A collection of short works from May

All words, photos, and artwork my own, unless otherwise noted. 

Note: The historian in me is always compelled to cite my sources, so I did something new this month. I tagged other writers who provided a first line in a poetry chain. If you prefer to be removed from this post, just send me a message. :) 

And away we go.

5/3/26

tanka:

Dark soil under nails

Bergamot budding early,

while zinnia waits

Hyssop coats the air,

sweet marigold won’t be rushed

5/4/26

Poetry chain, first line from

─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

authentic expression

though always with care

the kind of words that glow

the fire is there

but it burns in embers

gently warming

never smothering

the kind of heat that lingers

nostalgic and yet brand new

5/4/26

Poetry chain, first line from

─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

Part of the turning gears of destiny

Reflect what is inside ourselves

Each new motion built on emotion

That demands to be felt,

to be seen, to be held

For truth is the axis on which we all spin

the eternal rhythm where we finally begin

5/4/26

Poetry chain, first line from

─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

Never had a place to call its own

so my hope lives in my bones

I hold it close, a part of my chest,

and weary, rock it, as it rests

it knots its fingers round my breath,

a bargain made to conquer death

─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

This one went on to inspire much of my story:

5/6/26

like gossamer wings

drifting through the waving leaves

prisms dance on air 🫧

5/11/26:

tanka series

This went on to become a slightly longer post in a poem series:

5/12/26

maple:

red fire masking green,

beams of light bleed through dark leaves,

brief as breath on glass

5/12/26

Poetry chain, first line from

─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

face to face, now I have faith, my heart’s felt what’s chose, it’s you

a woven devotion, tangled and true

it’s storming again and you’re heavy on my mind,

a knot in my spirit I can’t seem to unwind

I toss and I turn, pressing my eyes shut tight,

while my body is restless, ready to ignite

always circling in the very same orbit,

paths nearly aligned, too close to ignore it

a fate so resigned, I’ve stopped trying to hide,

drawn by a gravity pulling from deep inside

I still hear your voice, though there isn’t a sound,

it’s a constant vibration, more verb than a noun

5/13/26

Poetry chain, first line from

─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

But for tomorrow?

We plant seeds along with hope

To heal every root

5/14/26

blue cornflower:

wild sapphire bloom,

awakened in garden soil,

deep indigo eye

buzzing bright with second sight,

leaning in, our gaze aligns

5/14/26

/the only way out is through/

5/16/26

iris tanka:

summer whispers near

warm breath mimics the stillness

painted paper wings

beautiful and perilous

guarding memories of you

5/19/26

deadly tanka:

pale green glamours thrum

whispering of dark rewards,

danger clad in light

a lethal kiss beckons home

but where does the spirit rest?

5/20/26

Poetry chain, first line from

─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

It’s hiding from me

creeping just beyond my sight

teeth bared in the dark

5/20/26

Poetry chain, first line from

─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

Like tomorrow sent me an invoice,

For a night I didn’t even get to keep

The sky’s a pooling ink spill,

And the moon is singing me to sleep

So I’m bowing to the shadows,

Because tomorrow’s talk is cheap

5/20/26

Poetry chain, first line from

─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

Trapped in my midnight

Your fingers trace the cosmos

Burning through my skin

Orbits align now

Constellations form our names

Tangled in the dark

5/20/26

Poetry chain, first line from

─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

I see myself now

Deep roots and twisted branches

A wild, wondrous tree

5/21/26

tanka:

Honey locust strands

Golden networks in the air,

Mapping like the mind

Wood and thought grow intertwined,

Both shaped by what they weather

5/21/26

Poetry chain, first line from

─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

For TGIF

When the family matters

And we met the world

5/26/26

wisps of pastel pink,

faded blue holds one bright speck,

little white dot moon

5/31/26

blue moon:

The world is throwing a tantrum in the streets,

All sirens and expensive, broken things

But the Blue Moon leans against the windowpane,

Glowing with that wild, unbothered light,

She doesn’t care that my mind is a drawer full of tangled wires

She just tilts her silver chin and says,

Look at us, two beautiful night owls, with nowhere else to be

Note: I was under the weather for a lot of May, so I want to take a moment to thank everyone who kept on tagging, engaging, and sharing my work while I was mostly offline. The support and community here are truly priceless.

Thank you for being here.

Until next time,

j

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24 days ago · 44 likes · 56 comments · Jacqueline and The Quantum Quill

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The air broke sometime before dawn

Humidity wrung out of it

The windows are open now

A breeze moving through the house

like cool lake water

Three nights of storms

Old trees shedding limbs

Branches scattered

Everything smells torn open

Wet bark, black earth,

the green bite of snapped stems

The bee balm leans hard toward the ground

Roots showing, a little dirt still holding on

Milkweed, cardinal flowers, primrose

Tangled in the grass

Ants thick across the sticky stalks

Pink and red blooms staring sideways

As though the whole bed has slipped a few degrees

The water runs swollen,

dragging sticks and leaves through the shallows

The made-land softened where the waves climbed out

Built on the unceded deep, on limestone and old debris,

the shore holds its breath

The ground here remembers being water

The Crow knows this,

That’s why it laughs

The Robin knows it, too

That’s why it sings

Dragonflies are back already

Working the air above the washout,

blue as nothing happened

But the Red-winged Blackbirds flare above the cattails

flashing shoulder-fire,

diving at anything that gets too close to the nest

Beyond the trees the lake is busy with its own weather

Grey water, whitecaps

A horizon too far away to touch any of this

The wind keeps moving west

The river keeps moving west, too

forced backward against the map,

running upstream through the concrete,

away from its own mouth

My lungs take the air in slow,

jaw bone aching for every split branch

A phantom heat settles across my own shoulders,

old weight finally giving way to sun

The soles of my shoes feel the thrum of the lakefill

the stolen stone, the buried rubble

trying to settle

The flowers remain there

Half pulled from the soil

bent,

blooming

So I let the grass hold my shadow for a while, too

Even though the ground under me is wrong,

the water runs backward

but my skin is warm

Blood keeps its own direction

Without intending to, I think this poem is the third in a sort of series that materialized on its own. Find the first two parts here below.

Part I

Part II

Thanks for being here.

Until next time,

j

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Part I

Part III

The sky’s unfiltered,

a blue I can’t quite swallow

My heart’s burnt coffee,

steaming in an old cracked cup,

while the Robin preaches peace

from a rusted balcony

“Hush now,” the bird sighs,

“Lay your heavy hammer down”

But the Blackbird grins,

lighting up a crooked smoke,

laughing at the pace I keep

The clover’s getting drunk on summer sun,

Stretching out its wild green hands,

And god, I want to lose my watch

And melt right into the humid land

But there’s a checklist burning in my pocket

A whistle blowing in my chest,

And as the world blooms like a prayer,

I’m stuck calculating the rest

I step through the brush,

soft grass under heavy feet

The Robin begs “stay,”

but a rabbit’s heart kicks hard

underneath my ribs today

One Crow joins the laugh,

circling my restless head

I want the silence,

but I’m built for the gravel

moving through the holy dirt

This poem started out as a note and grew a bit from there, so I figured I would share it in a post.

Thanks for being here.

Until next time,

j

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Sun bleeds into the corners of the shoreline,

turning the waves into molten glass

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

This hour belongs to nothing

No sharp clarity of noon

Or cool absolution of night

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Standing where wet sand gives way,

ankles buried in lapping darkness,

where warmth brushes skin

and pulls back

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Air tastes heavy with old heat,

thick as wild honey unspooling,

coating our throats

too sweet to last

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Memory behaves like this light

Stretching shadows until they touch,

preserving every insect wing,

every almost-was, in bronze

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

We walked where the water erased us

almost as soon as we appeared

sweetgrass, hot cedar, something overripe

sweetness turning slowly animal

in the cooling air

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Firelight moving over our knees,

trying to remember us

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

We call it beautiful,

this burning down

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

We watch golden ichor pool in our hands,

small, survivable light,

knowing to hold it is to watch it turn to ash

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Dark is coming in from the horizon,

but for a moment,

we are suspended

caught in the amber,

perfect, and trapped,

and ending

This was completely unplanned and unexpected, and inspired by ’s Chromatic prompt. Be sure to check out all of her amazing work and subscribe.

Don’t forget,

Stay gold Ponyboy. Stay gold.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Thanks for being here.

