We kicked the sheets to the foot of the bed
where they twisted like ropes,
caught us around our ankles,
legs already woven into each other,
pricked over in fresh sweat
that made their clinging embrace too much
for the fire under our skins.
Tonight’s prompt for the DVerse Poets Quadrille night is fire!
When the facts were laid out it made sense.
One by one
I could pinpoint where everything fell apart,
where the track first bent
sudden and broken into barren desert,
the initial dust cloud the only cover you needed
to keep me from realising what exactly had happened.
I didn’t understand where the thorns came from,
why I had to pull them out from under my skin,
when they had even found their way beneath it.
Surely there should have been a warning,
a prickle of pain or a bolt of lightening,
small or large,
there should have been something to say
this was not right.
By the time I noticed you’d carried on,
left me standing stranded
miles away from the path
I’d thought we were following,
night had fallen.
For a while I still thought
you might come back.
Daily Post: Fact
The nursing home had labeled it.
A thin strip of sticky white paper
folded over the band, pressed together,
with your name in neat, tiny letters
as if it was a reminder in itself
that the person who once owned it
could no longer claim it as their own
and had to be told ‘this is yours’
‘this is something precious to you’
‘this is part of who you were’.
Tonight’s prompt was to write a poem based on a token such as those left by mothers for their children at the Foundling Hospital in London. Make sure to click the badge above and check out the other wonderful poems written by the fantastic poets taking part in tonight’s fun.
Sleep drunk you curl into me,
mutter half a sentence,
and slip away again.
These mornings,
where the sun sneaks in
past the darkness of the blinds
to trip across the covers
in soft waterfalls of light
I latch my legs into yours,
find a rib to cling to,
tuck my head into the hollow
beneath chest and chin
and let myself breath
slowly.
unworried by the tussle of hair,
rumple of sheets,
tangle of chores waiting downstairs,
I lie here with you.
Daily Prompt: Messy
So it’s been a while since I wrote a chatty, update post. So long in fact that the original ‘If We Were Having Coffee’ seems to have fizzled into non-existence. But anyway, what have I been up to since August.
Well I’m still working on Shadow Dawn. The draft is now past the 70,000 words mark and I’ve had to go back to the start as I feel like I’ve completely lost track of what I intended to do with the book when I started writing it. On the plus side, I reread a chapter from about half way through and didn’t hate it so there might be hope for this story yet. 
For the past week I’ve managed to churn out more poetry than I have done over the last three months. If you follow the site you’ve probably noticed the upturn in the activity and I’m trying to keep things that way. I’ve started posting more flash fiction based on writing prompts from Story Shack and I’m trying to put up something for most, if not all of the Daily Prompts. Part of this is to do with trying to get into a routine of sitting down and writing each evening when I get home. If it becomes habit then I have no excuse for not finishing Shadow Dawn or for leaving this blog untouched for three/four months at a time.
Speaking of poetry, NaPoWriMo and Camp NaNoWriMo are just around the corner. In 2016 I managed to complete NaPoWriMo, but last year I didn’t even manage to complete the first day. For 2018 I’m hoping to not only finish NaPoWriMo but to also hit a few other poetry goals. So far I’ve not been doing too bad. In January I entered my first Poetry Slam, I didn’t get past the first round but I had a lot of fun and got some fantastic feedback from the other poets competing. In February I entered The International Book and Pamphlet Competition hosted by The Poetry Business. This will be the first of the six competitions I’ve challenged myself to submit to this year. I don’t know if I’ll manage to get anywhere with any of them but I won’t know if I don’t try.
As I’m now re-working Shadow Dawn more than writing from scratch, I also want to get back to my Headquarters series, and more specifically the Safe Haven branch that I started writing a couple of years ago. Since I’m also studying for my Level 3 AAT accountancy qualification my target is one update a month for the series. That might become two for March as the first update will be the redraft of part one.
Unfortunately I’m not looking to have any Guest Posts this year. I’ve done them in the past and while they are a great way of getting to know fellow bloggers, they take a huge amount of organizing. Finding willing participants is also difficult and time consuming. I am going to try a link-up series in April for fellow NaPoWriMo participants but that will be once a week and be incorporated into a weekly update post about how the challenge is going.
However, I am looking for fellow bloggers who are willing to share their poems and thought this Thursday as part of International Women’s Day. A week or so ago I posted a piece called Legs Eleven about the pressures of people judging you based on how you dress. This Thursday I want to put up a post for anyone to comment on and link to that looks at the biggest challenge they feel they have had to face as a woman, either in life or in the last year. If this is something you’d like to get involved with then you can email me at caroljforrester@hotmail.com.
Finally, I’ve also started experimenting with audio recordings of my poems. I added one to today’s poem When The Words Fall Out and I’ve also done one for my piece Legs Eleven which is included below. Let me know what you think in the comments below. I’ve tried recording videos of poems before but never liked watching myself very much so this seemed like a nice in between. Do you think they work or is it better to leave to poems as they are and let the readers just read them.
Carol J Forrester 
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