#nepenthenet

[fermentingferns]

I have cracked off, spilled out, chest

thudding on rocks, thigh(s)craping down the sides of trees. I am holding a hand the size

of a fat raspberry, and it belongs to a boy who needs me

but I am full of h o l e s a n d

I can’t keep him warm full full full full FULL of so, just so many holes. I think if I died, I’d still be tired.

Bone tired.

dry-heaving,

can’t feel from your elbows down tired.

it’s like looking at the sun when I hold him; staring at proof of your worst fear, but loving it so much that it splinters bone.

here is birth, life. grown inside me, and one day I am going to die.

-lynnea // mother who is sad

[sprawl2writes]

courage, dear heart

today our grandma drops the spoons, one by one, and they sing like bones on tile. her body goes next, a puppet with cut strings, a slow-motion folding of limbs, and my aunt runs to catch her, a daughter holding her mother, and i slide off the chair and onto the carpet, my spine wintering against the window where we fed the hummingbirds in may. our cereal bowls, milky, untouched. i have just outgrown being a heavy stone in my parents’ arms, my legs a field of scabs, my mouth a ghost town of baby teeth. if i bite down hard enough i can catch my grandma’s soul, keep her here with me.  i don’t want to tell how this story ends. i am old enough to know  narnia isn’t real probably, but i am young enough to pause each time i pass the gap in the backyard fence,  holding my breath. 

[csoip]

That strip of smoke coloured sky up there is the heaven of these people. -Jacob Riis and the heaven of these people is the heaven of those people from a different skyline. we look at the same gods with different eyes. that smoke-coloured, bare strip of sometimes light is beautiful when it is the only thing to look up to. when they dream, they dream of a sky painted like the sunset they know and the sunset they don’t, red-orange-blue with a grey haze on the horizon. when these people think of heaven they do not dream. they are tired. instead: heaven is the moment between breaths. heaven is the uninterrupted night of sleep. heaven is eight hours instead of twelve. heaven is all hands unhurt, all eyes not blind, a body on this earth that can contain their souls. heaven is their souls unbound in the closest thing they know to joy. joy is the little kindness, the way the light shines down. heaven is the light. that sky up there is not a strip it is the whole sky, it is the might of all the heavens all these heavenly bodies resting on the earth weighed down by all the dirt and fear they are the light trapped between the lines, they are looking at a different sky and seeing the same gods. they are learning heaven with their eyes open.

[compllexes]

here is how it begins:

the surge deep inside your chest, the soft but sure sound of waves crashing in the distance, riding towards you. at first it’s too far for you to grasp, to see, but as it happens, as the scenes unfold, you feel it shudder and rise to its feet inside you, and the softness turns into a steady hum.

the hum doesn’t last for long, and this is what happens next:

when the choreography and the words soar, so do the waves inside you. the hum zooms into focus, and it becomes a crash – the warmest, most uplifting kind, the kind that gives you wings. you can’t capture the instant it happens, because it’s too quick and elusive, but the warmth stays with you the rest of your life. it finds a home inside of you, and it becomes a kind of strength.

after the tides subside, it’s like wonder and awe and reverence and triumph and disappointment all want a piece of you, so characteristic of the selfishness of feelings. and you don’t know what to do or where to begin, so you sit there and lose yourself in the glorious cacophony, in the crests of the curving waves. you suddenly ache for the eloquence of poets – to lend language to this sound, to untangle the tides crashing in you.

here is how it begins, with the calm before the storm. sometimes, grief comes knocking at the door, drenched in rain and shivering, and asks for your hospitality. sometimes, joy marches outside in the july sun wearing parade clothes and an unforgettable smile. sometimes, nostalgia sits next to you and tells you a story about the good in goodbyes. 

and sometimes, if you’re lucky enough and open enough, the waves become an embrace and something awakens inside you, an all-consuming light, like you just swallowed sunshine. you think there are flowerbeds in your bones, and gold in your veins. you think you are fuller than you ever were before, full with feeling. you think, holy shit. i’m waking. 

and sometimes, all those love songs might just come close enough to encapsulate this blooming. 

[karmaalwayswins]

October

Four AM. Walk home after twelve hours at the Gas-N-Go. Fog hangs across the double yellow line on the road. I feel like I should have a cigarette but I never learned how to smoke. 

----------

328 Kings Lane, 2nd Floor, Apartment L. The door mat screams, “Happy HOWL-O-Ween!!” 

----------

Six AM. Sleepless. If a masked man burst into my home right now and cut me down with a scythe, would I collapse into a pile of lung and intestine and blood? Or, would I explode and release ten thousand butterflies?

