Prose Riot!

Here we will feature prose pieces. Staff: reinventing-wednesday, pomegranatepithos, and street-heart-posts. Use the tag #proseriot for regular prose pieces. Check out our prompts too and use the tag proseriotprompts. We also accept submissions.

[drearydaffodil]

Stroke your own cheek, use that sweet voice you save for people you love on you. Kiss a mirror, lay in warm water, use the good bubble bath. Light the candles and the fairy lights. Stretch. Drink tea or coffee or cocoa, simply find something to keep your hands warm. Read or draw or color. Become the thing that keeps you full at night. Watch sunsets, wear fuzzy sweatshirts. Be the softness you want to see in the world.

[beforeyearning]

[sailormatrixe]

‘if a poem was the medicine’

—- I’m tipsy and I want pink bedsheets and braces and severance payments again. gums always bleeding, sweating through my skin. the fever at my core needs to be extinguished. and I need to be adopted. my memories need a new ram. my horns need to grow in. but I’m just pillow defenseless, my nails always bitten down, jagged. my scars still itching. permanent nerve damage. my words need to vomit up and out from my esophagus. but I just keep swallowing them in. I need the world to end like it did in 2012. a new armageddon. I need cake with my feelings. to find that moment when your gaze turned away, when I lost control of the plot, and my soaking wet sheets turned themselves into poetry.

[sailormatrixe]

‘for all of these mkultra kids’

—- to dress up this bedroom voice and kiss my own scar tissue, again and again. to taste the blood through another feeling of loneliness. all of these vein-throbbing pulses. this body like a quetiapine kid playing with pain. no sleep, no hunger, just epiphanies down the drain. just one more dosage upper. just one more homage to homeostasis. just another vision coming from within the brain, blinding lights in the retinas. and what is my biology besides a nucleus full of delusions? just another biopsy of god. this perpetual sickness that lingers in the dna like a broken helix. like something that forever needs to be fixed. a long game. a someone that wasn’t built to stay sane.

[elegiesuponyourgravestone]

photo retreived from: https://pin.it/1S8Z4IcbC credit to the rightful artist!

the sea was a wound, and today i stood at its edge, tossing my heart in pieces to the birds that circled overhead, as if they could carry it somewhere safer than my own chest. i thought it might feel lighter this way, letting my grief grow wings and vanish into the blue. i stared at the horizon as if daring it to swallow me whole, to end this aching. i watched the birds scatter. small fragments of me spiraling outward, never to return. and how i wish it worked that way. how i wish that every time you give something to the wind, it takes all of you with it, until there is nothing left to ache, nothing left to disentangle.

— jv orongan, "so that for once, i could feel weightless." postscript: i'm also on facebook, Elegies upon your Gravestone!

[nanastupidwords]

We danced on uncertainty, laughed at fate. But destiny made us swallow our teeth.

The train will soon depart from the station, the ticket is slicing my palm, and you no longer want to show me your iris. The ice cream of the big city has melted and sticks to my fingers. The pink couches have turned grey. Tonight, you’ll laugh with me, one last time. You’ll tell me again that you want me to go as far away as possible. But this time, your eyes won’t be playfull, they’ll be pleading. My throat will burn too, you know it just as well, but I’ll smile back trying to hide it. I never knew how to hide anything from you. I’ll tuck my fear and doubts behind my back, like a white rabbit. Trying to soak up the sorrow you couldn’t escape.

The clock has completed its turn. Our hopes have expired. We tried to forget it, to play with it. But in the end, it had the last laugh.

[thefoxsquill]

A tree between fall and winter—orange and yellow still cover my arms, but the ground has more of me than my branches do.

My leaves shed to enter a silent stasis of baring my core to remember what I'm made of. Yet, I wonder if the trees ever get nervous before the last leaf lets go. With no cover, only bark and marrow exposed to the elements. Knowing spring will still ask me to begin again.

My own pulse moves forward, stumbling into new soil. It feels like a whisper caught in my throat. As the wind carries away what no longer clings, I hope to find comfort in the skin I carry, in the thoughts that spiral but still belong to me.

The answer may arrive through bare branches—in the choice of moving when I want to hide or staying when I want to run.

~ @thefoxsquill

[en-la-casademiamor-deactivated2]

Above the water

These are days of little rain and the trees sadly wilt. These are the days of too much heat and rising ridiculous costs. Summer is ending, but price gouging never does. The atmospheric pressure will persist in through fall, like everything else, if only to further confuse things.

Soon enough, there will be football games to go to. Band competitions. Pseudo normalcy in times of Arkham Asylum. I’ve already begun to inflect my surroundings with jangling skeletons. Witches. Moss from the yard. One must seek joy and burn in it. With it.

Inevitably, the neon colorful moods of teenagers will collide with the mounting stressors of school, therefore, engulfing my every moment: from sunrise past sunset. I will try to be zen. A needle to a compass. Pillars to stand over ruins.

As I go, day in day out, I will remain conscious that everywhere around me, like arrows pointing inward are trails of gunpowder that have been laid and will be lit. More of our people will scatter, be tormented, and at some point, this will cause for my immediate world to teeter. I will pray and search for water, for that one element that is as, if not more powerful than fire. More powerful than hate.

So much looks to be something like mathematics—but it’s just evil buffoonery. Evil lunacy. It’s really the same old game. It’s just that more eyes have seen its existence.

