
Tell me where you come from, what you remember
of the black ground. Talk in riddles only your kind
understands, talk in flowers, talk in thorny branches.
You crack the foundations in starlike patterns, and
you stretch the heart of you for the concrete above,
longing to carry the sky as a bed for the Sun.
GENERATION
the twisting flesh of the whistling tree
blankets the screaming mud with salt
in a lush park tended by arthritic backs
an old man sits with a young girl
as devils arc their spines within smiles
they discuss the taste of snow
ANCIENT
They know the end grows high, grows nigh,
outgrows the star dome like parasite patchwork.
The invaders never came, they were the ground stones,
what
Riding BikesGoing off medication is like riding a bike.
The doctor holds tight to my handlebars and lowers my dosage. The training wheels are off, and oh hey, look at me go! It's like flying but not, and I'm doing so well but then there's a horrible accident and I'm somehow upside down at the bottom of the sea with both wheels still spinning.
"Help," I say, and my doctor pats my head, puts a band-aid on my knee, and writes a note on my chart.
I've balanced by myself for months at a time, but I always end up hitting a fucking tree or falling off a cliff or something equally catastrophic because I am a catastrophic person. Except that is an exaggeration. I am an exaggeration.
I like to compare mental illnesses to mundane physical activities. Also you should know that I am sick but trying to get better.
Sometimes I relapse and then write poems about it.
It's not even the kind of sick where people bring you soup in bed and soothe your fevered brow. It's the kind of sick where I'm late to work because
Into a CongoShocks rippled south
realmed a loss and screened a track
stacks strung low and around again
She wanted the feeling of mica between her teeth
like lashes on a chiseled tree
totaled through and ruffled down
up and around again
Court and run south and
sandalwood
wrecked a home, she sat still
her knees knit together
unraveled over and into raw skin, over and into
she bloomed her hair into a Congo
It peeled like rose petals beneath her feet
a sheet strung high and low and around again
She said tell me why, but her fingers curled
around your head, around your neck, slowly
and then her shoulders
                        loosened
                                 like twine
I HEAR THE COSMOS COLLAPSING...I hear the cosmos collapsing against my soul.
Black space exploding, my imperfect face imploding
into a million skinless Stars, screaming into the
palpable Silence that has been touched less often
than even I have, into the abyss and the blackness
that beckoned me forward I stared, shapes realigned
the perimeters of my reality into a new glaze.
I felt the gravity slip away from under my feet.
Do you remember the time you poured liquor into my
virgin glass and made cocktails from the universes
spinning under my skin? I said "cherish me, please,
this gift that was mine" you said "why" and laughed,
you didn't see the tears I cried, multi-faceted like
the memories imprinted on my little piece of Forever.
I saw a familiar metaphor storming your eyes.
Do you remember when you traced constellations over
my spine? Andromeda role-playing her virgin unrest
and Astraea crying for Purity's sake, that's when
you extinguished your joint on my skin, I pretended
not to feel the sting-but I did, the sc
FlyingWe swam through the sky
and when we landed
we felt higher
than when we almost reached the
Sun.
You kissed my neck and your lips
still burned
and the fire in my hair went out
and you sighed.
I hate this part of the song where I can't hear you anymore.
When you woke me up
I remembered why I used to love you;
why the ash on your tongue
used to taste so sweet.
:thumb197137418: The Door of Our Cottage in the Western NightThey began on the beach, and a fire was raging upon the waters.  A fire on one side of the world and one around the other.  The earth had been unbruised, like an apple on a string, and then two stones had struck within a month, and everything had burned, slagged by deep space arrows. The wind was terrible.  Everywhere was a howl with no direction.
*
There were a few lichen-like communities in damp places, where the sky had steamed by but seared little, lifted ravines and streams from the land, unwrinkled it, dragon braille revealed only in fire.  There were a few who had been underground, and a few in the inland seas and lakes, a few in the deeper rivers, a few on the moon, watching it go.
The moon was hit four weeks later, and there were no lunatic survivors.
*
Once again, we were alone.  The world had been smoked and there was a smell of it everywhere, and we walked on the remains of the crater's basin lake.  It was involute
Ms. Foxrummaging through the night;
I find her buried in a handsome coat.
the darkness softens her
trash-strewn make up
to lay bags under her eyes.
I have always thought to chase
a beauty like that; blow my
hunting-horn like kisses
as I saddle up.
I would wear her around my arm and
discuss the big-game
and the beasts at bay
with boys that brandish
scorecards into the hundreds.
but,
she hid from the canines
lapping her neck with a head
buried in all fours.
I skinned her like a poacher
bearing my ivory smile
for her to unfurl
flushed and screaming
like a new born baby.
caught in my hooves the wrong way.
Hello NowHello.
I don't know how to greet you
I only know that I have always thought of you as something
I could hold in my hands
unnaturally as
a fistful of minnows before
they die
puncture their own bones
against me
and secrete the abalone glaze of their eyes
into a film on the dock
Until now I have since kept you as
a flighted likeness
of my mind
knowing too the cold of a multiplied sunset
ending in frost and space between rivers
the fragrance of a sweetly decomposing
salmonberry, telling time for reddening chinook to end
sweeping like a wind in the parts between birches
or of it's stain that I would palm and carry
thinking also of endings and beginnings
in such order
when gulls eat the cartilidge and fur
from animals put on the silted banks
of the knik
a place where the sun can fall deeply
and I
build fires
as I am no longer alone,
and we hear the chickadees being the trees
and the loons wanting to make night
could it be appropriate now,
while twilight is flaming
to finally know your name?