[ink-smudgedfingers]

once, i sleepwalked into a chapel and hatched an apology. it felt like burying a skull in a bucket of cold water or pulling apart the edges of a worn carpet. these are just ways to sing our history into being. one of many paths merging in your mouth.

Rachana Hegde, from “buzz,” published in Sooth Swarm Journal

[there-isnt-ink-enough]

We used to go to church every week with the sort of consistency that comes less from devotion and more from obligation. Church was a ritual, full of habits that we didn’t change because it would have required desire, an act that is too close to the line of sin to be attempted. We always, always sat in the same fading red seats on the right side of the second pew, behind the man with grey hair and the woman who always wore black. When my brother stopped pretending to believe in holiness, we left extra space for him. Saved by everyone and no one without a single word spoken, with the silent hope that maybe he would stop being faithless and somehow become “unbroken” like the rest of us. That empty seat was the closest I have ever come to anything resembling worship. The tangible, desperate belief in something that didn’t exist. If anyone had talked about it, I would have told them what a waste it was: he would never again try to fill this overwhelming emptiness. If anyone would have listened, I would have told them to start saving a space for me too.

—saved space/safe space

//a.m.n

[painterliest]

magnetic poetry

[unwrite]

i have wrapped myself in identities like tissue paper changing colors with each layer of words who do i want to be today bright like sunlight, coloring your world in yellow hues rubbing all of my happiness off like chalk on concrete blue like sunsets; i am your unicorn mythical, disappearing, disappearing or cold like winter because if grey isn’t a color then i am blank inside my rib cage

[nepenthenet]

March Prompts

1. angelica 2. blood money 3. polished gold 4. burnished bronze 5. marble arch 6. cecilia 7. brass knuckles

[fermentingferns]

“Do you have an answer for your actions?” “I don’t even have an answer for why my hands are in this position, I thought I would be more lucid & less ashes rubbed across damp bricks- a girl anywhere there is a cold front, pressing my forehead to the window.  It’s just that the trauma glazed my eyes like cataracts.”

“Sometimes we substitute branches for bones.” “I know this, I know where drought comes from.”

“Why do you overuse the word empty?” “Because I laid on my couch for five hours yesterday trying to convince myself it would be worth it to get up & make myself something to eat, to get a shower, but I didn’t fucking move, I just stayed there, thinking about how many peaches you could fit in one hand while you leave fingerprints in my hip with the other, listening to my dog bark like a metronome.  It feels like someone rubbed chalk down the middle of my tongue & my heart feels citrus, like burnt lavender.”

- lynnea // a dog barking like a metronome (first prompt series- poem III)

[sprawl2writes]

India

ok so here’s how it went. the bus driver tells us we have fifteen minutes. we shuffle out. all of us here. side of the road in the middle of nowhere. but i imagine houses in the distance. even the middle of nowhere is somebody’s neighborhood. the gas station is off white, defiant in the weeds. a moat of rainbow colored oil slicks this castle a shiny defense. the thin red line at the horizon makes it shine and shine.

i could have run, you know. with my backpack and my sneakers. i was born with a hitchhiker's thumb. i could have used it. but i didn’t. that should count for something.

what i do instead is i go inside the station. it’s somehow darker than outside. dull fluorescent beams. i’m feeling like the dead bugs caught in the fixture. i take a piss with my butt hovering over the seat. when i look in the grimy mirror it’s like looking at another person. my DNA is not my own. at the group home i forgot who i was. i suppose that was the point, right?

i use your emergency money to buy candy, the kind you never allowed me to eat. the girl at the counter has red hair. her eyes say fight but the set of her mouth says flight and it’s like i know her. the tension in her limbs. her instincts battling each other. her body a war zone in a red polo shirt. and i want to take her hands in mine. i want to tell her to take a smoke break, then i’d show her your emergency money and we’d run away together, make for the freeway, an ocean of stars to light our way. you would say i was being dramatic. but i want to save her, or be saved by her. maybe they’re the same thing. maybe unwanted girls recognize each other, like there’s something in our souls that’s the same. something slight. something yearning.

what i do instead is i ask her about the mountains. she says they show up all at once, like one minute the horizon’s flat, then, boom. i don’t believe her. then i tell her my name. i don’t know why. maybe i just want somebody to know it.

back on the bus, the sunrise bleeds through like a stain in the laundry. and then we come over the crest of a hill and i see them. the mountains. they split open the sky’s soft belly without mercy,  and black birds of prey pour from the wound. i am hurtling towards something that a few minutes ago, i couldn’t even guess the shape of. but now it’s real.

i guess i just wanted you to know.

