Edged,
your steel still held
despite the age
on your hands,
worn from turning
fields into food
with the same strokes
that built furrow lines
on soil and skin.
Seasons swept past
like always
but you stayed sharp.
Ready.
Dangerous.
Tag / creative writing
Waiting For The Bell
There was still tinsel around the picture frames,
all smiles and glitter staring back at you
in that echoing space
when the meals are finished
and the bottles drunk
yet the end is not quite upon us.
So we wait
and pretend
that this will be the year that we do something different.
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Sun Sick
Tonight I am chasing the cool side of the pillow,
almost as elusive as breeze
despite the windows with their open mouths
panting in the heat.
Here, the backs of my knees slide slicked
between day fresh sheets
too quickly twisted into abandoned heaps,
lumps of coal still smoldering at the foot of this bed
all while the ceiling fan wheels in slow circles
the air curdling into soups so thick
it sticks in my lungs
like grief I want to scream into the cool side of a pillow
until my breath has turned cotton to swamp,
until I cannot tell the tears from my sweat
and the summer feels a little less like a coffin
pressing in on all sides.
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Love Song
I do not love you like the ocean,
I’m much too scared of drowning.
Instead I love you like a battered paperback,
small enough to pocket
on walks from dorm rooms to lecture halls.
I love like the blanket my housemate bought me,
too pink to be polite
but a soft cucoon against my skin
warm on cold winter nights.
I love you like anything that can be forgotten
tucked away or to one side,
but hangs around in the quiet moments
still very much alive.
I do not love you like life itself,
but I love you a little like breath.
In the same way that I do not think about it,
in the same way that to not would be nonsense
in the same way that I don’t know how to stop
without the pressure in my chest building
to a point where I think I might shatter me pieces.
I suppose I love you a little like breathing.
I do not love you like the ocean though.
With you I have never been afraid of drowning.
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Scarecrow
You stitched yourself a world
of patchwork panels
hanging crooked from one another.
A cobbled mess of this and that,
the tension off in the needlework,
thread fraying loose in places.
One stray breath would rip asunder everything.
Yet still,
you held it out.
Carol J Forrester 
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