Poetry Owl

[prettylittledrafts]

dormant

still it lives

something buried deep

beneath the leaf fall of seasons

stirs

a root

remembering water

the old sorrow

unfurls its pale bloom

threading itself

through the dark soil of the body

until its bitter flower

opens in the throat

and every breath

carries its pollen deeper

the years fold closed

and all the grief

I thought the earth had taken

rises singing

[teetheandflower]

Meadowlands, sacrosanct—

Meadowlands, sacrosanct—

peeled back in the eyes of believers

revealing the bones beneath,

ash-white and clustered like a comb,

tasting the air anew

and shuddering in the naked light.

Slaked thirst.

Bitter branches.

Hollow apocrypha.

Above the meadows gleam.

[poetofthelilacsea]

headlines

I Tested Five Ways to Shuck Corn, and Police Stepped Up Security in Atlanta as a 66-foot asteroid exploded in Russia. The Evidence is Still Catching up, But, Who's Voting? We all Cheered as we die together. If we die, Disney's Live-Action Remake Dies at the Box Office. If we die, According to Gardening Pros, it could change the search for life. I Tried Thirteen Brands of Canned Biscuits- and If a star explodes close to Earth, this is what happens.

[poetofthelilacsea]

headlines

I Tested Five Ways to Shuck Corn, and Police Stepped Up Security in Atlanta as a 66-foot asteroid exploded in Russia. The Evidence is Still Catching up, But, Who's Voting? We all Cheered as we die together. If we die, Disney's Live-Action Remake Dies at the Box Office. If we die, According to Gardening Pros, it could change the search for life. I Tried Thirteen Brands of Canned Biscuits- and If a star explodes close to Earth, this is what happens.

[pretty-little-nightmare-xx]

The world belongs to the definitive. It belongs to the dawn that breaks completely and the night that falls with absolution. But I have always inhabited the fragile in-between, where nothing truly starts and nothing truly ends.

I’ve spent a lifetime standing at the thresholds of rooms I was never meant to enter, watching the warmth of a fire I was never meant to feel.

Maybe I'm simply a prologue to chapters that belonged to someone else, the blank page at the front of the book, the one you turn without a thought. Maybe I was never meant to have a story. If life is measured by its monuments, then mine is a graveyard of intentions.

[letters-to-dreamers]

Shadow of my dreams

Cover me gently with your hand

Or have no care at all

But don’t go away

Bring me company instead

Chill my mind until it is numb

Frighten me until peace comes

But don’t go away

Hide in cluttered corners

With your presence still felt

Make yourself an observer of pain

But don’t go away

Be an endless darkness

A vast void of light

Swallow the sunshine

But don’t go away

[bluesandbarebones]

Some things I can't let go

Though I have thrown away the blanket of words, saved snippets  line the cedar chest of memory. I can evoke only shadowed moments now, flashes of face, a hand, the far-off sound of a voice caught in the corner of an empty room. There is nothing I can’t remember and nothing I can recall; a paradox that leaves its cold imprint upon this page, a continual struggle between writer and ludicrous muse. 

[pocochon]

Rescue Me

I hid all the mirrors, and now I can't remember my face.

It's like the dark side of the moon, that can only be seen from outer space.

The last time you saw me, I was longing for your embrace.

Now I am just a shadow that you remember less and less.

I want someone to pick me, heal me, get me out of this mess.

To awaken the parts of me I feel are already dead

© Pocochon

[words-and-whispers]

looks like glass

suspended in animation

no deviation

nothing for the eye to take in but the translucent edges

I can hear the sound

feel the heat against my skin

I know it weaves an illusion to defy optics

to touch is to destroy

to taint the beauty

that thrives inside insignificance

[haikkun]

Sliver

You can see the deck your dad built, nesting,

From space

I walked past the classroom where you built birdhouses

And I bet they’re still wherever they’re perched, too

Love like that

Doesn’t leave this earth soon

It takes a lot of emotional erosion

More than weathering of plank board, acid rain,

Or even fire’s renovation

I kick myself

I should’ve jumped from the car

And pleaded the woman

We could’ve walked down the steps that he made

We could have earned

A splinter

Sure, something to fester

But even that gets pined for sometimes

In the missing of another

Some souvenir to prove he keeps

Needling into your life

Sliver decks share hive mind abilities

I project these things

I don’t understand fully

I only want traces in me, too

____________________________________

Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

[birchbritches]

Lest Remembering Does its Summoning

a dozen years hucked like the plucking grackles would be enough to pick them clean and we'd never run into our own mess again, so we patch them in, pack our backstory to the gills with nonspecific birds, then crows next, et cetera and so on, have a whole clean-up crew committed to carrion and how much lighter flight'll be once the luggage is eaten up and its indigestible infrastructure succumbs to lighter-fluid's subsequent combustion and every ounce of what we were has worked itself to death and the necessary afters and the clattering leftovers clacked together until they remembered what it was to be dust, a premise which is maybe spurious but persists so long as our ghosts don't recorporealize which we realize is not unlikely, which we recognize we may recognize in time, the run-in and eye-contact with which will be awful and call up a lot of unwanted self we may need to deal with again so we keep the eating creatures and combustibles on retainer, do our best not to remember why lest remembering does its summoning

[shamanfox]

The pilgrimage began with maps folded inside questions.

