Defloration

My dress, wrapped like a collar, smells of grass.

After I kicked his face, he pulled off my boots - hips jerking, rocks scraping against my back – and heaved them into the creek.

The grass smells like warmth against my cold body.

Shelter

The deluge began in the foothills and quickly flooded the delta. Dolores left puddle prints as she slogged her way to the plains. She whistled her lips bone dry, sucked up the clouds of mystery. Stood barren before the one good man.

Motherhood, Part II (*Editor's Pick GB#187)

A slice of cake once a year may not seem like much. A lock of hair in a drawer, a little tooth. What they don’t tell you is how the power of a kiss unleashes your inner goddess. How you become invincible.

       

End of an Era

Me, a stone’s throw away from dotted i’s, t’s crossed in the sand, tossed in the waves. You, a thrown stone. Each crash of wave, tumble of sand smoothes your jagged edges, while May’s full moon erases our trail across the bay.

 

Waterways

Despite all her trepidation, the jump was exhilarating; a shock of water that tugged at her, pulling her down. She let herself sink. When she did kick out, her ankle met an unmoored figurehead, perhaps, adrift in the undercurrent of the creek.

Elephant Opera Company

Always loud - coming or going -

we could not get rid of them fast enough.

Neither fashionable nor punctual

- unwieldy, spectacular, lumbering -

they ate up all the adornments

that kept us safely disguised

and then would not leave until

the fat lady sang.

 

Adult Education *

North light fills a row of windows high above the wooden platform where I’m told to stand. Easels scrape into place like a flower blooming around me. I hear easy chatter, lean into the paint-smeared stool, struggle to unwrap this borrowed robe.

*This piece placed third with the crowd, and was also Editor's Pick (Thank you Christine!)