There is nothing to do right now, but to remain calm. Strategic. To be like the old woman in The Night of the Hunter, who sits on her porch, keeping tune, verse, rhythm of faith and righteousness, with and by the creaking of a rocking chair that bevel’s away the long hours of an anticipatory dark night.

[bibboems]

we greet each other in the night as old acquaintances often do, with a nod, a shared understanding of why we’re both here. the light from the street lamps outside penetrate through the blinds, dimly lighting my bedroom.

the ghosts that haunt me in the middle of the night and i, sat on the edge of my bed, together entwined in memories of old. i sigh.

it’s midnight again.

i assume they would get bored of the same routine at some point; depriving me of sleep as we sit and recount every misstep, mistake made, word said. my father used to say, ’bullies only taunt you for your reaction’ - but when i am my own worst enemy, who’s side am i fighting for?

it’s midnight again.

the clock has struck twelve, a time i am most familiar with. i turn to face the mirrored door on my wardrobe - to confront the spectres face to face so i can have a chance at sleeping - only for their reflections to disappear as quickly as they came.

instead i am met with my own reflection; sunken eyes, hollow cheeks, a tiredness you can only understand when you’ve lived 100 lives in the span of 27 years.

the daughter; the friend, the poet.

who is still awake, at midnight.

@picklemafia - prompt: “midnight”

[picklemafia]

And what did you think would happen when you burned my maps to you? I told you I would find you if you left but one map. How could one find what does not want to be found?

[some-sort-of-mess]

Midnight

---

You and me— a star-filled sky. Looking for constellations. Your hand brushes my shoulder, warm. "There's the Little Dipper." You point, smiling, delighted. I glance, nod. I'm watching you. These stars mean nothing without you.

We stay out late, waiting for the Big Dipper to shift into our point of view. We lay in dew-wet grass. The blades are cold, itchy. It's worth it to hold your hand. The stars do shift. We forget about the Big Dipper.

I smile at you and point out how beautiful the moon is. You tell me that I am beautiful. We stand. We kiss. You check the time. "Better head inside, it's almost midnight."

---

Written for the prompt "Midnight" by @thenightquill hosted by @picklemafia

It's not so much a poem, I don't think, but I hope you enjoy reading it just the same.

[aubriestar]

lets find shelter from the midday sun where the ferns and mosses grow

under the willow where the boughs kiss the lake surface with barely a ripple

hidden from the turmoil, the unrelenting march of days heartbroken

with a world we don’t know that strangles hope with invasive seaweed

find me a summer back to acres of wildflowers untouched and breezes carry wistful wishes

where the lake has a spring-fed clarity i can see the sandy bottom where lies lie like sharp rocks on bare feet

now we watch where we step

©️-Aubrie-2025

@nosebleedclub prompt ferns and mosses

[serandori]

May the force be with us during these atrovirens days oozing rebarbative sap— irritant for our very beings.

The air seems thick with chloric menace, a green so sharp it cuts the mind, leaving us blinking in a half-light of premonition and foreboding. Hours move sluggishly, sticky with some invisible resin that clings to intent.

It grips conversations, seeps into the space between words, turning kindness itself slightly sour. The trees seem complicit, their leaves whispering in tones just beyond comprehension, carrying warnings or mockery— or both. We stand among them like unwitting pilgrims, wondering whether the journey ahead will scour us clean or stain us further.

If the world insists on painting itself in such noxious greens, then so be it— let us dress to match. We'll don fluorescent cloaks, sip cocktails of chlorophyll and gin, and toast each other. After all, if the end is coming, at least we won't face it alone.

[beforeyearning]

[asiwithercrumbleandfade]

The beginning

Remember, remember the fifth of May when we celebrated our freedom in confinement and tried to escape our house made of windows, just to end up trapped in the garden of Eden. Where we first met, all exposed, praying to some false God. Offering Them the bloodstain on your shirt and my dress woven from sunrays.

Weeks passed and that bloodstain grew, as did our companionship. My dress now more luminous than ever; your world rotating in my orbit. I was your sun in the mids of winter. But when autumn arrived your eyes like spring set my garden abloom.

And we buzzed like bumblebees in our little hive. Drunk on gooey sticky honey and hypnotised by the collective humms and drums of our beating wings. Unknowingly we capitulate to each others serpentine stings.

[echo-temporis]

The hands of the clock move with a deliberate slowness now. Each tick a hammer blow. I spend my days in a quiet vigil, waiting for nothing in particular; just the subtle shift of shadows. (undated)

[leftiswhatgodmademe]

Composite Sketch of Daffodils

I’m no longer any good at writing love letters. The ash and ink of past thoughts and tongies no long intermingle. This is a shard of bone stuck in a throat that has only known blood and other smooth things. 

I’m no longer any good at writing love letters. The dirt and dim-lighting of a fall picnic bury as many secrets as a cemetery. This is a mis-quote repeated ad nauseum. Words thrown down and up.

I’m no longer any good at writing love letters. This is a garden that blooms on type of flower to the detriment of the community. This is a promise kept under wraps. Re-gifted and tossed in the closet for years.

I’m longer any good at writing love letters. This is a request poorly spent. This is a task poorly asked. This is an acquaintance, barely a friend, more likely a stranger, poorly pouring emotions.

@drearydaffodil