Category / Poetry

by Carol J Forrester

Static Begins A Storm – #Poem By Carol J Forrester

This trail of fingerprints is simply browsing.
Palm pressed to the hollow of your spine
before you step out of the moment,
leave this touch behind you in that second
where electric ran your length
and cracked between your ribs
as something begins burning. 

I’ve combined by love of sketching and poetry to make some poem postcards for ‘The Muse Spits Blood’. They turned out rather nicely, so I think I might have to make some more postcards for the other quadrilles I have written over the past few years.

@caroljforrester

#poetry #postcards #writing #tiktokpoet #poem #mythology #greekmythology #drawing #sketching

♬ BARELY BREATHING – Grant Averill
by Carol J Forrester

Speak No Evil – A #Poem By Carol J Forrester

Temper your tongue with candyfloss static.

Electric
the bite is enough to ward off words,
stop them before the starting gates
in the narrow space 
between crowded molars. 

Use teeth to smile
around calorie free pleasantries. 

Taste patience becoming poison.
Every syllable sharp.
Bitter.

I’ve started recoding some of my poems and posting them to Tick-Tock. (@caroljforrester) Short and sweet work best, so I’m looking to a lot of my quadrilles as a starting point, and trying very hard not to self-sabotage with worries over how awful I feel I sound in recordings.

by Carol J Forrester

#NaPoWriMo2022 – Day Twenty-Six

My Body Is Like An Envelope

I have the watermarks
from when you steamed my secrets
loose from my skin. 
Boiling,
I felt every inch of you tremble,
kettle-like,
mouth a tight scream of a spout
shrilling for attention,
for answers. 
You left me unstuck, 
spilling words addressed to someone else. 
No one held your tongue accountable,
only mine,
here
see where I taped down the tears
the places that no longer seal.

Perhaps surprisingly, I always find the harder prompts to be the ones where I’ve done something similar before. I have a poem ready to send out for submission that works an extended simile/metaphor of a shipwreck throughout the whole piece. It can be easy to almost write the same poem again if it fits to the prompt, and I had to go off for a little think before I found a way to work around the old poem still lurking in my head.

by Carol J Forrester

#NaPoWriMo2022 – Day Fifteen

I Could Not Care Less About The Light Switch - NaPoWriMo Day Fifteen Prompt

intermediate, mediate, or whatever,
I do not need its technical portrait 
imprinted on my retinas.
As if you scored those wires on my eyelids
instead of crumpled fists of paper
our bedroom littered, yes, yes, our bedroom
where I am so desperate to be sleeping,
duvet to forehead, clawed over the ears,
this unbidden seminar of light switch electronics
threatening to blow a fuse in our marriage--
I DO NOT CARE!
I do not need to know why 
the switches won't match when the lights are out.
And we have tried every combination
every puzzle box of on and off
to make them fall in to a uniformed march. 
It was never a why question, but a general annoyance
of a thing seeming out of place,
like unmatched salt and pepper pots!
Not purposeful, but one being oh-so-slightly shorter?
Thinner? More rounded on the corners?
Not a, "this is salt, and this is pepper difference"
just difference you can't quite pin down
or turn off,
like the bloody light switches 
you won't stop explaining,
or drawing 
at two a.m. 
when I mistakenly say 
'I'm still not getting it?'
Which I admit was really my fault
so I'll take the next round of circuitry analysis in stride
but gods above, will someone smite me,
and while you're at it, 
hit the lights.
by Carol J Forrester

Some Nights – A Poem by Carol J Forrester

when the weight of the sea settles on her shoulders,
she wears a shawl of waves and swims in starless fabric
wishing for sequins. 
There is always a watcher, 
a little, bobbing boat cresting each swell of her filled lungs
its crew casting nets, for sequins. 
Even the sea foam does not glitter
but leaves its watermarks on sun cracked knuckles
passing hand over hand to reel in… nothing. 
Caught in their empty net she wishes
for sequins. 

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