Until next time,

j

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Part II

Part III

The dirt remembers

Before the strangling started, it was clean

I was a skinny thing then,

a chokecherry sapling built for white lace blossoms

and fruit that stained the fingers without needing to hide

like something nobody bothered to wipe off the counter

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌

Back then the crows still landed here

Back then the rain fell straight

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌

Then you came crawling up out of the ditch,

all creek-water and burrs,

dragging your long body through the weeds

until you found something smaller than you

stretching pale toward a little scrap of sky

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌

The bark smelled sour in the August heat

You climbed up slow

That’s how stranglers do it

Slow as smoke filling a room

nobody thinks they’ll die in

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌

You wrapped yourself around my trunk

like I was built to hold you up

Every season another twist

Another inch stolen from the sun

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌

You said you were keeping the wind off me

while my branches stretched for light

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌

And every good thing in the ground

seemed to find your mouth first

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌

My young self bent under you

Cracked like an old kitchen chair

The buds dried up in the throat

before they ever saw morning

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌

At night I could hear you moving

Little rope-creaks in the dark

Like somebody tightening a belt

out behind a garage

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌

Even the moon looked jaundiced through your leaves

Still, I tried to bloom

Every spring I pushed blossoms out

like busted teeth through swollen gums

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌

Mean little ghosts of cherries

Hardly enough there to keep the birds

But you kept feeding

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌

Now you stand out there in the weeds

weeping into your sleeve,

pointing at my crooked spine

like you didn’t do the twisting

Holding out your basket

Expecting something sweet

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌

Bitter fruit makes good medicine

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌

For years I kept my branches pulled in close

Stayed small, stayed quiet

Played dumb

I stunted my own growth

just to keep your weight from splitting me apart

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌

Squeezed sugar from cold earth and hard rain

to survive another season tangled up in you

Let my leaves rattle

to whatever cheap tune you whistled through your teeth

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌

But the heartwood turned stubborn

Sap moves through me now

like river water in January

Slow. Cold. Clear enough

to see bones underneath

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌

The grain’s gone hard as old fenceposts

You don’t get to carve yourself into it anymore

You don’t get to choose which branch gets the axe

You don’t get to stand in my shade

and be surprised by the dark

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌

I see your leaves blackening at the edges now

Hear the dry sickness settling at your root

That blight belongs to you, friend

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌

You had summer after summer

to loosen yourself from my throat

Let light reach where it could

That’s it

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌

But uncoiling takes work,

and some things grow so used to the chokehold

they mistake it for an embrace

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌

Now the whole damn canopy has gone out

The crows don’t land here anymore

Even the rain falls sideways around this place

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌

Still,

the wood keeps swelling

Some nights I hear the vines giving way,

when the cold comes down hard

But they’ve held on so long

I can’t always tell

where your crookedness ends

and my branches begin,

and what’s still moving through it

Still here

still growing wrong on my own terms

and it heals, rough as weather

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌

The dirt remembers

This was written for ’s photo prompt seen above.

Thanks for being here.

Until next time,

j

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Maybe a little less trauma?

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All words, photos, and artwork my own.

4/1/26

Magnolia:

satin petals stretch

like stars on blankets of blue

slowly spring unfurls

4/2/26 (this was a busy day)

10-word story

No matter what they did, the skull kept grinning.

────

4/2/26 poetry chain

and let silence decide

the way shifting shadows map a room

tracing light like it is your face

rather than a ticking clock

counting out the cost

────

4/2/26

Tanka:

A bloom of red wings

Bringing word beyond the veil

Where love and loss meet

Ruby glows upon my grey

With warmth I can remember

────

4/2/26

10-word story:

The forest was my quiet place, until it spoke back

4/3/26

April impatience

blooming even so, despite

blushing in cold air

4/4/26

Still Golden:

Raining once again

🎶 Thank you for being a friend 🎶

Reruns on tv

────

4/4/26

Contrast ♡:

Dry wood starts to split,

Frozen roots then sudden cracks

Seasons salt each wound

True as life and false as art

I am broken, I am whole

4/6/26

lately words escape

even as they fill my mind

sometimes silence speaks

4/7/26

Dolce far niente/For

Basking in sunshine

Feel slow living’s warm embrace

Sweet, honeyed stillness

────

4/7/26 haiku chain

My nose is itchy

I’m destined to kiss a fool

So the story goes

4/8/26 poetry chain

Until its found

I’ll listen for what is hidden

Let the earth breathe and open

As paths unfold in surrender

4/10/26

Deep in cool, dark earth,

Winding roots grip stones like hands,

Living, being still

As we sigh, the trees and I,

One pulse beneath bark and skin

4/11/26

Waiting wooden arms,

Reaching out for April sun,

Cradle puffs of white

Soft clouds bloom on barren boughs

Holding space for coming leaves

4/15/26

though it’s on my sleeve

be kind to my bleeding heart

as it starts to bloom

4/16/26

Tanka: 🐇

Peering through the veil,

The space between consciousness

What luck do you bring?

A trickster at dawn and dusk,

Or augur of our rebirth

4/17/26 haiku chain

Twilight beams softly

Rose and lilac briefly spill

Into dusk’s deep blue

4/19/26

Redbud:

They call you Judas,

Betrayal in fuchsia hues

Weight not yours to hold,

Bright pink buds give way to red

Not weak, resolved in breaking

4/20/26 poetry chain

They ceased to exist and they died in their dirt,

Powerless now, to inflict further hurt

They took what they took, so I answered in kind,

Evicting the shadows they left in my mind

Echoes that once carried the sound of their names,

I offer in effigy, I release with the flames

No more restraint, put the pain on the page,

A chorus for all with this righteous rage

The waiting is over, the moment is now,

The tide is already turning, the only question is how

4/22/26 Earth Day

Soft pink clouds above

Gone before the moon can change

Floating by like snow

────

4/22/26 Earth Day

Moon rising, half smiles

As Sun sinks in Earth’s embrace

Kissing her goodnight 🌎🌒☀️

4/23/26

A ghostly keel carves through the mist,

of hidden heavy whiteness

While gauzy sails and ropes entwist,

adrift in endless lightness

4/24/26

twin galaxies spin where the first embers start,

binding the stardust with the beat of a heart

they hold every atom of each love they have known,

a map of the cosmos in a gaze all our own

────

4/24/26 poetry chain

As a poet who longs for some semblance of love,

I struggle with the words, wait…maybe all of the above

I barely feel I’m a poet, though I guess the rhymes are there,

Ink out the verse, don’t rehearse, and I’m floating on air

But it’s just for a moment before reality creeps in,

and it’s like I’m behind a few steps before I even begin

Share it all? Is it too much? Am I even ready?

Do I want to be seen, or just keep it all heady?

Abstract it, distracted, leave room to breathe,

it’s all honest but clouded, a smile hiding its teeth

4/26/26

Tanka for Sunday

Searching for color

Dragging along a grey mood

Lilac sweetly sighs

Moon welcomes me as I am,

It knows there are days like this

4/26/26

April leaves a mark,

Power struggles in extremes

May, bring with you peace

Let each harvest yield its due,

Be it thorns or fragrant blooms

Thanks for being here.

Until next time,

j

Want to read more collections of short works?

She lies at the bottom of the staircase as though arranged there by careful hands. One arm folded upon her chest, the other stretched across the black and white marble floor. Dust freckles her skin. A single red maple leaf rests against her wrist, impossibly fresh despite the ruin surrounding it.

Above her, a spiral rises through a darkness that feels sentient. The warped banisters curl upward like ribs around a hollowed spine. At the center of the foyer, the remains of a grand piano lie flattened. With its dark wood splintered into a jagged silhouette, it looks like a great black wing crushed beneath the weight of the heavy air. Its keys are scattered like discarded teeth over the checkered stone, silenced by the same gravity that holds her there.

The house cannot decide what century it belongs to. It is a bored and twitchy thing, shifting through its wardrobe of eras. Every few moments the squalor peels backward. Mold retreats into polished lacquer. Cracks seal themselves beneath fresh paint. Chandeliers ignite overhead in violent blooms of gold, and suddenly the staircase becomes a labyrinth of velvet and crystal.

Music floods down from the ballroom. Champagne. Perfume. Cigarette smoke. Laughter, tinkling at first, then sharpened into something cruel.

And always the leaves.

They drift through the air no matter which version of reality exists. They are the currency of the bargain. Long ago, the house reached out and sucked the autumn from the rest of the world, harvesting the season of dying to fuel its own heart. Outside the windows, the world is a grey, static wasteland where nothing grows and nothing ends. Inside, the leaves spiral endlessly, caught in unseen currents, as though the entire house is breathing them in and refusing to exhale.

Then the vision ruptures.

The house is tired of the glamour. Darkness slams back in. Chandeliers become carcasses hanging from the ceiling. Wallpaper hangs in damp strips like shedding flesh. The music continues for several seconds after the ballroom disappears, skipping like a needle on a scarred record. The house is no longer listening to the tune. It is simply waiting for the next beat.

The staircase shudders, not structurally, but internally.

Red light bleeds through the cracks in the wood. The stairwell resembles the interior of a living body. Veins pulse beneath wallpaper and wood flexes, remembering tree and remembering roots. Remembering the moment it stopped being a building and started being a tomb that refused to stay closed.

And still, she remains.

