The churches are full of gilded hunger, drunk on blood, praying with hands closed. But the pagans pray with their hands open, So I leave the rotten dogwoods, for the shivering willows, and spread my hands out, breathing so deep that my lungs could fit the entire world inside. The kids won’t be alright, but …
The morning air is so crisp that it crunches between my teeth like glass. Biting and bleeding. But my mouth is so numb from the cold that I can only taste the welling copper. I can’t feel the pain yet. When I exhale the bloody sand is a pale mist that the wind takes away …
And I am cold metal pressed against your skin in winter when the snow takes your fingers and ears and nose and the wolves and doves gather to eat their piece the sky is pale and full the earth swallows the sound And I am that metal again in summer when you lick it and …
Death and me falling into the pale— that inky whiteness fogged with a thousand tongues of flickering smoke. the mist tastes like ash. my fingers are choking and the only sounds I can hear are paper burning And my own unheard pleading. precipice, downfall, silence.
liminal : characterized by being on a boundary or threshold, especially by being transitional or intermediate between two states or situations. I: Northmoor University’s campus had always felt like a strange new world to Sara in the midnight hours, a thousand streetlights lighting every inch of the sprawling maze of roads and old brick buildings in …
you ask me to make more art but the vultures have come and gone. My body has been stripped for parts, any gold or silver stolen for the pawnshops. My head has been rusted for so long that you can’t tell the broken parts from the living Coal and gas fumes choke you with the …
every poem can be about you if you don’t commit to a self. you can stay a shifting pile of neuroses, trapped between a coffee cup and wine glass. the kind of mess which stains. that you can never get out of your skin. cause you never had enough words in yourself, or a clue …
I have never once written a word I’m proud of. and I’ve never once taken a breath of fresh air. Or seen the stars unclouded. Or felt safe in my skin. I’m twenty years old And this country is the color of spilled blood, And the only metaphors I know are bloody, and I can’t …
And in reality you know this to be true: / you don’t feel any closer to this place on this floor / than you did on the second. / and it doesn’t feel like circumstance / or a choice / your wires are too tangled to connect / antennae too bent to transmit / lights …
you can’t hold yourself together anymore. the cracks spread further every day. making yourself marble has made them uncurable. even a helping hand can’t heal absence. there’s no glue for marble, no fix for burnt books. There’s a reason Victory is still headless, and you’re still not happy. nothing stays important, no one saves you, …
My sleep disintegrates into a sore neck and a dark room. I lift my head from my desk with a groggy moan. The screen saver of my laptop stares at me— accusatory and bright. A notebook filled with indecipherable trains of thought and decorated with drool sits on the side. The details come to me …
Your eyes are closed and I look out the window. The sky is drowning in crimson after someone tore out my throat with their teeth. Birds fall from the sky as if flight had just been a fantasy all along. I go to the ocean and watch the fish rise to the surface bellies-up, like …
The blades of red grass stretched over her head. They clung wetly to her as she pressed through them, but when she checked her skin, she found no crimson stains. What little of the sky she could see was black as mold and smeared with blood. The line between day and night was arbitrary. Warm …
these words are just a black box on a falling plane a drowned memory in an ocean plain. lost within a trackless train. stained with blood and promises now slain. lost deep in the shade. and there in that dark place laid, is the only light I ever made. you watch as it begins to …
Once in a while, he runs away. The story ends like this: he comes back. He knows that, but that doesn’t stop his escapes. The story happens because of this: he doesn’t know. His life isn’t bad, lonely, or empty. What life is, not just for him, is heavy. Sometimes he feels the hairline fractures …
Sidorenko’s Writing 