Mountains were climbed. Scriptures worn soft beneath searching fingers. Teachers gathered like fireflies in the dusk, each offering another lantern for a road that always seemed to bend beyond the next horizon.

Seasons ripened and fell away. Identities cracked like old bark. Every certainty dissolved into wider skies until even the one who sought became transparent.

Then, without trumpet or revelation, the search simply grew too weary to continue.

A raven called.

Wind combed through tall grass.

Sunlight spilled across an ordinary stone.

There, in the naked intimacy of what had never been absent, recognition bloomed.

The traveler had never crossed a single distance.

The path, the longing, the world, and the one who had chased the Divine through a thousand names were the Divine all along, delighting in the exquisite disguise of forgetting, only to awaken to its own boundless face reflected in every leaf, every breath, every pair of eyes.

[tearinmyside]

so much tilling...

fallow seasons

a faked death, this dormant, shallow breath under tree bark, in the tangle of roots and grubs. something lies in hibernation, extended coma to preserve the last shreds of pinked organs. a winter state in the fallout, blue and green in a capsule, your scorched soil weariness. harvest hides from your achy fingers, dried riverbeds and a sandpaper tongue in this arid topography.

-kab

[traveledlight]

A Prayer Carved in Skin

I. @traveledlight

Would you still cut your hand

and bind your blood to mine—

just to feel a little closer?

Would you taste the iron

on your lips,

call it devotion,

let it linger like fire in your veins?

Would you wear it—

a symbol carved in skin—

sacred and permanent?

Would you mark me

while you held me,

confusing love with permanence,

intensity with immortality?

Tell me—

if I disappeared,

would you follow?

Would you lose yourself

in promises too heavy to keep,

all in the name of a feeling

you couldn’t survive without?

Or am I the only one left

who would go that far,

who would descend into darkness

just to see you again?

II. @pretty-little-nightmare-xx

I’d take the blade without fear,

To taste the salt and crimson wine.

I’ll whisper secrets in your ear,

Your beating pulse matched to mine,

I’d press the steel against my wrist,

To taste the copper honey of our soul.

In every drop, a truth you missed,

You are the part that makes me whole.

Every mark is like a shrine,

A heavy cross I choose to bear.

I am your shadow, you are mine,

A holy, silent prayer.

If you should vanish in the night,

To the darkness where the spirits go,

I’d forfeit every spark of light,

To find you in the depths below.

If you should slip beneath the tide,

I’d drown within the blackest sea.

With every shadow as my guide,

I’ll hunt the ghost of you and me.

You are not lost or left alone,

In depths where even angels fear.

I’d turn my heart to heavy stone,

Just to keep you ever near.

[tinydancerinyourhead]

sundered

from a mothers womb

emerged an angry thing

jaw clenched, soundless

a boy with no expression

one part of a whole, a girl

his less connected half

attached to another world

unwilling to compromise

the mother felt devastated

but accepted the separation

withheld a life never realized

and lived amongst absence

the boy never outgrew his

blank stare, tight teeth

mute tendencies

he would wind his fists

in his need to create chaos

for two

the mother scrutinized

habitually, watched deeply

the boy under glass

her animal with two heads

looking for someone familiar

only to be left disappointed

in the face peering back

the mother could not hide her

wishful thinking

the boy could not hide his rage

in his moments of solitude

the boy sat in yellow daylight

pondering the feeling

of something unaccounted for

every now and then

he twisted his neck around

hoping to catch a glimpse

of a second shadow

hiding behind him

[drearydaffodil]

At the pinnacle, a diamond sky

Silence is a secret—

The exquisite velvet of

A millon petals

I am wonder, woven

Bare feet barely

Touching ground

The willows whisper

There is no weeping

The arms of night

Are gentle here

In the lap of the gods

[bellaj1977]

Ethereal heavens Cumulus suspension Wings purely arched Concealed hearts Eclipse the universe Curious in traversing stars Cradling my inner zest Enclosed beneath my breast Hearkened by a melodious murmur Volume of a pixie whisper Infinitesimal oracle Ratifying galaxies In her sing-song poise Broadcasting my sentiment Revealing my angelic fervor Conveyed into stained glass dreams Floating legacies of ardor Lulled between the rings of Saturn Hovering next to the afterglow Emanating from your golden halo Radiant remembrance Removes the fog of amnesia Knowing looks exchanged from afar Captivate deliverance Lounging on the precipice Across the starlit vividness Exposing bashful blushes Through nebula revival Ages of cherished armour Held in a suspended burst Blooming through cracks, curves Upending known physics Smiles embrace the brilliance Love in its reticent infinite Interlaces two celestial embodiments In a unison long transcribed Into the clouds gracing our skies Angels rejoice in the destined time Reveling in the incandescent Passionate flames permanently inscribe Underneath the plexus of the Milky Way We will frolic till the moons suspire Intertwining our pent up desires Languishing in a embrace of ever after

Jessica Bahr