The Poetry Marathon

Alphabetic Anxiety Part 1

Alabaster skin may contribute to your surging popularity

But it doesn’t define you. I

Can’t even imagine why people would get so hung up on that stuff.

Don’t they know how ridiculous it is?

Even if you’re the most famous person in school, it will all

Fade away once you

Graduate. Then, you’ll

Have to get a job at which point

I guarantee you nobody, not even

Jerry, will care about who’s popular or not. But don’t

Kill yourself over it. You’ve

Managed just fine before and you can do it again.

17 – last dance –

I watched as your heart broke, as love died, it was long day and a longer night,

l’d never seen you more human, more vulnerable than those moments, your hard arsed

exterior melted away, you truly loved someone more than yourself, I stayed close, as family

should a new perception growing, looking at life through a different landscape. Days became

weeks, became months, sorrow replaced by anger, by loneliness then life refilled with things to

keep your hands busy, your mind full for when you stopped, when days allowed you to think

sleep was hard to come by and you could bath in your tears,

 

-s.j.duncan-

 

 

 

Losing Shit ~ a lost cliche

I’ve lost my books

And my hat

 

I’ve lost my coat

And my cat

 

I’ve lost my place

Imagine that

 

I’ve lost my marbles

One by one

 

The seventeenth hour has begun

 

I’ll lose my tenses

As words steep

 

I’ll lose my senses

As hours creep

 

I’ll lose my witts

By the end of this, but

I promise you this

 

I will not lose the marathon

Now, you may carry on.

 

Cracked Love

Earth brings people together

As it decides to break from itself.

Such a beautiful, twisted love.

Earthquake.

 

Mary Gabis

Preserves

we finally ran out of summers you
could keep in mason jars
on your shelf
and every time I remember something I
am just remembering the last time
I remembered it

the last of the home-canned
tomatos are emptied
into the soup and
it won’t be long until
we forget the flavor
of 2013

Francis Marion State Park

My head is not the perfect fish body.
You’re more than a tamarack, more
than heat and hair and hostility
toward your body. I’m more than
a trip North, more than the finality
of divorce, more than the name
I wanted back so badly. Your snout
shrank. Now you only have a nose.
But I can still feel your coil–
copper and gold.

Black

8/5/17 10:19pm
Black

I’ve been bargaining for loss
Switched it left to right
The slight of hand
Swapped a name in place
of what could’ve been a grave.
Still you’ve stayed just inside the edges.
The finger-less gloves
within one state
either direction.

You’re still the extension of me
blood leaking from the same vein
Inky and familiar
My sticky home.
I’ll never have to say goodbye.
You’re designer draped
shaped to fit my skin.
It’s chewed into a name
That I’ll carry til the end of my days.

You have a proper family
roads traveled in opposite directions
But the earth is round and you’re always driving
right back to yourself.
My chest meets at the crest
sunlight peaking through the spaces
You’re holding my hand through it all.
Homecoming and knowing
That we’ve never left.

Prompt# 16 Alladin’s jinn

I am Jinn the jeanie

Who hid her weenie

In her jeans

and waddled in

smiling

into everybody’s dreams

They kept me bottled in

didnt let me find

the free-way

to escape

from the lamp’s tunnel

at the end of which

I held the light

Then Alladin happened

he rubbed me the right way

and she manifested

herself

like a giant who loomed

over every element of nature

and bent

the air, wind and water

to fulfill his wish

and when he wished for the princess

she knew he sinned

for he saw through her candour

and loved through her sins

my giant cross-existence

in guise of a jinn

ended.

Requiem for ice cream

The sun,
Harsh, unforgiving, on my face,
Scorching my arms,
Legs,
Every inch of exposed skin reddened, sore.
I spy the ice cream shop across the street.

I enter.
I order a double mocha ice cream on a sugar cone.
It’s as expensive as any ice cream in the city,
(Really fucking expensive; like ten dollars or some shit).

I exit the shop and lift the cone to my mouth.
I do so too quickly; the ice cream is already melting.
It falls from the cone,
It struggles to reach the ground through the heat
(At least that’s what it seems like).
And my heart breaks.
Watching that ice cream,
That beautiful, ten-dollar fucking ice cream,
Fall offensively slowly
To splatter on my pant leg.

Hour seventeen

Each year I write one prompt devoted to a cliché topic, previously these prompts have been focused on love, death, and angst.

This year the challenge is to write a poem about loss that is not cliché.

Respect

By Patricia Harris

Alone,  I trusted,

Unconditional acceptance

Of the idea that we were

Always meant for

Eternity…

 

Betrayal of my trust,

Pretending that it was right

That you are true

Before I knew that you

Were a figment

Of the imagination,

Through and through.