She feels the timelines thinning. They are spilling into one another. Reality stutters in uneven breaths. She sees a gloved hand touching hers at a masquerade. Feels his mouth against hers beside the frozen lake. They are both choking on smoke while autumn leaves swirl upward. She sees his body broken at the bottom steps with one crimson leaf trapped beneath his open mouth.

The visions arrive with the violent brightness of lightning. The house is not remembering them. It is a bored child with broken dolls. It is playing with them, shuffling the deck of their lives because it has seen every outcome a thousand times before.

Somewhere above, a cacophony of distant clocks strikes thirteen over and over again.

And then she sees it. She sees the origin.

The house is younger then. More vibrant and gleaming. Pure magnificence beyond reason, wrapped in gold leaf and candlelight. Musicians play in the ballroom above while servants move silently below like blood through veins. The entire house glows with that same feverish red light, the obscene warmth of wealth built from suffering.

And at the center of it, him.

Alive. Truly alive. Not flickering or rotting. Not split between centuries. He stands at the top of the staircase with fresh blood covering his hands. So much of it. The crowd below seems not to notice. She sees herself lying dead behind him, her throat opened so deeply her necklace has disappeared. His guests continue dancing around her body without looking. They are smiling too hard and laughing too loudly, as if terror is a refusal of etiquette.

The house was hungry even then. Especially then.

“Please,” he whispers.

He does not speak to the gods. He speaks to something older. An Absence that stands in the corner of the room warping reality. A blind spot that wears different faces: child, priest, lover, corpse. It is not a guest. It is a hole the bargain left behind. And, it is infinitely bored of this man’s pleas. He offered the very scaffolding of their lives and all the weight of their years. Just to keep her by his side. Love preserved beyond death. The kind of promise that sounds merciful until it is granted.

The house, which had spent a century being nothing but indifferent stone, felt the first itch of a heart beat. It liked the feeling. It began to eat the minutes to keep that borrowed pulse thudding. Devouring their future to preserve a single, suspended second. It knotted its fingers around their breath, anchoring their lives into the foundations, and never let go. The candles extinguish, and darkness rises from the floorboards. The staircase groans with pleasure as it drinks the blood from his hands.

The dead woman on the floor inhales. At that exact moment, every clock inside the house stops. The leaves begin falling indoors. Endlessly.

The vision convulses again. Now she sees another version. The house is decades older. Floodwater swallows the lower steps. They are both kneeling in the dark.

“You said this would end,” she whispers.

His expression cracks open. He has heard those words in every century. The Absence is always near them, a stain on every timeline. Patient. Waiting.

“You asked for eternity,” it says, the voice coming from the walls themselves.

“No.” the man answers weakly. “I asked for time.”

The staircase laughs from deep within the earth, where unfinished versions of them still writhe together.

The truth enters her like a blade. The bargain was never meant to save them. It was meant to ensure they would never exist in a world without each other again. The house obeyed literally. Across every lifetime. Every death. Every failed escape. It kept finding them. Dragging alternate versions of their souls back through splintered timelines whenever one of them tried to leave first. It rebuilt and rearranged them. And relentlessly, returned them to that same spiral staircase.

Nothing here is allowed to finish. Not grief. Not love. Especially not endings.

The red light deepens. The staircase begins moving beneath her, each step contracting like vertebrae flexing beneath muscle and skin. The banisters bend inward with intimate hunger.

The leaves begin circling her. One brushes against her throat and catches in her hair. One drags across her lips like a kiss. She does not fight them. Resistance is only another corridor the house has already memorized. The leaves tighten their orbit and wind rises from nowhere. Her hair lifts around her face and the leaves begin winding around her throat like a necklace. A noose.

Above her, versions of him appear simultaneously. He is young, old, burning, and sunken hollow. They are all descending together, their footsteps heavy and synchronized.

“I tried to let you die,” the most solid version sobs. “I could not bear it.” He does not speak of her pain, only his own empty rooms.

Each image of the man repeats the fragments in sputtered bursts. “I tried to let you die.” His voice breaks apart across a thousand versions of the same night.

But she barely hears him, in any state. The leaves tighten and she feels the familiar temptation of simply remaining. Becoming another piece of broken furniture fueling the heart of the house.

Beneath the staircase, the house breathes in ecstasy. It knows that soon, they will choose each other again and restart the charade. They always do.

And every time they do, another timeline splits open. Another version of reality rotting around the wound. Another layer of their ghosts added to the staircase forever.

She sees all their lives at once.

Wedding veils. Funeral shrouds. War zones. Hospitals. Ballrooms. Burning ships. Empty apartments. Ancient kingdoms. Futures of neon and mushroom clouds. In every lifetime, reaching for each other. In every lifetime, horror follows.

But, for the first time in a thousand lifetimes, she opens her eyes and looks not at the versions of him, but at the staircase itself. She reaches out and catches a falling maple leaf, crushing it in her palm. It bleeds.

She understands now. The house is not just feeding on their love. It is feeding on her silence.

Autumn forever. The last beautiful thing before a winter that never comes.

“Enough,” she whispers.

The word is small, but it sounds like bone snapping. The music in the ballroom above sputters and dies. The Absence, always waiting in the corner, tilts its head.

And she stands.

Her legs are weak and the stone floor is slick with rot, but she stands. Above her, the versions of him stop their descent. They watch her with eyes wide, terrified by the deviation in the script.

“You made a bargain for time,” she says, looking up at the man who has broken the world to keep her. “But you forgot that time belongs to the one who endures it.”

She does not run for the door. She begins to climb.

She walks deeper into the spiral, moving toward the source of the decay. With every step, she presses her hands against the pulsating wallpaper, feeling the frost in her bones vibrate against the veins in the walls. She is not escaping the nightmare. She is becoming the center.

The leaves do not choke her now. They follow her and swirl around her feet like a loyal pack of hounds, their sharp edges cutting into the wood as she passes. The house groans again, but the sound has changed. There is a shudder of recognition. A broken pattern. A change in the weather.

When she reaches the man, she takes his hand, her grip cold and fixed with the strength of the foundation itself. She carries her anger like a stone, but uses it only to steady her resolve.

“You were so afraid of the unknown in the dark,” she says, her voice echoing through every timeline simultaneously. “But look at me now, my love. There is nothing in this house more monstrous than me.”

She closes her eyes and forces the house to settle. She does not just stop the decades, she breaks them. She reaches into the wreckage of a fallen mirror, catching a shard that has held a thousand versions of her face. She drives the glass through every hour, pinning the clocks into a permanent, jagged silence. The glamour vanishes, leaving only the damp, honest decay of the truth.

He wanted a miracle. She gives him a beautiful death. She chooses the winter that was always meant to follow.

She pulls the autumn leaves inward, shrouding them both until they are a cocoon of wet burgundy and copper. She anchors them to the center of the spiral, rooting her soul into the very wood of the house he bought for her. She is the Absence, she is the house, and she is the clock.

Outside the wind stops. Inside, the last leaf finally touches the floor. The bargain is finished and the house is silent. She lets him go. Not out in the world, but into her. Into the silent, freezing dark where the Absence used to wait. She opens her grip and allows their lives to bleed into the marble and the leaves, until there is no longer a ‘her’ to suffer or a ‘him’ to regret. Finally, they are everything. And they are nothing at all.

This story is a culmination of a few things.

It is inspired by ’s photo prompt of the decrepit staircase and an original painting by . I also want to note that I wrote the opening poem as part of a poetry chain I was tagged in by , who provided the first line. Be sure to check out all the rest of their amazing work.

Thank you for being here.

Until next time,

j

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Maybe a fairytale about a door?

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I cannot say where the colors end,

they bend and spill and bend again

It does not begin

it’s already happening

I just arrive late

something swirling

something slips

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

my eyes don’t stop leaking

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

not water

not exactly

something tinted

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

Green-blue seep

chlorophyll dragged through thought

sap catching light on the way down

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

It slithers from my chin

into the floorboards

like it’s done this before

Like I’ve done this before

Or will

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

My edges rounding

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

Skin forgets its assignment

I am bark opened in living rings

counting years that don’t belong to me

but I will keep them anyway

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

The room inhales

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

Walls bloom into paisley veins

curling, uncurling

language I knew before

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

wait

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

The trees are not outside

They move through my teeth

low hum

patient as something

that does not end where I do

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

I taste green

I taste light that waited too long

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

They say don’t look in the mirror

Of course, I do

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

My face won’t quite hold

it gathers, drifts, gathers

into gold

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

beauty still

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

hair lifting, spreading

mane

roots

smoke forgetting which way is up

or knowing better

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

And there

not broken

not whole

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

it’s still happening

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

a woman

arranged in familiar places

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

Her hands hold weight

like they were taught early

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

Her softness stayed through damage

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

The colors breathe, pause, explode

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

Green needle-thin

threading my wrists

pulling something through

I don’t remember choosing

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

Teal thickens in my throat

Blue waits behind my eyelids

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

Not storm

Not still

waiting

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

Breath moves

then echoes

then arrives late

Or early?

