A misreading of a prompt from Kody Granger: a hollow heart.
She carved out a space to make it home.
She crafted a village inside, and yet
each time they hurt her,
her anguish made her burrow
further inside a place
nobody decided to look,
no one bothered to explore
deeper until it was thought empty,
deeper until it was thought vacant,
deeper still until they accused her
of having a hollow heart.
A poem built around an Evan’s Blue Song.
Within this shelter, your beating heart will be a bomb
(waiting to explode); instead of him, her, or me,
your rhetoric will be because of your enemy’s fractured heart
thudding inside their cracked rib cage.
You will have written yourself off as a casualty of this war
(a hostage of this situation), and
you will have sworn
there is no way to leave this war zone, unharmed, unscathed.
(Yet, somehow, you declare the scene a happily ever after ending.)
Your beating heart will demand fireworks (flashbangs with brilliant colors).
My heart has always begged for pyrotechnics
(as though it was crafted to create a show).
Cling to your memories, baby.
As the hours tick onward, you’ll be as distant as that far-off town you call home.
Release the demons you swallow because my memories are accessories, &
my heart is a hostage to the situation.
Your energy is hemorrhaging, losing consciousness with each passing minute.
My cherished self-pity is the refrain to that song we knew all the lyrics to.
How insignificant is this movie scene to the overall effect of the montage.
How trivial.
& yet, it’s all we can think about for days.
This scene is a car crash on a rainy night home,
and we’re counting bits of broken glass as though they’re stars.
We’ve made our bed, and now we must lie in it.
Even as the broken glass cuts, leaving behind scars – hopeless reminders of rainy nights and car crashes.
Your memories constellate at this exact moment in time (where time stops having any meaning whatsoever).
I have to ask.
How can you bear witness to what you saw & still manage to crack a smile, darling?
Your cigarette cologne is a scent you wear all these years later like a weapon, like an aphrodisiac.
Your energy is hemorrhaging, losing consciousness with each passing minute.
Your cigarette cologne is a scent you wear
after all these years
like a weapon, like an aphrodisiac.
Your beautiful energy is hemorrahging,
losing consciousness with each passing minute.
My cherished self-pity is a memoir that fell in the rain. Warped all the pages. Ink is left smudged.
Cling to your memories.
This scene is a car crash on a rainy night home.
You’re a distant, far-off city.
We’ll stick to singing melodies of a song we all know.
No cherished self-pity in the refrain.
I’ll continue to remind you of graveyards & ancient tombstones,
of fire escapes, &
of long-abandoned lecture halls,
quiet libraries
like a ghost.
We will sing melodies of a song
we all know the refrain to,
yet no one picks at karaoke nights.
I will remind you of graveyards &
ancient tombstones,
of fire escapes,
of long-abandoned lecture halls
like a ghost.
Your beautiful energy is evaporating now. We have made our bed, as they say, now, we must lie in it.
How insignificant is this movie scene.
with a little help from the boys at Evan’s Blue for some inspiration when I was struggling with a block.
Housed within my ribs
is a metronome that on a good day,
glistens like a cluster of amethyst,
but most days, it burns
like an arsonist’s proudest achievement.
It is an anatomical feature
I thought I disposed of
when sitting on fire escapes,
waiting for lovers to save me from the clutches
of my own sins & sorrows.
But she wrapped some grass around my obituary
and smoked it.
The vapors felt like my soul parting from my body,
but you did not say goodbye.
That day,
you made love to my ghost while a part of me watched.
That’s the shame of dying –
no one knows where we are
& I exited the room silently.
Forgive me.
Memories are a wound &
I must carry them.
Nostalgia lies close to my skeleton bones,
and yet my past is clouded
like a mirror with its shine worn off.
Whenever I try to recall the small details of you,
it’s like gazing at a blurry photograph taken
many years ago
of someone I once loved.
& remembering your voice,
though I could listen to it the rest of my days,
is like hearing a phonograph underwater.
The way it falters in my mind
as though you have a stammer,
though I know you never stuttered.
It’s my mind that creates the gaps.
Memories are a wound &
I must carry them.
As I carry them, the past becomes less certain
and I wonder if my memories are true
or perhaps just something I wrote down
in a book.
Storytellers don’t always make the most reliable narrators,
but even through the gauzy haze,
our memories glimmer with a whispering beauty.
“Unlike you . . .” a prompt from Kay A.
In less than a month,
unlike you to care about the wreckage of the Titanic that is my heart.
I have witnessed you stampede on
and trample me barefoot.
Yet,
the teeth you bared is what
I have come to expect.
Family taught me
(for better or worse)
to murder with mercy.
When you were flashing your baby teeth,
sharpening like knives,
I was practicing my smiles
in polished glass.
Unlike you to offer condolences
or express empathy,
and yet, the past few days,
while Lazarus has been in the tomb,
a different side of you has been exposed.
Unlike you to show warmth,
still a reptilian cold underneath,
but the air is a bit milder now – less frost,
less chill.
Unlike you to offer benevolence and yet,
a crack of a smile,
a beginnings of generosity.
Is it possible you were murdered by my mercy?
Killed by my kindness?
Or did New Year’s resolutions just fall
a few days behind on this calendar?
I’m not one to gaze the gift horse
in the mouth,
but I do have my suspicions
when you were flashing those fangs,
honing them like knives,
and are now sweet as spun sugar.
Just call me Doubting Thomas
if your kindness only lasts as long as
Lazarus was in the tomb.
Isabelle Palerma 