Featured by thorns

Rebirth of the Seer - Ch. 1Chapter One
"Don't do this, Richard!" she yelled. Her voice reverberated from the walls of the meeting hall, seemingly preventing the elders from issuing a response. I sensed frustration overwhelming her and frowned. Now was not the time for Monica to become indignant.
"Get the devil out of there, woman," I muttered from where I stood, outside the abandoned church whose sanctuary was being used as a place of reckoning. The perfect guise for a covert organization, if I had to be honest. The grounds were surrounded by an ivy-choked wrought iron fence, the area poorly lit to discourage passersby from trespassing. I felt an undercurrent running through the very earth itself, as though spirits could pass through dirt and mark an area sacred. Incantations, no doubt. It made me the sole irreverent creature digging my feet into hallowed ground.
Indulging in a deep, steadying breath, I stopped myself from projecting the thought of caution to my watcher. Instead, I shut my eyes. My powers
AdvertisementsShe was only six when the funeral homes started sending us advertisements, all competing with each other to be the best, to win her business. To win our business, more like; six is hardly old enough to understand what's going on. It's not old enough to understand why everyone is covering their mouths with their hands and failing to hold back tears when you walk into the room, or old enough to understand why people begin to outright sob when you start talking about what you want to be when you grow up. Once it was a doctor, before that it was a fairy princess, but right now it's a policewoman.
And of course all the children have heard about the funeral homes. Cold, nasty, make their business in knowing when people are going to die. Not how, as far as anyone can tell, just...when. A lot of kids have had relatives—great-aunts, great-uncles, maybe great-grandparents—start getting advertisements, maybe been shown them to know what to look out for, but not Anita. She
passerbyraspy voice, like a demon begging for mercy.  she was
always a broken melody,
a puzzle
with no corner pieces.
i can see her,
drenched by the truth in her own
words, "i am just
a crack in the concrete,
marked
by the footsteps
of people like
you."
Forever LoyalHe saw her coming out of the deli, she smelled like blood-sick and old wounds hiding under her last pair of clothes that didn't have tears in them. He went to her and introduced himself. She gave him a sausage. It was love.
He followed her for the rest of the day, ears pricked forward as he listened to her talk. It was funny how that made her happy. She would say "Piston, sit." And he would sit, stump where his tail should be wagging as she pet him with pale fingers. When she did that, he knew she wasn't blood-sick, she was food for others who were and they nipped at her like he sometimes nipped at the heels of children when they tried to stray into traffic. He could smell it all over her, the ghost of blood-sick hands but he knew they weren't trying to help her, they would kill her.
He barked, to try to tell her this but all she did was give him another sausage and coo, her messy brown hair getting in his eyes as she bent down and pressed her forehead against his, eyes closed. He lear
BraveryOn Saturday the twenty-first of January, Elliot took a gun, pressed it to the strip of bone between his eyes, and shot himself. The bullet shattered the frontal bone of his skull, warping his features past recognition, and burrowed through his pre-frontal cortex into the midbrain. He died before the sound stopped echoing through his empty apartment.
This story isn't about that.
I worked with Elliot for only a little while—less than six months. Most of what I knew about him came from his desk. Unlike the smaller ones the secretaries and other reporters had, it was a stately, imposing thing. It would've been terrifying, especially to a mousy little girl like me, but it was covered in paperweights and spare pens and pictures of people hunting ducks. Anyway, Elliot himself denied fear: he was middle-aged, poised on the cusp between forty and fifty. His hair had already turned grey, but he didn't dye it, like he hadn't noticed he was getting older or just didn't care. He smiled more t
Auditor of the Ashes"I am an incalculable rhythm of distinction."
Those words being uttered from the other side of the cubicle wall were not expected, but they could not be labeled as "unexpected" in my inventory of daily expectations.  "Is that so, Rod?"
"I am a paradigm of undiscovered configurations."
This second phrase fell on me as the first.  "Well, that may be true, but you know how much they love it when you talk to me over the cube wall like that.  I hope this audit project hasn't finally pushed you over the edge."
"I am a master of untamed neuropathic swings."
It was that statement, I see now in hindsight's tremendous focus, when I began to worry.  "Oh, you're the Jonas Salk of neuropathy now?  I thought you were an accountant?"
"I am the King of Spades, and I have an ace up my sleeve."
I heard his chair push back, the plastic wheels rolling across the plastic mat, and his Oxfords made a few taps on the mat until they transitioned to the carpet.  He was go
ObsessionIt takes 14 minutes and twelve seconds to walk to your home from mine every day.  Your mother never fails to smile at me when she opens the door. I never fail to notice that it doesn't reach her eyes anymore.
