Bitchin' rhymes from the 919

Credence

This is the story I’m submitting to the RFAS Creative Writing Contest—edits and suggestions are welcome.

——

Credence

My skin is a tawny shade of brown, the same color as dusty plains and fields of dried grass. I was made that way on purpose, and so was every other one of my kind. If we have a name I’m not aware of it—my kind do not have a language.

I was made tawny brown on purpose: it helped me blend in with my surroundings. It was important for me to be able to hide—it’s hard to catch birds when they can see you coming. I can tell you now that birds are not particularly tasty, all feathers and salty blood. Rather bland, overall. But the flavor still stains my palette and my memory, as it was the last thing I tasted before he rescued me.

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Follow

mywitsbegintoturn:

 

It’s a beautiful place you sent me to. Don’t get me wrong, I knew it would be. I trust you. I’m sure I’ll always wind up someplace nice, in the end.

The clues were a bit tougher to find this time. I guess that’s fair, considering where they took me, and heck, where they took me from. I was tired of the filth of that hotel. The blankets were way too stiff for something that thin. They gave off the sickening smell of something soaked in a few bottles-worth of Febreze. The room was full of the unsavory sort of scenery you can only find at a seedy motel; grimy wallpaper that used to be white, slick with the slime of a decades-old room usually used for only a few hours at a time. The scent of sleaze slithered through the air. I wanted to get out. I needed you. I had to find your message.

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Greater

Oh look. I totally stole Dylan and Anna’s voices. Whoo!

____________________________________________

Greater

See

My Grandfather

Was no war hero

No soldier on the battlefield

And no metaphorical soldier

He had his guns, sure

His bullets

And his

Fire

But

He wasn’t the sort to

Give it all for his country

Or the kind to believe the posters

That say that loose lips will sink ships

And that Hitler is in every empty seat

So he doesn’t sacrifice for

The country that claims its

His.

Wait

Don’t get me wrong

He sacrificed, alright

He built himself from the guns

And the steel drums

The chemicals and

Bleach.

Built

Himself from

The hate and a void

Left by a dead foreman

Before him and the soft

Preacher ahead. Built

Himself from the

Columns of fire

And the

Chemical

Waste.

And

He burned himself, too

With all work and no school

And the weak heart and the

Long nights,

But see,

Hate burns

So when the heat

went out and the embers drowned in

The cheapest scotch he could find in the city,

He found something in him that he’d given up

And managed to mumble

That it was a great day

for the human

race.

If I ever touched you

If I ever touched you it would burn your skin,

the fire from my fingertips licking and biting your flesh

blistering and swelling

so hot that it’s frigid

so tender that it’s too numb to ignore

the senselessness of coals turning your bones into ash.

And if I ever were to kiss you

I’m afraid you would be so drowned in flames

that an ocean could not put you out,

you would be so consumed

by the heat and spark and

combustion

that you would be eaten to the core,

that your soul itself would set alight

overwhelmed with flames

that rain soot into the ground

where it would sink into the ground

and your fiery essence

would sink further down

permeating the soils

and come to rest only in the

inferno beneath us.

So I must never touch you.

I had in Beauty

hard-coeur:

