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Kharon by Alexander Livtochekno

Kharon by Alexander Livtochekno

I hold coins in my pocket, refuse to drop them
into Charon’s rawbone hand;
I hold the gifts of my passage under my cloak
back from this boatman’s demand.
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Diary of a Lost Soul

I suffer the dreams of a world gone mad.
I have seen things that you will never see, and the film
is on a maddening loop. The heavens are falling down
and I can’t even breathe.
We turn kingdoms into dust as the violins
fill with water, as the winter takes one more cherry tree.
Everything has chains. I walk the sweet rain tragicomedy and
pass by a thousand signs, looking for my own name.
Have I run too far to get home?
Some die just to live.
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NaPoWriMo Poem #16: Roses and Thorns

To make a crown of thorns,
you must first tear the roses away.
The King is crowned with their stiff, green bodies
withering to brittle, bone, and dust after they
have been seized and stolen from the ground.
Before returning to dust, they stiffened into rigor mortis,
frozen in a circle as they entwine with each other,
thorns jutting out and radiating from an empty center.
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NaPoWriMo Poem #6: Begin With Fire

First, it must begin with fire.
The amphitheater, a darkened and silent blank page
laying just beyond a grove of trees rendered in silhouette,
waits for the first, single spark.
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NaPoWriMo #1: Kindling

St. Rose of Lima

St. Rose of Lima, by Jennifer Walterschied

for St. Rose of Lima

I know how to make fire.
It is not I who makes it; I am the kindling. A
cut here, a jab there: and the flame starts,
unbidden. In one little corner of Lima,
an Everlasting fire blazes on.
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Woman

Woman on a Brick Wall - RONE

Woman on a Brick Wall -- RONE

From in the shadow she calls
And in the shadow she finds a way
And in the shadow she crawls
Clutching her faded photograph
My image under her thumb
Yes, with a message from my heart

- Tori Amos

The day lights up, cold and blue. Cloudless.
Wings unfolding.
The light gives birth to a woman’s face, plastered onto brick,
watching the streets with two narrow eyes like bisected almonds that drip
faint streaks of branching red below. And she has seen
enough.
For this, she is weeping.
The great mystery of the decade:
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It Will Not Stop

There are birth pains,
and the water breaks in trillion-fold up the coastline spine,
an army marching to where water does not belong –
marching into the streets,
marching into the marketplace,
marching into the suburbs,
marching to obey a command invisible to the ears,
and like Mickey Mouse broomsticks,
it will not stop;
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Fractured Armageddon

Written 3/8/11 and 3/9/11
© 2011 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.
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This poem was composed for the last We Write Poems Prompt, Make Your Own Wordle. I went with writing the poem inside the Wordle itself which the Wordle website spat back out at me — with some modifications and a lot of help from GIMP (an image manipulation program). The original Wordle is below, and I hope you enjoyed the poem. In case you didn’t know, you’ll need to click on the image to enlarge it.

-Nicole


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Father and Christ

Here’s the broken body like bread, so many
jagged pieces together all dipped in wine: a scratch here,
a drop there. If spines and joints could be chopped apart
like so many broken sentences, this would be
a string of stuttered speech: the King’s oration,
born as a black-haired and fallow-skinned man but now a collection
of words busted apart and barely held together by ragged
strings. A lament of blood here, a dislocated shoulder
there.
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Big Tent/WWP Poem #42: The Way Back Home

Perhaps
if I could unravel the threads that ever live behind my skin, I could
find it. There are so many exposed, raw and frayed ends,
and as I have said before,
I pull on them so that you don’t. Watch me
pull away this sweater of a skin, blow the dust off
my bones, and climb the stairs to an attic
that ever collects: there is nothing sacred and safe
from being stolen from walls, from projector screens,
or from the air. Everything is carried home, purloined
beneath the archway of my arm,
slumbering against ribs cradled with adipose and skin,
nestled in the crook of my elbow.
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WWP Poem #40-2: Trinity

Trinity by Nicole Nicholson

Written 2/8/2011
© 2011 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

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This poem was also written for We Write Poems Prompt #40: Triptych Relationship. I just couldn’t stop. I decided to take an interesting twist and instead of Heaven/Earth/Man, I changed Man to Woman. This ended up being pretty dark, but I just went where the words led me. I hope you enjoyed the poem.

-Nicole
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