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

Time misfires

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

A child’s voice

in my mouth

reading something out loud

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

TAKE A LOOK

the walls pulse

it’s in a book

the trees get louder

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

Reading Rainbow

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

no

it doesn’t go

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

The words smear into the walls

looping

bright

too bright

a smile that doesn’t match the room

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

Butterly in the sky

something in me lifts with it

or gets pulled

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

I can go twice as high

the ceiling lowers

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

Take a look

my hands are smaller

no, older

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

it’s in a

the sentence won’t finish

it keeps trying

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

The leaking never stopped

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

It moves through whispering now

as if it was always meant to

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

Paths open where it passes

thin, branching

linking what was never touched

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

Voices move through my hands

Names bubble, graffiti behind my lashes

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

I am small enough

to be carried through it

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

I am w i d e enough

to

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

A flinch without cause

Love without center

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

Roots

threads

chords

something between

moving without direction

and arriving anyway

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

The air hovers, drawn closer still

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

Soft

too soft

a cocoon

or a mouth

or both

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

Something gives

almost breaking

almost opening

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

making room

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

I could lift

or I already have

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

TAKE A LOOK

it’s in a book

Reading Rainbow

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

no

they’re inside

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

Reading

my hands don’t end where I think

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

Rainbow

they keep going

through

but not all the way

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

I can’t remember how it ends

because it doesn’t

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

it bleeds into color

it remembers me

and keeps pouring

through my eyes

Press play - Playing with bubbles in the yard

This was written in response to ’s Surreal Saturdays photo prompt seen above. In keeping with the theme, I offer no explanation. :)

Thanks for being here.

Until next time,

j

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The adults were hollow, they grunted in chores,

Locked in the logic of senseless stone wars.

But night brought the darkness, the spilling of shames,

Of secrets too bitter to carry as names.

They whispered their venom to moonlight and air,

Leaving the children to carry what no one should bear.

There was a girl named Esme,
who kept what was never hers,
the muttered sharp-edged fragments,
the swallowed almost-words,
the secrets that slipped from mouths at night
like smoke with nowhere else to go.

Her village was loud in all the wrong ways.
Not with music. No, never that.
It was loud with the scrape of stone against stone,
the sigh of backs shaped by labor,
the low, bitter chorus of people
who had forgotten why.

They moved the stones as they always had,
as though preparing for a war
no one remembered beginning,
as though meaning itself might return
through enough repetition.

Morning to dusk, dusk to morning,
back and forth like a story
told so many times
it had worn its own meaning smooth.

No one asked.
Questions had long since gone missing
from the shape of their lives.

They hated it.
Of course they did.
But they held that hatred close,
something small and burning
they could still call their own.

But when the Moon rose, full and watching,
they gave everything away.

Into the air went the anger,
the shame with no proper name,
the distrust and the gnawing guilt
that had nowhere to settle.

They sent it upward, gladly.
Better the sky than the self.

They did not wonder where it went.

The children did not have such fortune.

It fell on them.

Too heavy for small bones,
too sharp for words still forming.

They woke with feelings that were not their own inside their ribs,
rage that rattled without language,
sorrow that clung, refusing to fall away.
An unyielding weight that burdened them even in sleep.

They did not speak of it.

They had already learned
how to keep their voices small.

But, Esme felt it most of all.
Every jagged edge.
Every trembling weight.

And sweet Luca,
her brother, her second breath,
who reached for her in the night.
She knew he felt it too.

He tossed and turned,
caught in storms that had never been his.

“Esme,” he would whisper,
fingers curled tight around her sleeve,
“Make it stop.”

So she did the only thing she could.

She answered the dark.

At first, a hum, thin as thread.

Then a melody,
stitched together from somewhere older than memory,
something the world had not entirely forgotten.

She sang to the Moon.

Of trees that knew their names before they did,
and sometimes, when the wind moved just right,
she thought she heard the trees whisper back in refrain.

Of rivers that argued and laughed in their rushing like stubborn Aunties,
as if disagreement itself was a kind of kinship,
of earth that did not demand to be understood,
only to be held.

“Is it real?” Luca sighed,
always at the most breathtaking part.

“Yes,” she answered quickly, before she lost her nerve.

And his hand in hers steadied the answer enough to make it true.

She sang of a door in the woods,
not carved, not built,
but grown.

A place where roots parted like curtains,
where the world remembered itself
and let you remember, too.

And as she sang,
the darkness came.

It gathered.
Oh, how it gathered,
pressing close around her,
curling into her chest
like it had found a home.

Esme drew it in with every breath.
All of it.
She held it so it would not settle on the others.

And in holding it, she changed it.
Not into something lighter,
but into something that could move.

It transformed into something that could be carried away
on the back of her song, if only for a moment.

And far beyond the village,
in the space between habit and fear,
something listened.

It had given them the stones,
and the hunger that settled after.
It taught them how to empty their hearts
until nothing remained but what it could feed on.

It did not like Esme.
But it was patient.
It had time.
It always had time.

Years passed,
as they tend to do,
even when nothing else changes.

Esme grew weary with what she carried.
Luca was ever watchful,
always near her like distance itself might take her away.

The adults spoke of better worlds
the way one speaks of distant weather,
interesting, but unreachable.

“How?” they asked.
Always how.
Never why not?

But Esme had begun to see it.
The door.

Not as a song or story,
but as something waiting.

One night, under a Moon
too bright to ignore,
she stood.

“I’m going to find it.”

Luca did not ask what.

“I’m coming with you.”

“Not yet,” she said.

And for once he listened.

Some truths arrive already understood.

The woods were never hidden.
They were simply…
overlooked.

But when Esme stepped between the trees,
the world shifted
and everything expanded somehow,
even her.

“You took your time,”
said something beneath the roots under her feet.

“I didn’t know how to get here,” she blurted, a bit more defiant than she expected.

A ripple moved through the wood like laughter
from something that had been listening a long time.

“You were always on your way.”

A warm breeze swept through the trees,
carrying something sweet and deep
like earth after a summer rainstorm.

She followed it
until she arrived at a door.

The door.

Just like her song.

Not made, not built,
but grown from patience and remembering.

When she stepped through,
the weight was gone.

It was not eased or better managed.

Gone.

She staggered,
like someone who had forgotten
what it meant to be unburdened.

Water greeted her first,
bright and knowing.

“You are late,” it murmured.

“I did not know I was expected.”

“All that lives is already expected,” it replied.
“Everything returns.”

The trees spoke in slow certainties.
The air moved easily through the open space,
as if nothing here ever needed to close itself.

And Esme,
for the first time,
was not holding anything that did not belong.

That was when she understood.

The village was not broken.
It was bound,
not to each other,
but away from each other.

And she,
kind, stubborn, human she,
had been holding the distance in place
by taking the darkness into herself
where it could grow unseen
and never be undone.

She went back.
For Luca.

This time she took his hand.

“It’s real,” she said, out of breath.

“I know,” he answered with a nod.
Of course he did.

When they reached the door,
they stepped through together.

He laughed first,
a startled, crooked sound,
like something long buried
finding its way out.

And together,
they made their plan.

Not a battle.
They would not fight.

They would return with something older.
Something that did not belong to violence.
Something breathing.

The thing that ruled their village
fed on silence,
on secrets,
on the lie of being alone.

So they would give it
the one thing it could not survive.

Truth.

They began with the children.

Led them, one by one,
through root and breath and earth.

The children changed quickest,
as children do
when the world stops lying to them.

They spoke.
They cried.
They laughed,
like it hurt a little.

One reached for another,
uncertain, then certain,
and did not let go.

And back in the village,
the rhythm of the stones faltered.

Then the parents came to the door,
hesitant and shaking
as if hope itself might break them.
Still frightened of wanting more.

Esme did not sing for them.

“Say it,” she told them. “All of it.”

And when the first truth
fell into the open air
and did not destroy the speaker,
the rest followed.

Small truths.
Hard truths.
Terrible, long-buried, freeing truths.

The air changed.

The thing that fed on what had been hidden
began to starve.

It rose up,
thin and unraveling,
whispering separation,
whispering fear,
whispering alone, alone, alone.

But they were not.

They could feel it now,
not as words,
but in their bodies and in the world.

The cords between them,
the steady, living pull
of something shared.

The trees waited.
The water listened.
The earth remembered.

And so did they.

The shadow cracked,
not with a scream,
but with a silence
it could not devour.

It sank back into itself,
not with force,
but with the hollow resignation
that there was nothing left to eat.

The stones still lay in the village.

But no one moved them anymore.

They became places to sit,
to rest,
to laugh,
to remember.

Paths grew where feet chose to wander,
not where they were told.

And at night, under the Moon,
the people of the village still spoke,
but nothing was sent upward to vanish.

Words stayed where they were given.

Grief was shared
until it softened.

Anger was named
until it lost its teeth.

