theysayshannon

[theysayshannon]

Town to Never Visit Again

You left me straight-mouthed. On a day. The sun was feathered. You said goodbyes are for good. You made sure it was true. And then you dissolved. To me. You were blood on the highway. Something destroyed. As everyone sped past. Thick and slick and splattered. Nothing but a stain.

#poem #poetry #poet #writer #writing #creative writing #creativewriting #spilledink #spilledwords #spilled ink #spilled words #goodbye #goodbyes #lovers

[theysayshannon]

We Live Many Lives Through Our Lovers

Whenever I listen to Explosions in the Sky, I am reminded that there was a time when I couldn’t give the summer light up. I was young, but not young enough, and I still bit my nails. I lived in the future, until I didn’t. Actually, I lived in a college dorm. The same dorm I had met my fiancé in. One night, he told me our wedding was off – we wouldn’t get married. Something about my sins because I didn’t believe in god, a god, his god. I still didn’t believe in god as he waved me goodbye, probably hugged me goodbye, I don’t remember anything but goodbye. He goodbye-d me and I thought everything was over. And then I met you, a you who spoke with me, a you who laughed with me, a you who laid me down in the dark and played me a song. We stretched out next to the moonlight that leaned in the window, my dorm room floor our spine. You were the first man I’d ever fallen in love with and I knew that when we laid there, the speakers trembling and your skin a warm blanket against mine while the song enveloped me in that moment, your words were a postage stamp. You could have sent me anywhere and I’d have gone. Wherever you said. We listened to the song for eight minutes before you kissed my skin in a way I had never known. The song was a foaming smithsonite blue. Nights like this were on repeat throughout the summer. Hot days, sun skin, I didn’t have to think about the past. I couldn’t take my hands off you. I was made tousled with your lips. Then you told me one day that you wanted to marry a Christian girl. I was still godless. That day, I’d run through my memories and run through what went wrong. What was wrong with me, and for another month we’d try to make it work, but I would never be your expectation, you know? Me in a navy-blue sundress, a different blue than the song, we decided we were over almost as quick as we started. And then his old echo knocked at my mind, you know, the one before you, and then your new echo knocked at my mind too. You might understand me better if you heard the echoes.   You wrote me letters, praying for my salvation, and I put them in a box like it was something worth saving. I read my dead mom’s old love letters until I finished, last month. it’s been ten years, I still have that box, and I read your letter last month. My husband doesn’t know. Your ear was talking when we laid in-between the sounds of that song, so long ago, and even if we have made it out, into a world much older now, made of much longer time, a world where I no longer bite my nails, I will remember Your Hand in Mind.

#poem #poet #poetry #creativewriting #creative writing #writer #spilled ink #spilled words #spilledink #spilledwords #freeverse #freeversepoem #heartbreak #exes

[theysayshannon]

Short Talk on Mona Lisa

She is a portrait, is she a portrait or a rumor, she's a rumor and she hangs on display in the Louvre, where the tourists go to visit her. They snap photos, purchase mimics in the gift store and forget that she was once a story is she a story or a person, she's a person and she is from Italy where she never got her painting. Passed on from person to person, it was never hers but she's on tshirts, magnets, and bags and she was stolen once, before she was bought by France. Please remember, she used to take baths, eat slices of bread, and I'm sure she's kissed a man. She was a wife once, before a widow. Her mothered body left for song by Nat King Cole and the All-American Rejects and maybe others. Her lyric is kept under strict conditions, she's in a bulletproof glass case. Her skin like porcelain, her skin might break. The Mona Lisa is one of the most valuable paintings in the world.

#poetry #poet #poem #creative writing #creativewriting #spilledink #spilledwords #spilled ink #spilled words #mona lisa #monalisa #woman #womanhood

[theysayshannon]

Where Women Get Their Mouths From

I used to write important things on the wall, depending on who you ask, pulled words from mouths, sacrificed ideas. That is to say, I used to be a teacher.

Now I use words to paint a picture that my boss wants, tell the schools in need what we’ll do for them. I’m a marketing coordinator for an architecture company.

I’ve always been a woman.

