Nightmare Associations
"you could die here."
Heat waves ebbing between boots and muddy water.
The sun shining on a beached bass. Your cane pole digging into my right heel, and a laugh that says, “You could die here.” Bloodlust fists that echo the same, a grip that changes my name when your wrapped knuckles squeeze my swan neck. Realizing, I am the bass.
Backshots and incisions.
Your name carved into my sulfur breasts from trying to devour the heart missing. Oil sizzling in a pan down the hall, burning a lonely housewife’s wrist while you become half-blind reaching for the deepest parts of me.
The marks on my dashboard and my alchemized womb.
Fertile promises bloom next to the graveyard, and somehow, I still missed the scythe hidden between your teeth. A mouth full of almost teaches me I was never born: I was always part of you, tortured molecules bumping into one another, searching for the atoms bubbling in your blue fists.
The silence and a wife-size hole in the wall, bleeding into the concrete.
Cracked back of the sidewalk where dandelions grow. Your fingers gingerly laced under my jaw as you counted the wounds on my heart. Who taught you to turn soft things into weapons? If the knife is a metaphor, then why is it in your hand?
Delicate dreams don’t stop to wonder where to grow.
The sacrifice-thrilled gnaw against my flesh that whispers, “I’ll never let you go.”
Escapril prompts featured
Big thank you’s to everyone who keeps me inspired! This weekend during Gather, we wrote leaping poems, and Maria posed the concept of “wild associations.” I tweaked it just a tad to be nightmare ones, oops!
Maria Giesbrecht // theguelphpoet // wild associations
Eleni // elenipoetry // who taught you to turn soft things into weapons
M. L. Macdonald // ml_macdonald_ // mouthful of almosts
Thirty-nine prompts in eleven days. What a time to be alive.
Well written