[csoip]

#prayforcharlottesville

i’m so sorry i couldn’t write sooner, but the world keeps crashing down and i don’t know how to write poetry about hatred without reason. i don’t have the metaphors. i can’t write this beautiful. listen, i gotta call you back.

after the silence for prayer: I FOUND ANOTHER BODY TO KEEP SCORE WITH, I FOUND ANOTHER REASON TO BE ANGRY WITH THE WORLD. AT THIS POINT WE SHOULD JUST ACCEPT OUR OWN FAILURE CUT THE LOSSES AND RUN BUT I CAN’T IMAGINE SOMEWHERE WHERE THIS DOESN’T HAPPEN AND I AM SCREAMING AND I AM SCREAMING AND I AM LEFT FEELING SICK AND TIRED AND I’M TRYING WITH ALL OF ME TO HOLD ON, KEEP THAT HOPE, BUT WHAT AM I HOLDING ONTO? THERE IS NOTHING HERE TO LOVE. WHAT KIND OF HATRED HAVE WE ALLOWED TO BREED INSIDE THESE WRETCHED BONES? WHAT KIND OF MAN DOES NOT CONDEMN THE EXECUTION OF ACCEPTANCE?

HOW MANY WORDS DOES IT TAKE TO EXPLAIN THE WAY I CANNOT BREATHE FOR FEAR OF DROWNING IN BLOOD AGAIN?

and everything we do is after the fact. everything we say has no meaning to the dead. #prayforcharlottesville, for everyone these atrocities have taken because we couldn’t find a way to stop them in the first place.

[compllexes]

“so what’s it like?”

it’s like you’re the last one dancing. it’s like the party when everyone’s leaving, or already gone. the silent red cups filled with unfinished punch, the drooping balloons and the streamers, holding onto one another and adrift in the emptiness. it’s like the world turning its back on you; not in the “i’m sorry i have to let you down” way but in the “i’m sorry we have to leave you behind” way... but i can’t tell the difference.

it’s like i’m trying to remember what it used to be like in hopeless hope that i could conjure for myself what it could have been like. and i think that’s it, really - every day, waiting in the shadows and hiding in the sunlight, one haunting: what might have been.

what might have been.

what might have been.

and in the silence that follows, i give up reaching out. it’s like the lights going out, and you’re alone in the backyard, trying to find the night sky beautiful but the way the stars look at you, the way they shine like everything is still young, finds you where it hurts.

it’s like you’ve forgotten what it’s like to smile with no weight and breathe with no mistakes and walk with no sorrow, to be so free of yourself, because now, all you know how to do is cry. and cry. and amidst the tears that blur your vision, you want to hurl what might’ve been against the wall. you want to sink onto the floor and wish for hurricanes. you want to leave, too, but your angles are forcing you to stay.

it’s like you’ve forgotten the little kid that used to live so wholly in the moment, she never saw any of it coming. she watched it slip away. it’s like the loneliness is hugging you and holding your hand and wondering why none of it’s helping but you just want its shadow off of you. and you know the kind of person loneliness is - she looks like you and tries to make you happy and when it works, she grows wings and calls herself solitude. when it doesn’t, she withers and grows claws and demands you call her abandonment.

it’s like learning to love the loneliness and learning to despise it. it’s like looking away and never turning back. one day, you just stop remembering. 

// this is what ALONE looks like - a girl with tangled black hair and eyes that are always looking for a home (r.w)

[karmaalwayswins]

Writing Prompts: October 8, 2017

1. "They're out of apples."

2. Three men, all wearing white.

3. Selfie with a football player.

4. He asks, she answers.

5. Meanwhile, one thousand miles away...

6. Five PM wakeup call.

7. Street theatre featuring drummers and an animal rights protest.

8. The boy on the corner sings songs about an imagined future.

9. He's from Kansas City by way of Busan.

10. "Are you ready for this?" / "No."

[ink-smudgedfingers]

we rush, arriving late to the funeral pyre on two hours of sleep. singers chant dirges. i crane my neck, disturb the smoke while others gape at us. behind me, my great aunt mutters: good god, she was such a slut. and i want to peel an orange, fit a slice in the gap between her front teeth, if only to shut her up. the asphalt sticks to my feet when i leave, barefoot, dress flapping around my legs. i am a giant bird trying to migrate but i keep thinking of that night i saw them coupling: door sprung open & voice rising several octaves like smoke from a forest fire.

Dirge by Rachana Hegde, published in Eunoia Review