And joy,
strange, bright, unfamiliar at first,
was passed carefully between hands.
Something fragile
they were learning to hold.

The children slept.
Deeply.

Dreaming of roots and rivers
that knew them by name.

Esme stood at the edge of the woods,
Luca beside her,
his shoulder warm against hers.

“Do you think it will come back?” he whispered.

She listened inward
and felt for it,
that old, hollow hunger,
that waiting shadow.

There was nothing there.

Not because it was gone forever.
She knew better than that.
But because there was nowhere left
for it to take hold.

“No,” she replied firmly.
“Not like before.”

The trees swayed gently with approval.
The river answered,
swirling its voice through the rush of water.

The village no longer stood apart from the world.

It moved with it.

Hands in soil,
feet in water,
voices rising and falling
like wind through leaves.

Breath shared between them.

No one carried what they could not hold alone.
No one needed to.

And when the Moon rose, full and watching,
they did not empty their hearts into the sky.

They sang.

Not to escape,
not to endure,
but to always remember.

That they belonged
to one another,
to the living earth beneath them,
to the sacred, ancient magic
that had been waiting all along.

And in that practice of remembering,
they became whole.

This story was written inspired by two prompts: ’s Door in the Woods prompt (pictured above) and ’s Happy Place prompt. I started to type out a long explanation of my happy place and some of my thoughts behind this post, but I think I’ll just leave the story here to speak for itself.

Thanks for being here.

Until next time,

j

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I don’t know why I keep writing about stones lately, but here is another

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You brought the steel of the law,

into a wooden room of hushed voices

At ten years old,

I watched you trim away my identity

with steady hands

✄---------

You did not prune for growth,

you cut to claim

✄---------

A parent on paper

handling my life like a document

to be edited at your will

✄---------

My name fell away,

a sound you refused to carry forward

✄---------

You wanted smoother lines

History shaved clean of its edges

A child tailored into something,

that required fewer questions

✄---------

But you only marked the surface

Beneath it,

the root held

And even now,

the warmth in the weather,

opens it all again

✄---------

Concrete dust

Stale smoke

A garage holding more truth

than anywhere else

✄---------

A train behind the house

moving through silence

like a line drawn and erased

✄---------

And her

My sister with scissors,

the only blade I ever trusted

✄---------

Our own ceremony

✄---------

Nothing sharp about it then

Only the slow falling,

of what did not stay

✄---------

Surrounded by out-of-season holidays

Bags of stone

Laughter bending instead of breaking,

in our dark humor

✄---------

We spoke in fragments

small enough to carry

Making some peace with the pieces

✄---------

Always so sure of yourself,

even as a kid

Shearing your own hair

like practice

Then mine

✄---------

Each pass deliberate

Each strand falling,

as if choosing to leave

✄---------

Not just a cut,

a revival

✄---------

For a moment,

we were children again

✄---------

Not untouched,

but unafraid

✄---------
What you did was not taking

It made space

It was medicine

✄---------

Then came another opening

I could not refuse

Bright

Clinical

Seven layers parted,

under careful hands

✄---------

Me lying beneath the light,

heart nearly louder than the thought

✄---------

Let us live

✄---------

A cut felt in pressure

Held breath, then sound

Proof

✄---------

Everything changed shape

We made it

✄---------

What was taken from me returned as

Everything

My son

My daughter

My Sun and Moon 𖤓 ☽

✄---------

The mark remains,

But it was not a loss,

It was a rearrangement

A heart multiplied and moved outside

✄---------

A door

I would walk through again,

without hesitation

✄---------

And then

with wounds still new,

my sister was gone

all at once

out of sequence

✄---------

Another cut that would not close

✄---------

Not clean

✄---------

Small and large, repeating

Shaping everyday

Life moving through the bleeding anyway

✄---------

My father, gone for years

here again, so briefly

We held what we could of each other

across what had changed

after too long away

✄---------

For a moment,

not repair

Just presence

Enough to recognize

Enough to feel

✄---------

Then he was gone, too

Not continuation

Not release

✄---------

A final cut

No motion in it

✄---------

Grief does not resolve

it wears

it returns

It opens the same place

again and again

✄---------

I carry them like this

in lines that do not end

They stay with me

and speak

✄---------

I have known THE CUT

as control,

as ritual,

as opening,

as loss

✄---------

I am what was cut into me

Oof. I appreciate you sitting with me through this piece. It was written in response to the endlessly wonderful ’s prompt you can find here.

Thank you for being here.

Until next time,

j

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A sky of unblinking lead,

drained of every hue but one:

the housecoat flapping like a patchwork flag,

the knotted scarf holding back her hair

and the world

••●━━━━━━●••

She stands on the edge of the curb,

anchored to a monochrome map by thin sandals

The air is thick with alchemy,

the sharp scent of wood smoke

drifting through a dry, biting draft,

a rebellion of heat in a cold, grey light

Disregarded warnings

••●━━━━━━●••

She does not look up

She is a pendulum that has found its arc,

a clock with no hands

measuring time in the friction of bristles on stone

The broom is too wide,

a heavy industrial weight

meant for factory spills and closing shifts,

but she pushes it

into the mouth of the gale

with the steady pace of a conveyor belt

that doesn’t know the line is empty

••●━━━━━━●••

She shoves the dust into an abyss of air,

but the incline of the wind is too steep

The debris rises in a mocking loop,

r o l l i n g back to her feet

in a cycle of constant arrival and refusal

Nothing is cleared

The concrete holds its ground,

indifferent and stained

Yet she persists with graceful futility,

her eyes fixed

on the circularity,

undisturbed

by the lack of an ending

••●━━━━━━●••

And I, stalling out in a body that won’t settle,

watch from the corner with a tightening chest

I see my own life in the sweep of her arms,

the caretaking, the ache, the persistence

of a summit we will never reach,

a burden that refuses to stay conquered

••●━━━━━━●••

I cannot tell if she is a warning or a sage

Is she hollowed by the repetition,

or has she found the secret,

that the weight simply belongs to us?

As the wind rolls earth back to her toes,

I feel the grit in my own eyes,

though she has not seen me watching,

I adjust my grip on the day

••●━━━━━━●••

We are just two bodies in the grey,

moving against a wind that does not know or care

that we are there

━━━━━━━━━━

🎶 Let it roll. . . 🎶

All rights for the music reserved for the artist.

Contains whistling, so mind the time.

Thanks for being here.

Until next time,

j

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A sudden loss

near darkness

collapsed into distortion

The world misfiles itself

left becomes echo

right becomes rumor

Depth peels away

You blink. . .

and the room inflates

swelling slightly out of place

No longer agreeing to stay fixed

soft tissue and light pressing outward

Nothing holds its shape

Visible,

(contained)

unexplained

Everything rounds at the edges,

as if it has been approved out of urgency

A fever dream with documentation

Calm enough to continue,

But it is all in your head

So you comply

(compartmentalize)

one body crossing thresholds

one body delayed

misaligned

d r a g g i n g the afterimage

You close one eye

to reduce error

still. . .

fish-eyed

Everything just out of view

like you nearly caught it rounding the corner

Words will not hold

letters d r i f t,

overlap

misread, miscounted

Your mind refracts,

instead of reflects

Uncorrected

But it is all in your head

It must be. . .

No one locates the cause,

so it relocates into language

Funny

You continue,

because continuation is implied

But you look fine

Of course you do,

That is what is recorded

Now everything lives at the margins

never central enough for action

People pass through twice

once as body,

once as residue

No one treats the second

Wait and see

Although visible,

a small, untranslatable presence

Acknowledged,

Not urgent

They do not move past naming it

Rehearsed sympathy arrives

formatted

expires on contact

You cannot stabilize into one voice

one complies,

one alarms

both recorded as

anxiety

Continue,

You are handling it so well. . .

If it were me. . .

But, I am me.

And I am now distributed

across incompatible versions

Help

But do not make it singular,

do not make it legible

I am blind

I need help

No answers

No intervention

Everyone is confounded,

but not compelled

Continue, as normal

Record this instead:

No.

This is not resilience

This is documented refusal

Author’s note: The 4-year anniversary of the time I very suddenly and inexplicably lost 90% of the vision in my right eye recently passed. From emergency rooms to specialist consultations, the answer was all the same. Let’s just wait and see. They sort of shrugged me off and told me to just keep doing things I normally do. Maybe it would come back, maybe not. I might need surgery. I might not. My sight was gone for ~6 months before (thankfully) it returned on its own. I still don’t really know what happened. This is the first time I’ve really processed any of that. And while this is about a (small) portion of my own medical trauma, it is sadly not a unique experience. So, this is for all of us going through it.

Thanks for being here.

Until next time,

j

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🎶 You’ve got to eliminate the negative, latch on to the affirmative 🎶

A new world is coming, one drop at a time

The officer didn’t look me in the eye. He looked at the inside of my wrist and then consulted a fan of cards he kept in his breast pocket. He slid one labeled 464 against my arm, nodding sharply.

