I thought I could absorb you into me and make you stay there, breathing through my teeth and smiling out my eyes like you somehow belonged. I wanted to dip my fingers through your flesh and feel the braille marks along your brain, all your essence like a silver dollar, cool against my palm.
It’ll fit perfectly.
But I didn’t understand –I couldn’t project my synapses onto any grasp of the ocean you encompassed. And I couldn’t feel the skin you were stretching and dissolving salty-sweet into the bream. I didn’t think you could love me back.
But I saw when your sea-glass eyes melted, dripping molten liquid onto earth, where it lay like a puddle of grace. I saw my reflection against the indigo, and I wept when I realized all the mud was washed away -if only for that instant, in that solitary ray of light where I was suspended in time like a dust mote in a copper strand of universe. I floated, silver as the stars and white as death, my hair flickering like shadows behind me. I became beautiful.
Just
like
you.
So I quit believing that you would leave me curdled on the sand like some pitiful, festering lump of faux-sliver scales and defective gills. I quit believing you would become only ephemeral traces of blue, buried in my hollowed bones beneath layers of myself I’m afraid to peel off and discard. I knew, somehow, that you could take every one of my phoenix feathers, stripping plume after plume from the meat around my ribs and inscribe poems on every stretch of pale skin you find, staining the parchment made up of my cells with their own blood. You could take away my oxygen and snap what's left of my skeleton wings and your voice could still induce me to fly, like you'd paper clipped wire from the moon to my shoulder blades. I’d still fucking love you. And that’s all I ever needed to be.
I looked in your eyes as they drained ink stains onto your lashes, the taut bruises around the empty white of your iris like all the writers in the world working backwards. I watched you take the quivering red of my heart in your fingers, wisping scars with your handprints and remolding it into ridges like crippled waves over the pumping, the waning strength of it. You called me beautiful, the storm inside me limping as you replaced it like a sigh of relief to the bloodshot blankness of my chest. It shuddered and then continued singing with a cracked voice, the ocean too large for its throat, the salt scraping all the edges. It was broken, and all-whole and all-glory. And the notes proliferated, dropped out of me like vomit or echoes winding through a maze of dehydrated shell, pounding against your ear while you smiled.
I fell.
and the world looked better lopsided.
And I can feel you,
searing through my veins,
straining them like ropes against
my clouded skin and
I can feel you
burning in my chest.
I can feel you burning.
A contest entry
- she only sleeps when it's raining . by she still smiles x.
2400 points, ends November 27, 48 entries
• next poem in this contest, • Add to finalists list, or remove from contest - Silver dollars and empty lungs (prewrites) by Writing0Freedom.
600 points, ends December 1, 237 entries
• next poem in this contest, • Add to finalists list, or remove from contest
Comments
1 - 6 of 6
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I thought I could absorb you into me and make you stay there, breathing through my teeth and smiling out my eyes like you somehow belonged. I wanted to dip my fingers through your flesh and feel the braille marks along your brain, all your essence like a silver dollar, cool against my palm.
- wow, this is amazing.
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Thank you =]
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I thought I could absorb you into me and make you stay there, breathing through my teeth and smiling out my eyes like you somehow belonged. I wanted to dip my fingers through your flesh and feel the braille marks along your brain, all your essence like a silver dollar, cool against my palm.
- really love the use of silve dollar, and braille, and just the way it all flows.
The second stanza, read as off kilter to me.
And I couldn’t feel the skin you were stretching and dissolving salty-sweet into bream frosted ski
- i thought the synapses, salty sweet, and bream frosted all in the same stanza was too much, it just seemed to not flow together very well
sea-glass eyes- i was really glad someone picked that up and used it. I wanted someone to use sea glass to describe eyes and you did stunningly -
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I tried to fix the too-much-alliteration problem... 'sit okay now?
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I am bookmarking this.
Like, I don't even know what else to say except this was definitely one of the most powerful pieces of poetry I have ever read, it's one of my favorites by you, and I'm so glad you decided to enter this poem into my contest
All of your imagery and emotion was simply overwhelming and articulate..the ending was just amazing as well.
I loved the title, too
thanks so much for entering and best of luck;
♥
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Thanks! I really really appreciate it.
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