I had in beauty

The thing which cannot be named

The breath that knows not the lungs

Or mouth

Or tongue

Or lips

I had in beauty

the shadow of a thing

That nobody inherits

And nobody sows

Of dust

Of life before life

Of void

Of empty space

Of null

I had in beauty

the forgotten thing whose shape does not belong

to me

to the divine things mortal

to the space of time

to the lightning bright

I had in beauty

All that was worth living for

The thing that is boundless

Soundless

Painless

Knowing everything

And being nothing at all

I had in beauty

In my hands of flesh and bone and blood

The thing of what and why and how

Without answer

With every solution

And in my grasp of lead and stone

I had in beauty it

It

The it

the it of all time

it of the clawing earth with its roots deep into this core of lead

it of the space of stars and light and dust and thread

it of this humanity that feels, loves, bleeds

it of these people, these hearts, these seeds

It of the empty space

I had it in beauty

And held it with all my might

Like my soul was on fire

Like it was every morsel of life

Like it was the last sunrise my eyes would see

Like it was a dandelion wish longing to be set free

Like it was mine, mine child, my baby, my heart

With veins pumping the pap of all that’s worth living

I had it in beauty

I had in beauty it

I

Had

And now it’s gone

I had in beauty

And now I’m gone

Creation—Please Post Edits/Ideas for Revision

Creation

            I’m not very good at beginnings. When in a conversation, I like for the other person to introduce themselves. It is not that I have little to say or a big ego, but I find the other person to be profoundly more interesting. In fact, in any given conversation all I do is ask questions. I ask people who and why and how and appear to be genuinely interested, and that is all people need to spill their whole life stories. To this date, no one has ever noticed that the entire time I reveal nothing about myself. I mew up their every word, yet for all intensive purposes, I am a black hole. They know nothing about me, but really, no one does.

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My poem I submitted to the magazine

kilgoretroutfan:

i hate people

with their noise

                        their faith

                                    their heaven and hell and their

hope

their petty beliefs about

good and evil and

how they just always say they’re right

                                                            even when

they know they’re wrong

                                    about everything

and when they try to stop you correcting them they pretend to agree with you so you stop talking and they get the whole idea wrong because they don’t believe it so at this point they might as well not even try

                        and all those

                                                who say that everything

will work out or that this

                                                is the best of all possible worlds or

that god won’t let us destroy ourselves like i know we will

all those people especially

                        can

                                    go

                                                and

fuck themselves

Range of Distribution

My name is ANNA and I am jagged like the Andes

A like a yawn

N stretched tight like nylons

N drawn back like a bowstring

A on an exhale

ANNA like a kiss

ANNA like a fleabite

ANNA like a sneeze

Ahhhhh-NA!

My name is ANNA and I am jagged like the Andes

How hot and humid Ayunuh born of a southern drawl on the leeward side

How cold and wet and Presbyterian tight-lipped Aenah clings to the wind-swept face

But no never Awnna Awnna has no home

No never call me Awnna.

My name is ANNA and I am jagged like the Andes

My name is ridges crevices and pokey-pointy peaks

I amgigantic

ANNA!

Insurmountable like a skyscraper without stairs

Steep and inhospitable ANNA at 45º angles

ANNA that avalanches and injures the incautious

ANNA ineluctable and miles-high

Cutting short unawares and

Dropping down for miles

Down twisted fissures and manufactured mine shafts

Bouncing off of ledges and

     Smash

             Crash

     Bang

and then…

                           poof!

Echoes through my palindromic mountaintops.

My name is ANNA and I am jagged like the Andes.

mywitsbegintoturn:

It’s one thirty. I should be doing something productive. Sleeping or studying or working. I’m not. I’m laying in bed staring at cobwebby ceilings and dragging my fingertips across the too-sleek keyboard of the only light in the room.

I’m awake because I’ve been thinking. This isn’t new. I show up to school racoon-eyed time and again from long nights like this one, and when people ask what I do when I stay up, I smile and shrug, because I don’t do anything. I read books I know by heart and stare at my neighbors’ Christmas lights and write rambling messages to no one in particular like this one.

But writing. Writing isn’t something one can do passively. Not at one in the morning. By then, all semblance of control is long gone. It broke along with the sky’s perfect black back when the stars first showed up. By now, writing isn’t controlled. It’s an inky bloody mess, and that’s why I’m still awake. That’s why I’ll always be awake. I have things to say. Ink to bleed. There are things that can’t be done in the day. The sun is too hot. It coagulates and clots the ink long before it could ever hit the page. So I need this. The gentle coaxing of a sleepless night to draw the worry from my head and the blackness from my veins. To pull the ink from my pens and the pages from my sketchbooks. To pick apart my pieces and reassemble a newly streamlined brain.

How could I ever sleep?

Weight

mywitsbegintoturn:

She wraps her hand around my wrist,

A dotted line of speckled skin.

Her pinprick fingernails push against my palm.

They’re red. Like apples.

Just low enough to pick. Just big enough to eat. Just shy of ripe.

My hand closes around hers, and I try to tell myself

That if apples aren’t picked

They’ll fall

And rot.

But

They won’t, because

I am the rot, so

I open my hand

And listen to her laugh

Like a half-formed melody in the notebook of a composer.

And I remind myself

What just one

Bite

Might do.