your body is jerusalem,
he’ll tell you
coveted first, then plundered.
– you’re my backwater bedroom
martyr, he’ll tell you
as he nails your wrists
to bedposts,
seizes your tongue like
a white flag,
pulls stones from your parapets –
little sister,
i’ll tell you
the children’s crusade
is lost:
and you’ll kneel at his sword and know
you were always his
to take
nor alive.
she was neither dead
trepidus sky-
and her heart was left with the
because her eyes belonged to a crying bird,
always half blinded by tears
she was
Contest Submission: Felicity's Backstory by Pearlbomber, literature
Literature
Contest Submission: Felicity's Backstory
Felicity blinked the morning sleep from her eyes and watched the warm sunbeams, which streamed unannounced into her chambers. The first rays of the new day were just peeking through the open window and creeping towards her face. She was thinking about the day that lay ahead of her. She was still pondering when the sunlight struck her green eyes. Felicity squinted in the harsh light, rolled over, and started staring at the wall, that was barely an arm’s length away from her. She watched the sunlight slowly creep up its slightly dust covered surface. Her eyes stopped for a moment on a thin crack before continuing to follow the
you know i would fill you up and over with love
an overflowing kitchen sink stacked with plates from
a breakfast two mornings ago i recall
the clink of a fork and an intake of breath and an
"i think im going to leave you"
slipping from your lips like a prayer,
i nodded,
and went back to my tea
what could i do to keep you, this backwards love we had
i exist as a passing point i am neither your point a or b
artemis will deny that she walks these woods barefoot
searching for love in dewy blades of grass but
i am painfully honest about the holes people have left
you were my orion for a week or so,
if i was a planet i would be pluto
for i
i wrote my first suicide letter in 10th grade.
they told me it didn't count if you felt like dying
unless you had it down on paper
like a vetoed birth certificate.
i've rewritten it enough times since
to realize i could never leave with a proper goodbye.
goodbye is too heavy a word for paper to hold
and i was never brave enough for the kind of courage it takes to tell them
why.
why they weren't enough to keep me here.
but i'm finally learning a different kind of bravery-
the kind it takes to
stay.
stay.
i learned to wear death
like rope burn my junior year
my senior year we became friends
but i finally stopped cutting the insides of wrist
it rains the most on sundays. by calliopen, literature
Literature
it rains the most on sundays.
i've never had a dream quite like this, i was
flying with the wings of a pigeon dipping
through a halcyon haze then i was in
kindergarten again- drowning in a pool
with nothing to hold on to, i still shake
at the memory
some days i can rule the world
most days i can't even rule my body
i poke at the marks on my skin and
i will myself to believe that i am a
constellation, not a consolation prize
her technicolor coat is, technically, just red
hyperboles don't exist in the rain,
happiness is just a chemical in your brain-
but oh, the things we do for it.
i.
we were seventeen
when you promised me that
this tiny dustbowl of
a southern town was not going to be
everything my life was made of.
it wasn't hard to believe
because the maps you'd spread across
your ceiling never lied (since you claimed
it was easier to dream when they
were stuck above you
in the night).
i remember the lines you'd drawn
in a felt pen, red because it seemed important,
seemed louder than the rest, and
i remember how you
would trace the roads with your eyes until you
fell asleep. you had a knack for
memorizing every escape route, and when i asked why
you answered that it was because one day you
would have to run