You leave your door open an exact two point three centimeters. I don't think you do it on purpose. There is something wrong with the wood that has left it that way. I pause one foot outside the door and listen to you cough, trying to determine how sick you feel today. I hate that every time I think you are particularly ill, I am always right.
Six months, seventeen days and fourteen hours. That is how long its been since the doctors told us you had an illness. I sat there with your parents, listening to a man who said words like 'terminal' and 'leukemia', and counted the number of times he said 'patient' as if it were your name (Seventeen).
The blood bank says one unit is four hundred and fifty milliliters and I watch as they put the needle into my ar
We're all just Meat and BonesHolly,
I'm going to die.
No, I'm going to change…into them. I should probably write this down directly, quickly, and to the point. In about an hour I will cease to be Ryan, English major at Lander University in Greenwood SC, and I will start my life anew as a zombie. Yea, an undead corpse that stumbles around all day searching for human flesh. I will be nameless…just one undead among thousands.
Which is exactly why I'm writing this letter on this stack of blank receipts. I'm holed up in The Dixie, a local burger joint. Ironically, I always thought the old-timey and weathered neon sign out front would make a perfect apocalypse backdrop. Now, I'm not so sure. It flickers constantly, illuminating the gyrating bodies of the dead like some twisted disco party. This hovel will be my resting place, or my stomping ground, depending on how you view the situation.
If you find this letter, watch out. It won't be me…this letter is me, or what's left of me, Ryan. Mor
InfertilityInfertility
"When are you two going to start working on more kids?"
It was such a simple question.  The thought behind it was innocent in design. A simple inquiry on why a thirty-one-year-old woman had only one child was one of the most dreadful conversations that I have ever had the pleasure of being part of.  
While my daughter was the light in the darkness cast by my own body's failure, my happy little family was not the societal norm.  According to my family's version of the American Dream, a man and a woman were supposed to have two children, a dog, and a white picket fence. This was a sign of success for a stay at home woman.
We were never normal. My husband and I did not marry in the conventional church.  Those aren't our beliefs.  To replace us on this orbiting rock that we call earth, we have a little girl. She is too smart for her age, wanting to watch video games that are ahead of her time and writing a story
The Ringslender, tarnished silver band
rests in palm of withered hand
ancient promise, absent stare
detritus falls like snow on hair
wedding present grand oak bed
ghosts of words the mirror said
rain-rot splintered windowsills
caustic crumbs of guilty pills
alabaster-shattered trust
footprints in the carpet dust
canopy of velvet shame
creaking-staircase-whispered name
the progeny of lies and tears
divests her of her souvenirs
and grateful for the life she gave
the heirloom never meets the grave
:thumb275338442: The Galaxy Sings in B FlatThe galaxy sings in B flat.
Fifty-seven octaves below middle C, hundreds of thousands of tiny stars with little worlds trailing atmospheres in elliptical orbits.  Double-star systems, triple-star, more; planets, civilisations, dark matter, tangible matter, all circling, swarming, humming together in one enormous note, not bumping together but carrying a wave from the centre of their island universe, expanding out into space…
Sound cannot exist in a vacuum.  This is a widely known fact.  And space is a vacuum, sure.  But only when you look at it from here, from our tiny little world.  Close your eyes, zoom out, and look at the celestial spheres from their view; and space isn't so thin after all.  Close your eyes, zoom in, and even our dense atmosphere is just atoms in a vacuum of their own.  Sound as we know it, sure, that doesn't exist outside our little stardust orb.  It's too small, too fragil
couldn't bluei draw a picture of
tomorrow morning:
a man in a silver box sells
75 cent coffee and bad bagels.
his shirt is the kind of blue no one ever
tried to name a crayon after.
dust-plastic blue,
tried to love you
(couldn't)
blue.
and the morning is that same color,
the color of canned lightning-bugs and
unfiltered cigarettes and desire,
because that is all you
draw with couldn't blue.
i pay him 1.25 in change and purse-lint
so that a fourth-world factory can make more
silver boxes to sell more things
more stale blueberry muffins.
and he will keep gathering change
in 75 cent purse-lint increments
in the small sinking townships of
all the couldn't blue mornings.
and he will keep gathering the
ugly colors of
another side of desire
and he will wear those colors
on a shirt
those colors no one
liked enough
to name.
:thumb265049443:


This month’s wonderful suggesters

As always, we really appreciate everyone who sends in suggestions, so please keep them coming! These are the deviants whose suggestions were used this month:

Dancing-In-Heels, LiliWrites, SadisticIceCream, zebrazebrazebra, neurotype-on-discord, PinkyMcCoversong, HaveTales-WillTell, mirz333, Xanderpus, pixiepot, riparii, Avallynh, julietcaesar, Kaz-D, Euxiom, Solarune, LadyofGaerdon, Magnius159, fyoot, Hello-Please, Vigilo, EmmyIsAZebra, TarienCole, linaket, angelStained, Nichrysalis

:iconbigheartplz:

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