Storm of winter
clouds of night,
break o’er the crashing
waves of fright
and bring the cleansing
rains of tide
to waken us
in sleeping, hide.
Month: June 2022
Armour
You’re my armour:
beat thine breast,
where all cold steel
at mine behest
might sing in echo,
violence swayed,
The Mother
No time for a shower. Grilled cheese for lunch, if they were lucky. Too late for order-in groceries. Could she order pizza? She could ask him to pick something up, but his trips to the grocery store always took twice as long and came with a bombardment of questions via text: “Which isle is that in again? Did you want the organic or the regular? What size diapers does she wear?” (Maybe if you changed them more often, you’d know!) And that was if he thought to text.
Scratching Names
The tight press of bodies around him were just shapes, smelling of sweat and blood and the tang of stale urine. He wrinkled his nose in disgust, stifling a gag. The smell was on him now, like a baptism in a tainted stream that could not be washed by any number of holy prayers. The bodies around him shifted and murmured. They were animals in a cage, grumbling over the pangs of hunger and thirst.