We warp in the heat,
buckle beneath the buzz
of thick cut air
pressing in on all sides.
Can’t blame trains
for stumbling.
As unsteady on tracks
as we are.
Yesterday they seemed
straighter, smoother, solid.
Today everything is
melting,
running into gutters.
I would stop too.
Choke my mixed signals
and lurch into whatever
station offered refuge.
Poem for the hottest July day on record.
His mother is an echo in the tread of his soles,
smaller
her steps swallowed up by the forward march
of man up and carry on.
She sees her own father
in the square set shoulders,
spine now a rod
to be turned into a weapon
when sadness finally stews into anger.
He will tell people how he’s never hit a woman,
because that is the same as respect.
His mother raised him better
than to paint a girl’s skin with fists,
so he’ll call it love
when he uses words to do the same
where it’s invisible,
and call it consent
when he talks the ‘no’ away to a half yes.
When the glasshouse eventually does break,
he’ll pretend away the damage.
Not realizing that you can’t
until the last pane shatters.
Bravery mutates into desperation,
shame,
escape.
Nothing else seems to fit
when the world is framed that way.
‘We should really address the elephant in the room.’
Those were the words you tossed out over coffee,
like spare change or old candy wrappers,
bits of pieces you were bored with carrying around
and deposited on my living room table
between the books and the plant pots.
There didn’t seem to be much point explaining,
your elephant wasn’t in this room,
or hadn’t been until you kicked up dust clouds
into a grey silhouettes.
I kept my silence on the matter,
much like you had kept yours until now,
too cautious about the fall out,
about how you might have to hold me together
when all the pieces broke apart
and ran for the corners in the skirting,
white mice abandoning ship
at the first sign of storms.
I let you think you were the only one
holding out a hand,
while you explained why I was sad
and how it could all be fixed
if I tired hard enough
and put in the work.
You can learn how to listen to the some speeches
without really hearing them.
It’s the same trick you used each time I tried
to put shadows into sentences,
when the doors opened enough
that I could see you were there.
So I nodded
and I pretended
that all this helped me some,
and then I let you leave smiling like a hero
while I went back to face the storms.
Written as a response to Diana W Peach’s speculative fiction prompt. I was going to write a piece of flash fiction for the prompt of a short story, but this poem so of found its way out instead.
The plastic widget wakes me. Pressed into my flesh, nerves along my arm dead and heavy against the sheet. Asleep in the way the rest of me should be. Instead the rest of me is restless, and churning. Feet, clumsy, hit the laminate like dumbbells. Followed by ankles, calves, thighs, hips, waist, breasts, shoulders, neck, head, arms, wrists, hands, all sleep stricken and wonky. They uncrumple reluctantly, each one an exercise in memory, coordination. Rag doll woman with sand-bag limbs.
In the bathroom I want to lie my head on the edge of the bath, lean it there until the room stops spinning, until my skull lightens to a point where my neck is not creaking. Instead I dig my fingers into the composite. Notice again how it bows out too far. The edges don’t fit flush. There are marks where the veneer is chipping. I fit my body in much the same way. Badly. Not at all. But that’s nothing new. It’s time to check the clock, count the hours left before I need to be somewhere, be someone, work out how to function like a human again.
Night came in too soon,
Day did not have time to clean
all the cobwebs out.
I now remember why I don’t wear that particular pajama top to bed anymore.
Tonight Kim is at the helm over at dVerse Poets Pub, and she wants us to write about what January represents for us. Unfortunately I tend to find myself wading through treacle at this time of year, and the long nights don’t do much to help.
This piece actually fits with the Rag Tag Community’s daily prompt for the day lumber. This was somewhat unintentionally but I hope they don’t mind me adding a ping-back for that prompt as well.
I almost added the following haiku at the end of this piece but decided not to as I felt the other went better with the theme of the Haibun.
Sun comes in new sizes,
fun, mini, small, and absent.
Only out in glass.
In the end I know that the blue patches are only temporary, but at two a.m, with a dead arm, a bruise on my shoulder, and my head spinning, that sort of thinking takes a bit of finding.
In the calm of an empty room
I found Pride behind the mirror glass,
and coaxed it into daylight.
I fanned flames from ash
with a slip of red silk,
slashed open white to the skin,
bared like orange pith,
small defense against an outside world.
Like water,
Pride slipped from me at a doorway
and in the mirror
was only sin the colour of shame.
Grey again in the ruins of an inferno,
I told myself
no one was looking at me anyway.
Carol J Forrester 
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