“Mark him as 464-Alpha and schedule him for the HD Drop Test,” he muttered to the medic. “Let’s see if he can hold the reagent better than the 440s and 450s.”

They didn’t call me by my name after that. I was a living swatch being prepped for a new coat of paint and shipped off to be part of what they called the Suburban Initiative. They marked a circle on my forearm in permanent violet ink and dripped three drops of a clear, heavy oil into the center. It didn’t burn. It actually felt cold. A deep, sickening cold that belonged in the bottom of a well.

“Report to the Initiative, 464-Alpha,” he said, flashing a startling smile of synthetic white. “Consider yourself a pioneer of a very bright future.”

They drove us to a… neighborhood, I guess, for lack of a better word. It felt like it had just been unpacked from a crate that morning. A grid of duplexes sat on a flattened patch of dirt, everything painted in a subdued palette of colors with names like Manifest Destiny Mint and Postwar Primrose. The light was the best part. At least that’s what they told us, but I didn’t trust it. It wasn’t sun. It felt pressurized. A yellow glare that stayed constant from 0600 to 1800 hours, as if the government had bought the sky and installed a dimmer switch to ensure no unapproved shadows survived.

The first few days, my whole body seemed to hold its breath. I walked the concrete paths with the other ‘high potential candidates.’ Other young servicemen like me, whose dark skin had been mapped by the soot of motor pools and the grease of supply lines. The men who labored in the galleys or hauled heavy crates in the night. The ones never meant for the recruitment posters. We weren’t invisible here. They called us patriots. We all stood on our identical porches, looking at our circles, waiting for the war to happen to us. They said it was refinement.

Then, the purple vein started crawling. It started out thin like a sewing thread. Eventually I could feel throbbing while my own pulse tried to catch up. With every heartbeat, the line seemed to stretch wider as it wound its way up my forearm.

I noticed the neighbors changing first.

Arthur was a young guy from Georgia. He was always talking about the red clay of home and the flowering dogwoods and wild ginger he helped his grandfather care for as a kid. I noticed him standing on the pavement near his duplex at noon. He was staring at a vacuum cleaner advertisement in a magazine with a look of religious ecstasy. The purple vein had reached his throat, wrapping around his neck like a royal cravat of pure progress.

Wait, why did I think that? I don’t even know what a cravat is. I know the grit of a heavy engine and the smell of diesel, but I don’t know what progress looks like.

“Arthur?” I called out.

He turned fast. His hollow eyes glinted like plated chrome. “The neighborhood is very efficient, don’t you think, 464-Alpha? I’ve decided I need a second toaster. A man isn’t a man without a backup to ensure total consistency.”

He didn’t sound like Georgia anymore. His voice seemed far away and detached, like a radio announcer selling luxury soap. He sounded like he’d been scrubbed with lye until all that was warm about Arthur was gone. Replaced. By a terrifying flat beige that was so aggressively neutral, it felt like a scream.

By the end of the week, the change spread even further. The neighborhood had become a bizarrely choreographed stage play. My friend Sal, who used to swear in three languages, was now meticulously clipping his grass with a pair of silver scissors. While he snipped, he hummed the tune of a steady march in a flawless, soulless baritone. He didn’t look at me, but I could feel his agitation anytime I was near. To him, I was just a smudge in the scenery. It seemed like no one could really see me anymore.

Somewhere deep, even I was starting to despise the look of me.

Because the special assignment wasn’t about the reagent. It was just the delivery system for the Dream. They were testing how much of us had to burn away before we became the ideal citizens. It would adjust our static, so we could tune into the proper frequency.

Wait…that’s not right. A man is not a radio. But, it felt like someone was twisting a dial in my brain. Turning down the noise of my life until all that was left was a single note.

On Sunday, I sat on my porch watching the neighbors sweeping nonexistent debris from their driveways into the empty street. The purple vein was at my shoulder now. It felt like a hot wire, soldering my memories shut. I tried to picture my father’s face, but all I could see was the sleek, aerodynamic curve of that Ford Super Deluxe they were talking about making. The one that would ‘start the world again.’ I tried to remember the smell of my mother’s kitchen, but the mild scent of Spic and Span was more…correct.

Yes. This was better. Modern. Streamlined.

The vein reached my collarbone. It felt like a zipper closing me into a brand new suit.

Across the street, a technician in a pristine lab coat stood on the sidewalk, checking a stopwatch. He looked at me, then at his clipboard. He didn’t see a soldier. He saw a nearly successful integration.

“Looking sharp, 464,” he called out, his voice oily and encouraging. “Just let it reach the heart. You’ll find the world so much more available then.”

I looked down at my arm. The purple line was humming now, like a tube warming up deep inside a television set. It moved like a determined brass-pronged plug headed for its socket in the center of my chest. I wanted to scream, but my throat felt like it was being lined with velvet and ad space. I looked at the cookie cutter duplexes and, for the first time, I didn’t see an experiment.

I saw a bargain.

I stood up, my back straightening into that military posture I’d never quite mastered until now. My mind filled with a haunting, lovely broadcast I hadn’t heard yet. It was soft and white, like the industry had polished it until it shone.

The vein touched my heart and something clicked.

The glare of the sky didn’t hurt my eyes anymore. It was glorious. It was the brightest thing I had ever seen. I looked at the man in the lab coat and smiled wide, teeth gleaming like a fresh picket fence.

“Sir,” I said, my voice deep, confident, and impeccably manufactured. “I believe I’m ready for my new refrigerator now.”

I didn’t even wait for a response. I turned and walked into my identical house, whistling that song:

The light bleeding into the living room highlighted the spotless new carpets perfectly.

This was an interesting one to write in response to ’s weekly prompt. I actually grew up in a tiny duplex in a square-mile of government-made low cost veteran housing that was built after WWII that looked eerily similar to this image. My grandpa served in the Navy and moved into the neighborhood after the war. I wrote a nonfiction piece about some of the stories he shared with me, which heavily inspired this flash fiction. He was one of the servicemen the U.S. military used in their (then) secret mustard gas trials.1 Maybe I will share the nonfiction piece one day.

The song I reference in the story is “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive” (1944) performed by Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters (you can listen above, though the Ella or Aretha versions are better, in my opinion).

1

For a quick article on the secret mustard gas trials, you can listen to an NPR story here. More and more details have been emerging about the trials so there is a lot more literature about it now. Always happy to recommend more.

---

Thanks for being here.

Until next time,

j

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Eloxochitl (Nahuatl)/ Tsuhyűnsti (Cherokee)/ Katlaha (Choctaw)/ Yùlán/Mùlán (Chinese)/ Mokuren/Kobushi (Japanese)/ Talauma (Kalinago)/ Magnolia (French/English)

Petals laid like funeral silk

over a scaffold of older intent,

not quite wood or bone

but something that remembers both

· · ─ ·𖥸· ─ · ·

They do not answer the storm

They outlast the question

· · ─ ·𖥸· ─ · ·

Their sap keeps a record

written before sweetness had a name,

before the bright buzzing of the bees

When the air pressed close and heavy,

and the earth rehearsed itself in slower forms

· · ─ ·𖥸· ─ · ·

They opened anyway

· · ─ ·𖥸· ─ · ·

Not for song, not for light

But for small armored witnesses

the patient insistence of beetles

Dragging through the silt of pollen and heat

while these elders held their ground

against the slow grinding of plates

· · ─ ·𖥸· ─ · ·

This is how it began

Not beauty, but endurance

Mistaken for an offering

Strength born of survival

· · ─ ·𖥸· ─ · ·

They were ancient in a young world,

rooted in the seams where deep time folds

practicing the long arithmetic of remaining

· · ─ ·𖥸· ─ · ·

Now they bloom like a secret they have agreed to keep

· · ─ ·𖥸· ─ · ·

Call it a private joke

this softness they put on

That hides their truth on their own terms

· · ─ ·𖥸· ─ · ·

They have watched continents loosen

felt the sky revise its color,

stood through the waves of ash

Extinction passed by more than once

and did not think to take them

· · ─ ·𖥸· ─ · ·

So they flower

· · ─ ·𖥸· ─ · ·

Pale, fragrant, almost excessive

As if daring the present to misunderstand

As if daring us to believe

this is fragility

· · ─ ·𖥸· ─ · ·

But the petals are only the surface

of a much older decision

· · ─ ·𖥸· ─ · ·

To persist so completely

it begins to resemble mercy

· · ─ ·𖥸· ─ · ·

And still they stand

unstartled, unhurried

keeping their counsel

· · ─ ·𖥸· ─ · ·

While the rest of the world

tries, again

to become new

Magnolias have always been special to me, but I only recently learned that their fossils pre-date bees and go all the way back to the Cretaceous period. My mind was blown, and what started as a tanka formed into this instead. ’s April prompt ‘courage to bloom’ was also on my mind as I wrote this piece. I included only a few Indigenous names for magnolia in random order at the top. The list is in no way exhaustive. And if you are interested, here is a quick article from the Smithsonian about the long history of magnolias.

