The Straw

Rachel Belue

My head is pounding against my skull. My heart feels like a weight in my chest. I can’t even bring myself to fake a smile. This must be a small glimpse into the depths of despair. And all it took for me to get here was one boy refusing to take a moment out of his day for me. He claimed he loved me but I can’t bring myself to feel as though that is truly the case.

He’s only become the straw leading to my inevitable fall.

I feel frozen stiff.

I have no will to move.

It was taken away.

I feel like the life was drained out of me.

I know the reason.

It’s simple.

It was the straw.

Winter Simmons: Goo

Tara

Hall

all she did was dream, like a cube of something sweet, drawing hope from her veins and screaming out your name to bring the rain, a storm, a city car horn, a war, a fire, but wishing for the better. she says, you could kill and chew your lips to nasty bits, but still you’d be the pulse in my neck and in my wrists. every day she walked on the memory of you, dragging her shoes, by strings, behind her, cutting her soles. she knew, of all her dreams, the one where the weird feeling in her stomach transfers into being thirty-somethings with you with your hand hovering over her belly button, humming some sonata until the vibration of it knocks all your teeth out, was the one she needed most, she’ll never not need you. reaching into that absence, falling in, and drowning.

the plant in her window grows in spite of itself, and days keep scratching themselves out, the itch that won’t stop. the dirt and the dust around her will always carry particles of you, if there’s something more to life, she’ll tie it back to your thin legs and pocket knife, piano keys, bad days, sorry eyes, that soft smile after an exasperated ‘hello’, new haircut, while you’re fifteen and ready to grow but somehow ready to die. four years since your last words to her, a long finger extended to paper, this drawing of a marble man, “but where’s his belly button?” all she did was sigh and scribble something out. she’s just happy you’ve lived all this time, made it to somewhere else, even without her, new orleans where bukowski once cried, talking about the love he lost to some self-loathing, prophetic poetry mission. she’ll never see you alive again.

Tara Hall

Remind me again of that perfect medium between accepting the child, hurt, in my heart and the young woman struggling to rise up and out, trying to find better things. baby’s breath and wine, tell me it’s okay to cry. To milk the last drop out of everything that could have been mine but got away and I have to remember at least I wanted it bad enough to miss it. Otherwise, I would have wasted my time and that’s all any of us really has. We break it like bread and pass it around, one born, another dead. I wanted to clench your shirt in my fist and tell you you reminded me of what it feels like to want to stay up late, up into another day, and yearn for something as simple as to touch your pinky with mine.

I feel alone in my skin for the first time in months, forgetting that once I had trusted my bloody heart in the hands of someone so cold, downing cranberry juice and a glass of bourbon. Long are the days when we remember the dead and how they now strengthen the life that spreads through the roots beneath us.

I was once a young girl who believed beautiful things arose from the ravaged. So I’ll mend cuts and bruises, and try to sew together the spaces between us where I choke down my words of wanting to be your thing forever and make myself bitter so I don’t feel so much like a broken record. So many things made for the purpose of wasting time; jigsaw puzzles, repairing broken automobiles, writing poetry. But trying to find the right thing to say is by far the best one. I guess, if you know, you know. Not eager to drink up the last of me, nor forget time gone, bread eaten, and those passed, I feel like I can find my place in the capsule of your breath and no longer tear at the seam where I’ve attached myself on your sleeve.

You will be the best part of me; when you break off, you’ll come back renewed, the magic beanstalk, the heart beating in a womb, a starfish making the sea its own.