LOUDER AND LOUDER

LOUDER AND LOUDER By Brianna Malotke

Bones heavy, and our souls ravaged By chaos, our pleas and cries for help Are lost as the sirens drone on, and as The dust settles after all the buildings Are bombed Crumble beneath the weight Of our oppressors, you’ll find the bodies, Broken and buried under the rubble.

And down the road, looking back they Will erect monuments in our memory, And we will all be forgotten, Overlooked Except for a paragraph in a history book, But for that brief moment, as the world Watches, Hearts shattered around the globe, As the bombs Fall and the missiles strike.

As the innocent plead for help, we’re all Watching frozen in terror, the fear of Speaking out coursing through us, but What we need is for the cries of help to Be drowned out by those who yell out for Actions, for them to shout back - louder and louder - that change is happening.

For one day soon the voice of the people Will be deafening, more than anything We could ever imagine, and there’s hope For peace to spread, ignoring any border, For we’re all skin and bone with a soul Contained within, and one day soon, We’ll all have peace, the cries gone.

Brianna Malotke is a freelance writer and member of the Horror Writers Association. Some of her most recent work can be found online at The Crypt, Witch House Amateur Magazine, and Sirens Call Publications. Her horror poetry is in The Spectre Review and The Nottingham Horror Collective. She has work in the anthologies Beneath, Cosmos, The Deep, Beautiful Tragedies 2, and The Dire Circle. In April 2022 her poetry was included in the Women in Horror Poetry Showcase, Under Her Skin, published by Black Spot Books. In 2023 she will be a “Writer in Residence” at the Chateau d’Orquevaux in France.