Thanks for being here.

Until next time,

j

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Books are time travel

But more than that,

They are translation

A mind made visible

A soul, mapped in language

I. Worlds Beyond the Door

Books are like portals

opening into elsewhere

fantastic adventures unfolding

where dreams can take shape

We walk into worlds

with fully spoken languages,

mythology and origin stories,

maps that stretch farther

than the eye can see

They carry us onward

to dragon-haunted paths and secret quests

We walk beside heroes

Fear the rise of the villains

And feel

somewhere deep

We are both

Time loosens

reality shifts

and now

we are more than we were

We travel across timelines,

across galaxies,

across lands that never existed

until someone imagined them first

The world building, the thought leading

entire realities made from nothing

but ink and belief

They let us see

the wonder and magic

inside someone else’s mind

And for a while,

We live there, too

II. Where Shadows Learn Your Name

But books are also something else

They whisper in echoes

of things with no name

They pull us in behind locked doors

with questions without answers

into rooms that feel too silent

into pages that watch us back

They will enrage us,

unsettle us,

engage every sense

until we can’t look away

We feel it

every bump in the night

the tension building,

the sense that something’s not right

They make monsters

And sometimes

they let us be them, too

We sit with the guilt

With the shame

With the parts of ourselves

We don’t always name

They stretch wide the moment

and hold us inside,

Make us feel every ounce

we try to avoid

And still

we turn the page

III. Where Voices Refuse to Fade

And then,

Books bring us back

Not to where we started,

but to where others have been

Through the spoken word,

through stories passed down,

they tell us of our ancestors,

where we came from,

what was carried before us

They keep us company when we are lonely

They teach us the

wide world

when ours feels

small

They give us new ways to think,

make us feel heard,

less alone,

less strange

We capture it all on the page

so we can live it again

and pass it forward

To those who will come later

To love

To innocence

To guilt

To becoming

To walking long journeys,

to exploring our past,

to sitting with both pain and glory

They remind us

that even in small lives

we shape something vast

That we are connected

across time, across story, across feeling

Coda: The Door That Opens Both Ways

Books are portals

not only to escape

but to return

to remember

They bend time

expand what we feel

expand what we know

expand who we are

They crack the world open

and remind us:

we are creators,

we are connected,

we are

in every story

part of the same whole

If it wasn’t clear, man, I love books. This was such a special prompt from . I highly recommend checking out other writers’ interpretations. It is always amazing to see the different directions people are inspired to travel. Played with the formatting on this one to give it that portal feel - and now we have drop caps!

Thanks for being here.

Until next time,

j

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It fractures where it shouldn’t.

My chest is heavy

Dense with a dread that has no name

And then takes yours

It is you, and it isn’t

The air is thickening now

That uneasy weight before the sky splits

I keep writing about the seasons like they are a language I still speak

But I’m only watching the pressure drop

Waiting for the shift in the atmosphere

New information salting old wounds

I am feeling too much

After years of stasis it all fractured

Cracking like thunder over the water

It makes me feel broken

I am.

But also, fuck that

It’s cyclical

It is nature

Still, it feels like the electricity before the strike

And I am even further away than that

Happiness is the most unsettling thing of all

A sky full of that strange teal light

I don’t trust the glow

It feels like a trap

The breathless silence

Before the wind starts to howl

I am organic, but hollow

Wooden

Full of rings that mark each year

In the shape of a person who survives

I rely on the weather to tell me I exist

The first cold drop hits my skin and I think:

Okay. This is happening

I am happening

And so are you

But you aren’t

You are a lost signal in the rumble

A frequency dissolved in the oncoming gale

A tension I still feel

But cannot place

I never held much space

For anything

But you

There is no room in me for me

So I let the squall take it

The horizon holds what we cannot

Hidden

Behind the shelf cloud

Storing the parts of me

Too heavy to weather this

I break myself

On instinct

Not in any dramatic way

But in a carelessness

That hardens things

The way a storm enforces the land

I need the feedback

To recalibrate my senses

I need the proof

The nerves still work

This is for you

And it isn’t

It’s art, and it is nothing

The rain is coming

I hate this

I love you

I am standing in the path of it

Watching the trees bend

Under a sky I don’t recognize anymore

A tempest that never fully passes

I don’t tend to explain my poetry very much. But this came to me when I sat with ’s Thirty Nights of Possessed Writing post for day seven. It mirrors the heaviness I have been feeling and also the Midwest’s spring weather. I left it mostly unedited.

Thanks for being here.

Until next time,

j

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All words, artwork, and photos my own.

3/1/26

endless carousel: 🎠

children, hide your eyes!

the whirl of pastel night mares,

whispers day and night

young ones, look away!

lest you join their baleful ride,

hush now, cross your heart

3/1/26

hung low, adoring

basking in each other’s gaze

love birds and the moon

3/2/26

Whatever you have been holding onto

That isn’t yours to carry,

Drop it

As the moon rises gilded and turns to rust,

Feel the shift in your own blood

Transformation is a cellular demand

Let it go

Let it go.

The Blood Moon insists

3/5/26

A bit of me in 10-words:

Beyond dimly lit archives, her wilder words bloom in sun.

3/8/26

emerging for light

aconite, sedum, and I

bright, but still drowsy

3/8/26

we did it:

cotton candy clouds

for all the daylight we saved

rosy gratitude 🩷

3/9/26

otherworldly view

glowing green against deep blue

wait, take me with you

3/11/26

let me yearn for you

both of us so entangled

alive with the fire

3/11/26

not quite Spring:

though I long for warmth

the hushed tones March snow offers

provide their own peace

3/13/26

That this moment is enough,

A paired distillation of the same flavor

Most will evaporate, but damn, you still savor,

The tincture of shared shadow, the pull of the weight

The salt of two souls in their fluid state

3/14/26:

trying to get excited for spring (ink sketch, digitally colored)

3/16/26:

Snow day (acrylics and ink)

3/17/26

curled up in my lap

worn from the weight of the day

hope gently slumbers

3/18/26

very nearly spring

oh, the allure of March plans

fools me every time

3/20/26

equinox:

sending hope in steam

this celestial equator

to bring sweeter fruit

3/21/26

neighborhood sphinx:

answer my riddle

though I hall give you no clue

where the hell am I?

3/22/26

calcified patchwork

each of us g r i n n i n g inside

mosaics of bone

3/23/26

Cinquain: 🐦‍⬛

Coven

Ink-stained, sharp eyes

Offering silvered verse

Casting shadows on the pale sky

Sisters

3/23/26

Four word story:

The crows laughed last.

3/25/26

sleepless moonstone sky

glitters in its subtle glow

keeps me company

3/27/26

cemetery fruteria/back home on the south side 🥭

selling near the gates

mangos six for five dollars

a sweet distraction

3/28/26

I am trying to listen more,

but hear less

I want the words to flow o u t

so they don’t live in my head

but they get stuck

suspended

in dissociative synapses

where I watch

my life from the ceiling

a flickering projection

blip/ in

blip/ out

3/29/26

more crows🐦‍⬛

love as the crow flies

rushing to connect our dots

ignoring red flags

3/29/26

Sunday:

cedar tea from home

wood smoke in the air calls me

plodding slowly on

3/29/26

striped Lebanon squill

puschkinia scilloides

welcome, sweet stardrift

3/29026

Friendship in Four Words:

An eternal inside joke.

3/30/26

like entangled roots

we gather strength in darkness

digging deep to bloom

3/30/26

free flowing thoughts, fun!

let them flood my synapses

cleansing sweet relief

3/30/26

very nearly full

pale stone softly shimmering

as pastel light fades

3/31/26

Ten Heavy Words:

The kingless State still demanded a subject’s sacrifice as tribute.

March felt like a very long month.

Thanks for being here.

Until next time,

j

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“See the Duke and Duchess watching?” The Cat whispered with a leer.

“They love a goodly funeral, it’s their favorite time of year.

They’ve got their gin and grievances, they’re waiting for the end,

So don’t you dare survive it, or you’ll have no one to offend.”

But Alice found the jagged spin, the twitching, raw delight,

Of dancing through the greenery and setting it alight.

This story is a continuation of my first short fiction piece, Merry Un-Birthday. If you have not read it yet, check it out here: 

And away we go.

The Maze did not merely exist. It digested. It was a sprawling, leafy labyrinth of generational malice infused with a tangle of rusted knitting needles and shards of porcelain. Thorny rose bushes that bled strawberry jam and misery lined its path, held together by the calculated neglect of the Duchess and her Duke. Outside, the sun blazed like an enraged tyrant who was feeling ignored. Inside, the temperature dropped with the sudden, wet thud of a heavy cellar door.

