(Poems) september’s stillness
I put the bullet in my mouth (the bullet that is september), and I wait for it to go off. the metal is still warm from august, the taste getting heavier on the way: this is the best time of year, but what’s it worth? there have been better septembers and better years with better …
(Poems) – planet of apathy
this just in: the acceptable quota of school children shot at their desks has been raised for the twentieth time in as many years. this just in: oceans are rising and the rain is acid and the air is poison. this just in: police budget raised for the continuation of federally-acceptable murder of people not …
Eldrich AAA
Nicholas hates driving through the Midwest. The palette of pleasant yellows, blues, and greens is stretched so thin over the cornfields and isolated pockets of forest that it loses all meaning in the monotony. Mountains are towering, forests are mysterious, but the endless fields of rural Ohio? They’re just exhausting. He has to sit ramrod …
(Poems) – astronaut
is that a space helmet or a halo? god’s never been to the moon: he’s lost in the stars. maybe divinity is just forgetting. losing the earth for the sky, selling out to the void. maybe divinity is just apathy. the absence of a reason to look back.
(Poems) – sleep need not apply
I’m tired of closing my eyes, just the same way I’m tired of bitter coffee and my own burning chest. the way I’m tired of losing time on dead end streets and in endless loops. the gps isn’t working and the maps are wrong. my words aren’t good enough and the paper comes double-edged. it …
(Poems) – wet shoes
you can pick up your shoes between two fingers: a peace sign and follow me under the awning where we watch the driveway flood and we don’t complain when the wind blows the rain into our faces. it deserves it. it did so well. our lungs make room for the rain and glow like saints: …
(Poems) – happiness
in the way that it is the most rotten fruit to swallow. in the way that it haunts me at night and kisses me in the morning. in the way that it sinks but I can still touch it so I sink with it. in the way that it hates to be written and loves …
(Poems) – falling action
there’s red in the sunlight, i can taste it in my tongue: heavy and holy— i’m dying in the sunrise with hollowed bones but no wings. I never left my country, barely left my home. the morning burns my eyes, and it’s quiet here, alone.
(Poems) – constellations
the best thing about the stars is that they aren’t watching us too. we drew the lines ourselves. god isn’t going to come down and set our aim true. there aren’t enough fingers to pull blame into a straight line. there isn’t another white man leading the earth on its revolution around the sun. or …
(Poems) – limbo
I’ve lost my way, but still found myself here. It’s a colorless, formless place. It creeps like fog, but it bites like fire. It consumes me like it wants me, like it needs me, and I’m too tired to refuse. I’ve lost the lines between who I was and who I want to be. Blood …
(Poems) – To (you)
I’m not sure who I’m talking to anymore. It’s you, obviously, but I don’t know who you are. God doesn’t know who you are. The best window into a person is through the ribcage, not the eyes. Could you be (future) me? Those who I love (have loved?). A friend I’ll make, or one I’ve …
(Poems) – gray ohio
trapped beneath a rolling gloom, tasting the blooming death. we sit beneath a blinking sun, because hatred grows best in this soil and we relish the bite of winter thorns and blood-soaked billboards. what else grows here but corn and asphalt and steel? what else does heat do but leave?
(Poems) – white dwarf
I’ve lost so much of myself. I reach for hydrogen beneath a trillion twinkling eyes and find nothing. So much of me is gone. The iron and sulfur and magnesium and neon. It’s so much darker now. What’s left— the things I used to love— sit in me as merciless reminders. Accomplishments turned to mockery. …
(Poems) – photon violin
Our room is tangled with light. Orange and yellow threads of gold twist and intertwine, and I run my fingers through them as if they were your hair, catching on knots and worries that you wake up with every day. I will do my best to free them, to allow the strings to vibrate and …
(Poems) – city of specters
I’m seven years old and we’re going home in the dark. driving six hundred miles without a light in the sky. the seat beckons with stiff comfort and you will never feel this peaceful again. columbus ohio is a scattered dream or ruined film. the stars have fallen into the streets like dead gods and …
(Poems) – rotten dogwoods
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 …
(Poems) – april harvest
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 …
(Poems) – metallic
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 …
(Poems) – smog
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 – 2,122 words
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 …
(Poems) – picked clean
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 …
(Poems) – yourself
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 …
(Poems) – twenty – 120 words
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 …
(Poems) – ninth floor – 107 words
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 …
(Poems) – headless Victory – 68 words
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, …
spring ghost – 294 words
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 …
(Poems) – the closing – 106 words
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 …
Heartland – 500 words
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 …
(Poems) – black box – 56 words
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 …
gone sour – 416 words
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 …
(Poems) – a Door inside – 112 words
the Door is as old as me.Sometimes I chip at it,And let a little through before ISlam it shut, and then I haveA story, or a poem, or a shred of somethingBigger, which I discard. i Know there is more behind it.An ocean ofSelf that I can never let through in case itDrowns me and …
gas station lovers – 1012 words
The long and bloody dance ended at that gas station at one in the morning. Anton found Jonas filling his car with shaking hands, dirty clothes, and a week’s worth of stubble turning into a beard. Not that Anton looked any better. He lingered by the ice machine, savoring his last moments with the man. …
(Poems) end credits – 86 words
There’s rolling text when I die— names who helped, names that didn’t. A startling construction of steel and thorns. Why I succeeded, why I failed. All written between the lines of those who built me. The backing music is a mocking drone. The theatre empties before the words stop. No anticipation of a legacy, no …
(Poems) – frostbite – 58 words
A path unhindered: plowed and lit framed in bright darkness. I know the way to go. But a shifting silhouette in the distance: between me and the end A lover? A killer? An end or a beginning? I go forward: trusting with eyes closed— A kiss ringed with copper on my lips. A rose-scented knife …
(Poems) – it dies, unaided – 54 words
The firelight begins to dim. I see it, we see it. The splitting, crackling wood quiets. Sore sorrowful sparks make their last dance. Smoke rises like irretrievable hopes escaping us The charred logs lose their glow. I sweep up the white ash, we sweep up the white ash The fireplace sits dark and still.
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Sidorenko’s Writing 