It’s not the first time I’ve looked around at work and noticed this. It’s almost entirely women. It’s tables that troubles get placed on, the empty bottle of whiskey, and commands turned into guidance - things you’d like to hear. This is despite the company being made up of more men, or maybe in spite of it. I work in marketing, right next to HR, and I’m surrounded by women who are paid to communicate.

It’s not the first time that I think about how this department is mostly women. Because women are communicators, of course.

They spend their whole lives listening to a litany of complaints, directions for what to do: leave the boys alone (boys will be boys), don’t gain weight (it will sink you like an anchor and you won’t get very far), blue is a boy’s color (someone should have told Mary). We are taught what to do so often that life becomes a quiz, environmental training. Expected responses are the answers, they will work, they will be what get little girls an A, so we learn to communicate.

The office is decorated in colored rubber ducks, kid’s paintings like on the fridge, and loud mouths dressed pretty. Some kind of cross between a playroom and matriarchal house. Women. Be nice, they told us when we were young. So nice we’ll be, in an office full of the only women in the company.

#draft #women #poem #poet #poetry #creativewriting #creative writing #writing #writer #spilled ink #spilled words #spilledink #communication

[theysayshannon]

A Man Like This Seriously Exists in the World

They say that morals are when decisions get undressed and still look good, he said. But they aren't real, this history professor continued, no, decisions never look good on their own accord. Society wraps them   in a Burberry trench coat, so stylish. But decisions don't like Burberry and society's tellin' them to walk around in these coats as if they do. Society will dress these damn decisions and send one or two home with you like a child's been born. Society forcing morals on you. The same history professor also said, women shouldn't have the right to vote because their husbands, they must have husbands, right? Their husbands would use the pen at the voting booth to sign 'I love you' to their wives. A husband would never vote out of his wife's best interest, and if his wife voted too, she'd just clutter the polls. Throw out the wife from the equation and let the man make the decisions. So many people, they are leeches, think everything's easy. They want everything handed to them, they want everything so badly to be out of their control, or in their control, those are really the same thing, and control will hold you hostage. Now will you please hold your questions. I have no answers, I just told you everything I know to be true.

#draft #IDontLikeWhenCreativeWritingProfessorsMakeYouWriteInADifferentStyleForAllOfClass #poem #poet #poetry #writer #writing #creative writing #creativewriting #creativewriter #spilledink #spilled ink #MYHISTORYPROFESSORIN2009ACTUALLYSAIDMORALSDIDNTEXISTANDWOMENSHOULDNTVOTE

[theysayshannon]

Your type:

I will flirt with the idea of it, I will lay it like perfume across my neck which is the closest I’ll get to punishment I will dial its keys and let it ring, but its my tremble on the other end, my curse that answers it was only half past the moon when your eyes sunk and then I’ll lay in bed with your tragedies, my hands wrapped around their throat it’s a conversation they’ll tell me I’m sinking we're both sinking because we’re in the same ship the same spine of a ship and it’s fracturing until we’ve come loose

#draft #poem #poetry #poet #creativewriting #creative writing #writing #writer #spilledink #spilledwords #words #crush

[theysayshannon]

Men Aren’t Even the Worst Problem a Woman Can Have

She thought his bare bones were beautiful but he was too busy using them to build a fortress that keeps her out.

He’d ask her to come over, buy groceries with him. She painted him a gallery wall for his apartment and asked if he liked it. The dog barked and his freezer was full of fake ice cream he ate for meals.

Men let women waste time like it’s currency, like they owe it, and women will pay to have the house built.

#ReadTheTitle #poem #poetry #writing #writer #creative writing #creativewriting #creativewriter #spilledink #spilled ink #spilled words #spilledwords #words #poems #men

[theysayshannon]

a woman whose husband died drowning is now facing water

days roll onto themselves into nights like a pillbug. days are long and tired, treaded, and waterdrops on a page. i'm the leftover stains.

your skin felt like the soft flesh of a peach your skin against my fingers your skin against my tongue your skin was something sweet and then the drip down I could peel your skin with my fingers open you,

the water rung you dry. a compression so close and I stand here the edge the edge of fate my stained self, peel me open, take me.

now here i say take me like you love me too take me like your own.

