prompt from intro to fiction/poetry: use a (petrarchan or shakespearean) sonnet to answer a question that is posed in the title.
if bleeding means an open, gushing cut
or fragile, fearful loss beneath my skin;
the heart a tireless pump that works within
when crimson rapids flood my empty gut –
if music means a rush of colored glass;
a dancing needle lodged inside my lungs;
some soul-thing burst upon my stolen tongue;
a flaming match to shape my bones of brass –
my music bleeds in honey, sweet and gold;
a soaring chord of petals, sunlight, air;
some ache, like rhythmic, necessary prayer;
a singing sacrifice, both warm and bold –
i breathe my music in a desperate plea;
it breathes a burning life back into me.
prompt from intro to fiction/poetry: use a line from one of three poems read in class (i used I heard a Fly buzz–when I died by emily dickinson) as the first line of a 3-4 stanza ballad.
with blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz,
the sky begins to crawl.
from the ocean’s dark and salty tears,
a great, terrified call.
and thus, the children of the moon
split the earth at its seams,
the fish a rainbow in the water,
the birds a choral gleam.
these lights are what i see at death
a stillness broken by song.
at night, i yearn to find the horizon,
a gate to right all wrongs.
i sail the sea, following the stars,
their blinking on my palms,
to the planet’s end; a glistening hinge,
the blues a tumultuous calm.
completed: 11/12/18 17:21
prompt from intro to fiction/poetry: write a poem about a painful experience using figurative language that sometimes exalts its subject and sometimes brings it down to earth. (this prompt was only followed to the vaguest degree.)
insp.
yesterday in anatomy class,
we dissected sheep hearts, and i stared
at the red-grey strings of it all, the stillness,
and i took a breath
with my pulsing fingers on my pulsing neck.
my blood pressed against everything
i’ve ever been, about to burst.
today there was a bird in the middle of the street,
trembling and broken, one limp cracked wing,
so i picked it up and laid it under a tree,
was padding it with ripped grass and dead leaves
when it stopped breathing.
i was late to class, eyes red and dull,
blood in the creases of my palms.
sometimes i break things just
to see if i can put them back together,
and maybe that’s the tragedy of it all –
when i cut something miraculous open
to feel how it might be alive,
and i’m left with cold, sharp fragments
of a pretty, small thing
that used to sing.
there’s something in the way she moves,
like gravel on a road that’s sick of being run over,
like a whole world’s strength is trapped in one old jacket,
like she knows better.
(she’s always known better.)
and the skeletons in her closet have never
felt old enough to be made of bones –
they live in the notches of her joints,
and the pockets of her voice,
and the shatters of her chest,
and she thinks maybe
she can’t breathe without them.
there is softness in you–
is what you imagine your father would say
on the days when your scars glare pinker around the edges
and your blood churns like a forest fire
raging against your skin.
there is softness in
the too-long sleeves of your favorite shirt,
the scraggle of your bottom teeth,
and how you hold your sister
like you know exactly where she hurts.
softness in
the way you are so honest sometimes
that you smile with your lips pressed together
to keep your soul from spilling out,
and softness in
the way you are still a little girl
who misses her dad,
and softness in
the way you try
to be happy.
there is softness in you–
the stars sing.
you are loved,
you are loved,
you are loved.
one day we will wake,
our fingers trembling with divinity,
our stomachs fluttering on silver wings,
a clean outline of what we used to be
seared into mere pillowcases.
we are the devils with elastic lungs
and blazing ribcages,
we are the angels with bulletproof shoulder blades,
sharp diamond haloes tucked under our skin,
we are power, we are vitality, we are
life.
skin once so soft, bones once so
fragile, cardboard nymphs
bolstered with hellfire.
with hearts that know no beat
and lungs that know no air,
we are eternal.
this is the obsidian that gives us infinitude,
this is the gold that makes us holy,
this is the blood
of the gods.
It seems we will never have enough glue to hold ourselves together.
At the end of the day the sun will always set like clockwork, but even bathed in the corals and mauves of an hour hand we still find ourselves breathing like puppets of bone and freckled rag dolls. Our hands cradle our ribcages together but what will keep our hands intact?
