saevuswinds

 We folks have been living in West Virginia our whole lives. I remembered my brothers and I driving too fast in cars and motorcycles. We’d use to race each other to the springs and then search for fairy stones. Our family still worked in the mountains. Then things were changin’, and we couldn’t drive no more. The other folk, they looked down on coal. They watched the black snakes slither out of our chimneys. Sometimes the police comes and they told us the world’s dying and we can’t be doing this no more. But in winter, we felt safe. No police would come to the coal mines then. There’s ice on steep roads. Th

Dear William, when you warned people with that runaway star, no one noticed. Part of you died when you hurdled towards the Earth. In wartime, everyone loses part of themselves. My father fought for the next great war until his legs gave out. I don’t know if he ever killed someone, but I imagine a field of corpses and the smell of defecation would at least change a person. He never mentions it, except late at night, when we both look at the sky and watch you. He knew which way to go when fighting because he’d watch your stars and you’d keep him from danger. I’ll never forget that. His face was battered and grateful when

 We folks have been living in West Virginia our whole lives. I remembered my brothers and I driving too fast in cars and motorcycles. We’d use to race each other to the springs and then search for fairy stones. Our family still worked in the mountains. Then things were changin’, and we couldn’t drive no more. The other folk, they looked down on coal. They watched the black snakes slither out of our chimneys. Sometimes the police comes and they told us the world’s dying and we can’t be doing this no more. But in winter, we felt safe. No police would come to the coal mines then. There’s ice on steep roads. Th

The Odyssey Oh, how the ocean waves bash my ship, but seasickness is nothing when I feel the pain she left in my chest. Life pins me to the ground, beaching me on islands that only serve as distractions. Although I could have any goddess, it is the memory of her warm body against mine that allows me to fall asleep each night. So at midnight, I rise, taking a moment to spell her name in stars, and imagine that she’s curled up in the bed I made for her. She is the one who remembers me, despite admirers swarming her like wasps. In all my moments, the only time I could fall apart was in her arms. The waves may crash into me, and the journ

i called her hot chilli peppers because i believed she could breathe fire and singe my homework with her long red nails. now a decade later i wonder if it was her illness that made her retire and not the plague of prayers upset students sent her over all those years. i wonder if she will remember the year her homeroom was vandalised or how she taunted me in the corner of a classroom. i am not brave enough to ask if those losing memories lose it backwards or if it all goes and snippets stay. i hope she loses the things that made her so callous and remembers me as the girl who smiled on the first day of class raised my hand and asked her what

Five is the number of times you worry he’s stopped breathing, as the surgeons carve around his heart, twisting away the plaque ridden arteries, and pulling a vein out of his leg. Five is the number of heart wrenching hours you and your family were waiting in the hospital room, worried that your lives would crumble, that there would be five members of the family instead of six, that five days out of the week he would not come home for dinner, that five kisses from him would no longer be given to his wife and four children. Five was the amount of fingernails you bit off while watching people enter and exit the waiting room, and the amount

 We folks have been living in West Virginia our whole lives. I remembered my brothers and I driving too fast in cars and motorcycles. We’d use to race each other to the springs and then search for fairy stones. Our family still worked in the mountains. Then things were changin’, and we couldn’t drive no more. The other folk, they looked down on coal. They watched the black snakes slither out of our chimneys. Sometimes the police comes and they told us the world’s dying and we can’t be doing this no more. But in winter, we felt safe. No police would come to the coal mines then. There’s ice on steep roads. Th