Tag / napowrimo

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

#NaPoWriMo – Day Twenty-Three – Candle Flame

They were all odd dancers.
Up on their toes,
jittering ballerinas,
twisting in an old wind.
Shifts turned to ragged sails
from long wrecked ships
still trying to take their home.
Spent nights wrapping
their bone fingers tight
into abandoned symbols.
Gathered at last on the hearth,
faces pressed against soot
and ash,
begging
for the strings not to pull
them up again.
Up onto their toes
to dance like strange, dying flames,
guttering the last of their wicks.

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