I moved through the corridors with the gait of a woman who had spent a lifetime carrying her heart outside her body, frantically balanced in two open palms like a gruesome game of Pass the Parcel. My tattered pinafore hung spattered around me, a Jackson Pollock of singed tea leaves and I told you so’s.

The hedges remembered me. Of course they did. I had taught them how to behave.

“Edges clean,” I’d whisper, shears trembling in my soft, obedient hands. “No reaching. No swallowing. No teeth.” And they had listened. In the way things listen, full of pity, when you are small and afraid and trying very hard to be good.

But now? Now they leaned in, breathing. The Maze exhaled something toxic and green. It felt uncomfortable and vaguely apologetic, like a drunk relative at a funeral. It was all wrong. The symmetry was gone, which is to say it was telling the truth now.

“Alright,” I muttered, stepping past a hedge that tried to lick my wrist. “We’re not doing manners anymore.”

A laugh bloomed from up above, slow and peeling, like paint off a rotted wall. “Well, that’s one way to do it.”

I didn’t bother to look up. Looking directly at my problems had never really improved them.

A grin assembled itself in the branches. Teeth first, then the rest followed like an afterthought. The Cheshire Cat lounged atop a hedge made of petrified screams, filing a claw with a fragment of something that looked a lot like bone.

“Oh, Alice,” he purred. His eyes shone like chaotic disco balls of teal and sulfur. “You’ve redecorated. I adore what you’ve done with the decay. Very freeing. Very feral.”

“Let it go,” I huffed. “I’m taking my sister back from the center.”

“The Golden One?” The Cat licked a semi-transparent paw. “You are much too late, darling. The Maze finally collected its tithe. The Duchess decided a sister is much easier to manage once she has been potted and pruned. She has been mulched down to keep the shadows tall.” He slunk down from the hedgerow. “No one does passive-aggressive quite like family. Or flora.”

All at once, the Vastness rose in my chest. The tidal wave of ache that the Duchess had always categorized as a defect. To her, my soul was a leaky faucet. A flood risk. To the Maze, it was a gourmet meal.

“We were born into these roots,” I hissed, kicking at a twisted one that bore a silver thimble, suspiciously like a human finger. “Swapped for polished pebbles and empty promises by people who should have known better. I’m the girl who shattered the Looking Glass, Cat. Now move, or I’ll turn you into a tea cozy”

“How brave,” the Cat chuckled, appearing at my side. His tail flicked in time with a discordant piano that was half-sunk into the dirt. One key depressed itself with a tinny, stubborn plink.

My chest caved. “She used to dance,” I whispered.

“Charming,” the Cat said softly. Not mocking, for once, which was somehow worse. “But you couldn’t even save yourself, dear. You were a child with pruning shears, not a god. You reached through the needles for years offering softness, and she reached back with a hand that was half-claws. You both played the Maze’s favorite game: ‘Is it a Hug or a Trap?’”

He somehow g r i n n e d even wider, which seemed anatomically irresponsible. “She became the Maze, Alice. She learned the glamour of the hedge. She saw you through borrowed iron eyes, as a smudge on the emerald perfection. Why save a sister who turned herself into a topiary full of razor blades?”

“Because we were children! At least we should have been!”

My scream caused the hedges to recoil, revealing a path littered with EAT ME wrappers and scattered rose petals. “If I am the fire in the water, then I will flood this all with flame.” I felt my anger stretching, as if my head bumped against the violent haze of the strange sky. The Maze felt suddenly small. A pathetic box of twigs at my feet. And I was a giant with a match.

The Cat vanished, leaving only his grin behind to mock the concept of a straight line. “Fire is such a crude way to edit a map, I love it!” His voice echoed into the air. “But do be careful. The Duchess and her Duke are watching from the balcony, Alice. They hunger for a good tragedy. It’s the only time they get to feel superior. Don’t disappoint them by surviving.”

The hedges parted, reluctantly, like lips around a secret. I didn’t look back, I couldn’t. Instead, I decided to dance. A jagged, twitching middle-finger of movement. As I spun, the Vastness spilled out of my chest. It wasn’t a burden anymore. It was high-octane fuel.

I reached the center, where the Golden One sat encased in briars. Her hair a halo of iridescent bramble and her eyes cold as the stones they’d been traded for. I didn’t offer my hand. I struck a match.

“Wake up, Sister,” I lilted, my voice a roar of mad energy as the flames erupted around us. “The tea party ended ages ago. The Duchess is out of gin. And I’ve decided to clean up with a controlled burn.”

The Cheshire Cat reappeared for a second, toasted by the heat and looking delighted. “Controlled?!” He snickered. “Mind the eyebrows, Alice! We’re all mad here, but we needn’t be singed!” He batted a flaming branch away from my head with a translucent paw before he vanished into the soot.

I grabbed my sister’s clawed hand and yanked hard. The Maze groaned, its roots screaming as the green walls collapsed into glowing charcoal. As I dragged her along, I offered her my cracked tea cup filled with nothing but the cool, dark air of the exit.

“Merry Un-Birthday, Sister,” I grinned, the madness bouncing off of both of us in our haste. “Ignore the Cat. Let’s go see if the Duchess and her Duke are flammable, too.”

This was another amazing prompt from . As soon as I saw it, I knew it was time for Alice to have another adventure.

Thanks for being here.

Until next time,

j

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The knots are loosening. Ancient joints of oak and iron finally surrendering their grip on the myth of wholeness. The sealed away. The safe.

For an age, I was a silhouette of avoidance. A relic of denial standing against the dark edge of the forest. But the dreams have arrived. Ambiguous. Tugging at my hearth, reminding me that to be seen is not the same as to be understood. To be lived in.

The world out there is wrapped in soft blankets of wildflowers. Yet, there you are. Drowning out the birdsong with enforced walls. You have forgotten the scent of jasmine in the air. The way you can almost taste the first warm breeze when it lingers on your lips. But me?

I am exposed.

I am a body of stone learning the glory of the atmosphere. And I am tired of being a monument. Weary from these straight lines and hollow rooms. For decades I stood behind my own facade, convinced that to be complete meant to be impenetrable. But now I am learning the art of falling apart.

I want to be the overgrowth. I want to be the moss that forgets the boundary of the door and the wild violets that do not bother with the burden of time. They tell me I should stay upright. Sturdy in the routine of the seasons. As if love does not speak in masonry.

People see my jaggedness and call it haunting. I call it perseverance. I have stopped shaming the cracks. Even architecture suffers losses. And grief is not a structural failure. It is a collaboration with nature. It arrives both slowly and all at once. Like water. Like fire. Like air through trees, howling through the windows. It is the storm that breaks the floor to find the earth below.

You cannot fix the rain.

So instead, I let the weather sit in my halls. The heat. The cold. I let discomfort move through the corridors until it is no longer an outside force. It is a reclamation of my own wilderness. The ivy climbs my throat now. Untamed and honest in its embrace. Holding me together in the places where I broke.

I am a sanctuary for the unmade. The taboo. The owls nest in my rafters because I have stopped pretending to be separate. Other. That faulty divide is a specter that has finally gone. In its place there is the smell of wet soil. The vibration of the stars. The deep sigh of relief when you finally stop fighting the sky.

Let me be a beacon of both the divine and the decayed. A miracle of architecture and light. I am not a ruin. I am the place where the world finally got in.

My favorite library in the falling snow

I appreciate you reading. This piece was written in response to photo prompt.

Thanks for being here.

Until next time,

j

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Don’t share the music, don’t let them in,

They change the frequency under the skin

So I guard the bridge, I guard the hook,

I keep my favorites in a closed-up book

Because I know how the alchemy works,

How a person’s shadow suddenly lurks

Even in the upbeat tempos of a summer track,

And once they take over, you can’t get them back

[Skip]

Before the first chord can land

[Skip]

Before I see the shape of your hand

A frantic panic, a saving grace,

Before the memory bleeds into bass

Because the beat drops,

And the volume starts rising

And the refrain is there…

[Skip]

Surprisingly agonizing

[Skip]

I once embodied these rhymes and this scale,

But now the melody feels paper-thin and pale

You took the golden and left behind blue,

Now I don’t hear a chorus, it’s only you

Now I’m lost in the dissociative hum,

Waiting for a crescendo that will never come

[Skip]

The almost-was of the story we told

[Skip]

The potential that turned these harmonies cold

If I share the music, I give them the key,

To rewrite the parts that belonged to me

So I sit in the static, feel the waves in the air,

Because the song I loved is no longer there

It’s just a ghost in a rhythmic cage,

[Skip]

A smudged bar of notes on my favorite page

I hold on tight to the control I have left,

Stop.

A silent room from a beautiful theft

Note: I have been feeling lyrical because I have been singing more and coming up with melodies again. It made me think about how dangerous it can be to share your favorite songs with others. If you aren’t cautious, you could be connecting them to the music forever. So be careful out there with your mixtapes…er, I guess, playlists. :) I still share my favorites freely. This poem is all talk.

Thanks for being here.

Until next time,

j

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