We walk along the horizon but only because we might burn before we learn to fly, and the moon laughs as she pushes the tide and we keep walking because we never know quite how to float in her oceans.
But we grow taller still, wire models of fractures and stinging eyes, we paint our broken nails like they could be museum exhibits. (Maybe they would be, in another universe.) Our blood stains deeper than bone and we taste it as often as we taste each other’s lips, as often as that hour hand seems to snap and as often as someone throws a wish to the waves without knowing they’ll never get an answer.
It seems we will never have enough glue to hold ourselves together, but we keep searching anyway.
You have dreams. Or nightmares, maybe, but at this point you’ve lost the distinction.
Your tears are hot when you think her shadow is beside you in bed, but every morning you slam what you remember into blank pages with the obsessive tip of a pencil all the same, and you miss her even though you know she would never miss you. Does she miss you? You almost snap the lead.
In your dreams, she tugs on your hand to pull you into the ocean, and in your dreams the sand sinks between your toes but you don’t mind. She kisses your name into your hair and she scrubs the sand off your elbows, and the salt on your split lip is nothing compared to the seaweed tangled between your ankles and hers, nothing compared to the foam mustache she draws onto your lip with a tinkling laugh.
In your dreams, you’re close enough to count the freckles on her nose, and she leans into your neck when you’re reading, and she hands you her sunglasses when you say you don’t need them. You dance when nobody’s around and she loves you like she loves daisies, like she loves the shade of pale yellow you painted her kitchen with, like she loves ice cream on a summer day and the way her brother rests his hand on the steering wheel.
In your dreams, she didn’t throw you away.
(The page rips but she wouldn’t mind. Neither do you.)
dreams of clean teeth (i can tell that you’re tired)
In which Carmilla and Meg help each other in more ways than Meg can count.
Completed: 12/1/15 8:32
A/N: The March Family Letters x Carmilla crossover. This is for @sharonbelle, who is basically forcing all of her followers to watch The March Family Letters, which...I don’t blame her.
{400 lux, lorde}
Carmilla Karnstein is quite possibly the sloppiest person you have ever met.
And yes, you know she was born 300 years ago and you don’t (always) blame her for being unbearably apathetic at times, but there is no one in this universe who can give you a good enough excuse for being as unapologetically gross as she is. Who would ever let their bathroom become that disgusting?
But there are little (sometimes absolutely minuscule) parts of her that remind you of each of your sisters, and the fact that she doesn’t really care about anything helps you unwind a lot of the time, and sometimes she is the only one who seems to understand you for who you are beneath the work-obsessed matriarch with a stick up her ass. Your timetables make it obvious that you work faster when she’s in the room, chewing on the straw of that probably revoltingly dirty sippy cup and silently flipping through a book she’s read a thousand times. When you think about it, it’s nice having someone in your life who isn’t your family and who isn’t Joan who still makes you better. You think this is probably a very, very good thing.
(All thanks to Joan, of course. Joan is the reason you let other people help you in the first place. You should tell her that sometime.)
When everyone else goes out to film some vlog (and Jo even manages to drag Beth along, although that’s not very surprising at this point), the two of you are left in the quiet peace of the house. It’s times like this when you’re settled on the couch doing work that she decides to poke fun at you for engineering, and you don’t hesitate to cock your eyebrow and take a philosophy jab right back at her. You almost snort at the way she halfheartedly scrunches up her nose in response and hands you a cup of coffee exactly how you like it before settling on the floor with her back against the couch right beside you.
Every once in a while you’ll look over your papers to peek at what she’s reading, and every time you do, there are notes scrawled all across the page, circling and underlining and crossing out. You didn’t always put as much effort into your English classes as math and science, but you’re pretty sure Mr. Wilson from ninth grade would probably frame every page of that book if he could.
The more you think about it though, the more it makes you want to cry, because she’s basically always reading nihilism, and maybe she hasn’t had the best life but nobody should feel that perpetually and deeply sad. You didn’t think it was possible to have walls higher and stronger than yours until you met her, but Laura is sunshine in a smile and she is breaking down those walls just like Joan broke down yours, and sometimes it really sinks in how lucky you are to see her laugh like she is still pure.
