02:37am 22nd July - depart from London by commercial jet, business class.
00:53am 22nd July - arrive in New York an acceptable 7 minutes behind schedule.
Slaying an archangel is hard work. It takes a great deal of study, picking your mark, separating fact from legend, learning your target's tells and vulnerabilities. Even if you succeed, and when I tore Gabriel's crystal heart from his open chest I became one of the precious few who have, there is still the matter of retribution. Angels never forget the death of one of their own, and a legion of these creatures now wait to descend and deliver their vengeance. My only sanctuary is the night.
Spring
She rusts the world green,
garlanding her hair
with flowers and sunrise.
At first, they clink
waxy tulip cups and gossip
over the corn tassels' latest
monarch fashions. They pallet hay
into sleepover mattresses and braid rain
through each other's plaited
cattails. But though her palms
toast eggs from hens, her
dream-clear eyes flint ice, and the
green reflecting from manicured lawns
will never match her envy. She
scorches her enemy from memory.
Summer
She strokes sun-kissed knuckles
across reddened scalps, skirt
rustling with fairy fire.
She casts a flippant glance
over her shoulder, ignoring
for as long as she can the
lady in red t
when he asked me how i wanted him to build the house,
i answered him truthfully.
i said i wanted the pillars to be made
of pages from every book ever written,
curled in on themselves until
they could hold a roman arch.
pour words, strong and weak, into
the earth instead of cement-
let it be flexible to adapt
to pressure.
build the walls from the ground up
through prose supporting the bricks
layered by memories forged
along the path we took
to arrive at eden.
tilt poems into pyramids above
our heads, ceilings just high enough
to be within earshot of every
laugh we'll ever make.
empty emotions into a template
of a window and slide it i
You know what I miss?
The simple days
of aimless buses and trains,
like magic carpets
that helped us to escape,
if only for a little while.
I miss the endless walks
that led to hours of
strip mall shenanigans--
spinning in desk chairs,
petting that little blind kitten,
and reading anything
from cheesy joke books
to Frost's melancholic verse.
I miss cheap deli lunches,
discounted coffee house milkshakes, and
midnight conversations on the swings
at your old elementary school,
with the moon so bright that
I could see your T-shirt.
Remember that time when, hot chocolate in hand,
we followed the sound
of live fiesta music
sailing on the hollow
i hear my grandfather breaking shore on D-Day,
the muffled black and white German blaring
on the History Channel. the memories etched
in his face fading as the rabid fear, break-neck
hug, anything, to hold on.
and his fear seeps into my clothes, my spine,
lingers there for days.
A Turning Point in the Clockwork War by Ysabetwordsmith, literature
Literature
A Turning Point in the Clockwork War
A war of attrition
depends on supply and drawdown,
how much you have and how much you use up.
With personnel, the balance concerns
the influx of recruitment versus
the outflow of casualties, deserters, invalids.
There is only so much loss
that a fighting force can sustain
and still fight.
Pilot Claude Archer was the first
to challenge his invalid discharge.
"I don't need legs to fly," he said,
patting the healed stumps of his thighs.
"My Osprey runs on elbow grease."
The members of the discharge board
paused and looked at each other.
What he said was true.
The Osprey-class fighter jets
relied on hand controls,
and a sharp eye and iron n
but i hold my hands out, ad infinitum by chromeantennae, literature
Literature
but i hold my hands out, ad infinitum
polysemous kneels and jaded,
i curl ambiguity against
the collapsing walls of
ambigram.
letters folded into wings
and gone again.
(maybe they're fluttering,
gliding, soaring, drifting (away))
i cannot fly and
nor can you.
and my voice is clawed
into the branch where i was born
and i am not st. vincent;
i cannot birth in reverse.
no matter how much
i try to carve the words
out from my jawed
insides
out.
but this love and sadness
is baroque, climactic
and dramatic.
i look for you
in the attic of my mouth
and the basement of my hands--
i hear you in the corner
of this dystopian (uni)verse
and know better than to reach
for you now,
the room
the letter that never arrived by sunshinegypsy, literature
Literature
the letter that never arrived
as if grief had never hollowed out my heart,
caverns echoing with the memory of a laugh,
as if despair had never stolen my voice
until love whispered in my ear
and I knew what mattered,
to speak
of knowing: there are things
you will decide to protect yourself from,
pain
you must never relive,
and some you must live
and live again,
no matter the cost