Carmalain7

i. the first stone was a pebble, whore of babylon, that you refused to take too gently between your teeth ii. he pressed flowers in your face to say “swallow,” hands bursting with color you cried out but gravel fell from open lips and weighed you down iii. his mouth broke one by one your blood vessels but you loved until you liked the bruise- (proof you could keep him in one place long enough to leave a mark)

My lips bleed more than I do as a woman. At eighteen, I locked my menses in a closet. I threw out all my blood-stained clothes and I unfolded from my own womb, clean and hopeful. My mother and her sister and their mother warned me that I was not eliminating a problem, that I was only relocating it, that it would turn up a year later, disguised as an inexplicable sadness. There are questions people ask me. Like, how does it work? And I give cold, calculated answers, I list chemicals and name methods. I perform long-winded speeches about pharmacies and doctors and stigmas. And when they ask why I chose to spray red roses with pesticid

I don't know when we first went underground. I don't even know if it was one mass exodus, a swarm of mankind trickling through the earth's crust so vehement we carved our own caverns by the force of trampling feet, or whether it was a gradual process, perhaps even a repetitive one, a family here, a neighborhood there. For all I know, the echo of the damp subterranean machine has always reverberated off the cave walls, created long past by the Angels, who think of our well-being even while they shake their heads helplessly at our flaws. They say that those who remained on the surface were raptured away in a great flash of light, like a millio

Greetings, fellow Deviants!   So this is a blog about poetry, and some of my thoughts on poetry, and some of my thoughts in general. Recently, I have been trying to write a bit more poetry, and the more I read and write poetry, and the more I study poetry, the more I think about poetry. Logical as this seems, sometimes I wonder whether the genre of poetry truly lends itself to analysis; to a picking apart of a coherent and whole entity in order to "understand" it. I often ponder whether there are merits to this relentless literary unravelling of the enigmatic rainbow that is poetry. I remember in high school, I was one of the few