(You wish you could bottle up that laugh to give to her on the bad days, but instead you ruffle her hair after lunch when she’s just waking up and you give her some of your favorite chocolates and you listen to her stories when she can’t stop her ribs from aching, and it doesn’t make logical sense but you really believe she is still young enough for you to take care of her.)
And when everybody goes on a beach trip together, Carmilla tries to shield herself from the sun but an hour into swimming you look up and she’s already drained enough to curl up on the towel and sleep. She fights to stay awake to watch the sunset with everyone, but a few minutes later she knocks out again with a smile on her face, and no one else had the foresight to get the sand off of them so you volunteer to give her a piggyback ride to the building.
Her head rests solidly on your shoulder and her little breaths are hitting your neck, and with the exploding oranges and pinks across the sky, you feel like you can tell her that everything will be okay. She smells like gravel by a waterfall and morning dew, and you think sometimes she just needs an older sister like you to sing her to sleep.
In which Mircalla meets a stranger of sweet smiles and a tongue of poison.
Completed: 11/10/15 10:55
Somehow, you have not died yet.
When you open your eyes, there is darkness and the sting of metal bars deep in your lungs, and you can hear remnants of your brother’s cries so clearly that you can almost see him.
Mud is smeared on your lips and your hair falls from your shoulders in chunks, and blood thrums behind your eyelids but you think it is far too silent for your heart to be beating.
A dead man’s stench masks the tang of iron from three feet away and your jaw drops in a silent scream, and nobody is coming to save you from wherever you are and somebody is gasping and stumbling and crying (is it you is it you is it you), and you pray for help.
Suddenly a woman appears like something holy, with a silk voice and a touch like tulips, and she runs her cold, cold hands across your cheekbone and through your hair, but you do not dwell on how her skin is just as frigid as yours. Your vision blurs and her eyes could turn your tears to crystals, but you do not dwell on how her teeth are stained as red as yours.
“Please don’t leave me here,” you gasp, and dirt falls past your tongue but you’ve forgotten how to choke.
“My child, I would never,” and she breathes life into you like you are a gem.
She saw him for the first time like he was a meteor crashing through the sky and burning right in front of her. It was that evening when she woke from humanity and found herself floating through waves of stagnation, where hearts do not beat and skin does not flush, where the winds hold no melody and the stars only give off smoke, and she thought she was alone.
But she met Death and he growled, “You escaped,” and she saw the way his fingers twitched and his lips snarled but she did not see any menace, she saw fear and exhaustion and guilt and she fell in love.
But Death was leaving and when she looked behind her she saw strangers approaching with, “Welcome back,” painting their teeth, and she ran back and she hugged Death, cried into the fabric of his cloak, “Please take me with you.” Please.
He turned away.
And so she fell into the arms of a new family and soon blood was like a stain she did not want to clean, and every time she tasted the iron of mortality she would see him. She would stand above a corpse like it was an altar, and he would see her bared teeth and her white knuckles but he never saw any vengeance, he saw regret and emptiness and insecurity and he fell in love.
And when she felt lost, or small, or gone, Death would push her hair behind her ears and he would hum, “Oh darling, there is poetry buried in your bones, somewhere.”
And as she burned away, she put her head on Death’s shoulder and he kissed her hair, and her eyes filled with ashes and she smiled.
In which it’s been centuries since Mircalla lost her father, and sometimes Carmilla hurts the way she used to.
Completed: 10/27/15 10:52
A/N: This is partly a personal piece and partly a fanfiction, so I took some liberty with Carmilla’s past and historical context.
You lose yourself lighting a fire, like you are breaking the world apart just to see if you can put it back together, and the last petal falls off a flower with a whisper of, “He loves me not,” and sometimes digging your fingers into the dent in your desk is not enough to save you.
He used to hold you against his chest when you cried and he used to guide you through the waves when you felt like drowning and he used to fall asleep to the sound of your piano, but not anymore.