#abunchofmypoemssmashedinto1really poetry

[theysayshannon]

At the Bottom

Imagine you’re right by me in the row with only twenty-five others on board. A window’s on your left and so you show your cheek, look down at trees, the engine roars and I look at the watch wrapped on your wrist to count the minutes. Your hand waves to ask, “A Bloody Mary, please?�� and I insist on flipping pages: scenes of sand, waves, masts in a travel magazine. I don’t hear the pilot, but we drop, a woman screams something about engine failure and fear. I reach for you, while everyone shrieks. Seems I have to ask, are you all right? I hear more screams, another drop. You don’t say a word.

#atthebottomofeverything #brighteyes #poem

[theysayshannon]

Love Letter Written While Watching the Breaking News in the Evening

Two sofa cushions sagging centered, some

honey rings cast on walls from floor lamps, nets of shadows, family photos hanging in the living room where we are sitting, legs crisscrossed on top of each other, under the rush of sounds that means there’s breaking news. The screen cuts black, to court, a boy threaded orange. It doesn’t matter which boy, no, it could be any boy, his hands against the desk. His lips cut like a superstition, a judge in front. The scene flips back. These are

no ordinary days, the newscaster says on television. He talks about how we can grow a better day tomorrow now, through thoughts and prayers. Some cars go past our front window, the world still shutters. Newscaster’s now standing next to a repeat image from weeks ago, a canvas of carnage, bodies on display. Turn it off, you say

to me. A button tap, the screen pulled closed, an envelope of silence and you draw my name into a whisper beside my ear.

If these are no ordinary days then why do they look like the last. Another sad investigation, while a hand slides up my leg.

I turn my head and kiss you on your lips.

[theysayshannon]

Yellowcard’s or Motion City Soundtrack’s or another band just like them’s concert in a theatre that’s not in Detroit

walk up to the front door

before an old marquee; a line down the block, a building made with bricks.

we get inside and lights are ripping like a crack down the black of the theatre

energy igniting energy a crowd spills bees from the hive surrounded by buzz

we’re at the edge of it all, bleeding into it.

and Vans shoes black jackets piercings like a yearbook the whole place is a ticking time bomb and then

x band says hellooo De troittt! but we’re in Royal Oak or another city like it. They say De-troit’s the best! the crowd cheers.

they say this to every city.

the lights blow a split-lip kiss and the stage is bruised black and the drums break thoughts we’re all in.

A loud synthetic sound, say

what???

[theysayshannon]

I watch the stars with everyone else but destroy them on my own - Richard Yonkers’ By the Light of the Stars

The sky had to detonate like that so I could twist stars between my fingers, into my palms, against my skin. Burn.

Now I stand underneath the fallout’s center, where I am an explanation. Debris kiss me, reflections exchange me, and everyone takes me.

(But) Between where the sea nuzzles the sky, we all misbehave.

Here we are centered, with closed knuckles, sharp lines, a journey sewed shut. We are where we get ourselves tangled in fishing line, feathered bate dipped just beneath the surface - the world barely skimming the top. We are wild

in the way that silence is wild, and still somehow convinced that voices will be what chase us from this flood. The heavens

are still smashed against my hands where they feel soft, underneath the wreckage toft and I will let their heat stain me while I sink the moon and everyone (watches).

#poem #poetry #poet #creative writing #creativewriting #spilled ink #ink #spilledink #spilled words #spilledwords #words #ekphrastic poem #ekphrastic #ekphrastic poetry

[theysayshannon]

ode to my love  - In imitation of “ode to the flute” by Ross Gay

your skin feels like the soft flesh of a peach your skin against my fingers your skin against my tongue makes it sweet like the juice drip down and I can peel you open your skin so delicate I will not bruise the center will not bruise your skin keep it soft my body against your landscape you are ripe your skin ripens beneath me and I will devour your skin like something in season