He told you your hair was black like mystery, like a curtain hiding beauty, and now other people run their hands along your scalp like you are something holy but not in the right way, not with the holiness that he kissed your forehead with. You miss him like your heart cannot beat as hard without his hand around yours, and you do not remember the exact crook of his nose anymore but you pretend that loss is normal, bearable.
You cannot remember his eyes and you curse yourself, wonder why. They were your favorite things to look at, they were the last things you saw before you lost, before you broke, before you burned in the arms of another who claimed to love you more than he did. Loss is infinite and the shade of brown his eyes reflected into yours will never stop spiraling away from you, into the embrace of oblivion.
(He would have said he loved you the most, and you would have believed him. But not anymore, you are a mess he cannot kiss clean and you do not deserve him anymore.)
There was blood sprawled across your face like it was war paint and you could not remember what he meant when he said, “You are an angel,” and your hands had almost finished sowing seeds of destruction when you realized that he wouldn’t love you like this.
Completed: 10/9/15 15:56
A/N: A minific where I conveniently ignore the Carm, Laura, and LaF scene in 2x36.
The school is starting to collapse when you throw a catatonic Laura over your shoulder, and you don’t slow down until you make it into the library.
LaFontaine is a heaving mess behind you, resting their hands on their knees when you finally stop.
“Not needing to breathe comes in handy, doesn’t it?” they pant. You don’t bother answering, instead hoisting Laura off your shoulder and gently setting her on the ground.
She is still entirely expressionless, staring down at your feet, so you cup both of her cheeks with your hands. She lifts her eyes like they’re the heaviest things in the world, and you lean into her and murmur, “We’ll be okay, yeah?”
She gives an imperceptible nod and you know that’s all she’s going to give you for a while, so you kiss her forehead before you can convince yourself not to, and walk over to where LaFontaine is poking around for something. You don’t think you want to ask.
“Here’s the camera,” you say, and they just stare at your hand. “Can you see if you can set up some sort of connection?”
You look behind your shoulder to see Laura slowly sitting down on the ground. Grimacing, you add, “For her.”
Without a word, LaF takes the camera out of your hand and turns around to pull at some cables. You grab a blanket off a nearby couch before the cushions manage to snap at your fingers, and walk over to where Laura is huddled alone.
“LaF is setting up a new connection so we might be able to broadcast something later, okay?” You wrap the blanket around her shoulders before sitting down a few inches away to give her space. She doesn’t reply, but you weren’t expecting her to.
You let your head fall back and close your eyes, heaving a big sigh. It’s been a long day.
When you hear the jangle of silver, you open your eyes again to Laura carefully, shakily fiddling with the collar around your neck. You almost catch your breath, almost remember Vordenberg yanking on chains, dragging you to an execution you would have welcomed if it was anywhere but in front of Laura, anywhere but with the young girl the world was too cruel to.
But Laura’s touch is careful as she tugs on the strap, so you settle for just looking at her and trying not to cry when you see the bags under her eyes, the gash across her forehead, the quivering of her pupils.
Her eyes start filling with tears when she can’t get the buckle undone, and you know exactly how it feels to be so broken that the littlest things are so goddamn frustrating, and you don’t even want to try not to hate everything that has done this to her.
As gently as you can, you bring your hands up to grab hers and she stops moving, looking warily at you.
“I’ve got it,” you whisper, setting her hands in her lap and taking off the collar yourself. The sounds of metal and worn leather slapping against each other fill the distance between the two of you until the collar drops to the ground.
You watch quietly as Laura’s eyes lift once again to your neck, probably noticing the bruises and small rash forming. Her hand is trembling when she runs her fingers along your skin with a touch so light you can barely feel it.
“I’m sorry,” she chokes out, and her hand falls to your shoulder as she leans into your chest, “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m so, so sorry.”
Before you can stop it, you thread one hand through her hair and wrap the other one around her waist, pulling her into you and rocking her back and forth.
"You’re okay, cupcake,” you say into her ear, over and over and over again like saying it more will make it true, because it’s not true, because nothing is okay but you still feel like she belongs in your arms and you belong in hers.
“I just wanted to fix it,” she mumbles into your jacket, and you press your lips to her hair.
You stay like that for a long time, and nothing is fixed but you think the two of you might be getting there.
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