#its like all the poems ive written before smashed into one #my professor gave very very limited rules which made this one difficult to write #poem #poet #poetry #creative writing #creative writer #writing #writer #skin #peaches #love #sensual #unoriginal

[theysayshannon]

What It Takes to Survive: A History

There’s a swish shuffle crackon the road where Autumn Olives grow. Branchy / silvery and green, they grab the sky / nothing here is nutritious.Its red berries look like the next. I never learned her real name, just that she’s / invasive and her red berries look like the last. If there are multiple seeds / slippery / she calls them a bud.     Buds / appear / when her flowers die, her thorns grow backwards /     they hold onto skin and don’t let go. She’s some kind of rose. And over there the wasp is gone now but / she’s been here / Her tiny eggs left / blooming / in the stem of Golden Rod / implanted / with her sex organ. Golden Rod does not want to birth the wasp-child but the Momma is a parasite / her eggs will balloon in the stem. She won’t tell anyone, but she turned her / organ / into a weapon / and now she’ll sting. Then there’s the Emerald Ash Borer, a tiny pandemic that smashed the forest Ash trees / leaving behind a volume of bare bones. Freckled in from Korea to somewhere in Dearborn, good riddance / Dearborn / and we’re over here now like / Ground Zero Because we have a tradition of fighting invasive species here / ending with practiced wounds / that nothing will eat. And now I’m thinking of the time we, just two girls, walked down this same trail in the dark / behind a twilight yawn / into the debris of tomorrow. An adventure, but we were never Native Americans set fire to the land / the areas that smoldered rewilded / in hopes to destruct invasive species. This I understand. I walk again past the Ash that survived, survived the Borers and the fires and “Hi, Ash.” It’s polite to say the names / to greet them Do your berries look like the rest? / even invasive plants can become native.  

#poem #poet #poetry #creative writing #writing #writer #nature #in the woods #woods #bugs

[theysayshannon]

Hairpin Poems

ALTAR I passed the wrong gravel road at sunrise PALM He let me in the threads of yesterdays HEIRLOOM In my pocket / an address I’ve never used TEASE Hair pulled together with a silk ribbon, nude / skin OFFER She said goodbye at the gas station closed at midnight RIPE You’ve never used your teeth to drink the juice of berries CURSE It was only half past the moon when your eyes sunk QUESTION In a Mexico city you fell through the thick water TASTEFUL She didn’t ask you for your fingers IMITATION I like your wound on this canvas

#poems #poetry #poet #poem #creative writing #creativewriting #spilled ink #spilled in writing #ink #spilledink #writing #writer #hairpin #hairpin turn #shorts #short writing

[theysayshannon]

Pink, Sylvie Baumgartel

[theysayshannon]

I Love You More - In conversation with “Adaption” by Ada Limón

I think about telling my therapist that she, my mom, is the - was the - sharp low-to-the-ground hunt of a crocodile: a breath held under water and a mask of day-crust mud. Like the firm peel of an Autumn Day. She was a sunrise you taste under the Big Dipper: the wrong kind, and she'd stain your soft, diaphragm’s grief with an I love you more. She’d remove you from yourself and leave behind a kill, an open casket eulogy. All the things she has been: cigarette smoke hung on insides of lungs, abandoned alarm howls, plastic wristwatch stuck on the same minute, unhealed divorce fingers, mispronounced flames, a poem she'd never love. All the things she has left: A paper full of death notes - the rules for when she's gone. But All of these things rest when she's coughing up lung. She is: Jewish/Christian/Muslim prayer on a deathbed, butterfly tattoo, Blonde from the bar, too many damn shirts, scrapbooks, shoes. And then in one week, she is a story facedown and I can't tell if I 1. miss it enough. If I 2. miss it at all. If sometimes I 3. miss it more than I should on account of the first two. She's sometimes a catch-your-breath moment. Sometimes a good riddance. Sometimes she's grief-shaped and I know what that looks like but I don't know what it is. I think about telling my therapist that I've never not had a mother. And now she's dead.

#poetry #poem #poet #creative writing #creativewriting #spilled ink #spilledink #spilled words #spilledwords #writing #writer #counseling #death #mothers death #dying #grief