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of storms and skysee my hair dance wild as wind-strings jerk it about//hear the ocean-wind heave itself against us all- crashing into our eyes and mouth//feel the winter-wind brush our skins in summer//then inhale the heaviness of air and sink through the dirt- because darling, you don’t deserve god’s beautiful violence.

(it drags the tree by its leaves saying kiss your trunk, kiss it and it does; releasing with a snap. the other trees flitter-flutter violently, crying within the cacophony of rain on concrete. white stars fall where light exists, and only sound where it disappears. the sky -the colour of sunburnt skin- watches it all with hunger. a

sickDeath slouches over the edge of her bed, licking his lips as he caresses her thighs. He sings the noise of wind and rain crashing all around and her head throbs with the sound. Her head is hot. Her forehead is on fire and her cheeks catch alight with it. She burns silently and sees red, red, black.

Tiny insects have crawled beneath her fingernails and they dig with tiny claws and teeth until they are swarming beneath her skin, biting outward at her flesh. Each vertebrae carries bruises and as she tosses her body about the bed they ache loudly and sharply.

All the heat has rushed to her face, her body shakes like a leaf in wind and goosebump

flesh puzzlesIn the beginning it was enough. I’d be wide-eyed, quietly watching her through the windows. Limbs and torso like a slender tree; bowing in wind and always shooting up toward the sun. She’d wear summer skin in the middle of winter with freckles spoiling her shoulders and cheekbones. Her birthmark was a dull red stain at her collarbone and she had a mole beneath her left breast. She was thirteen and I thirty, but my, oh my, did I ache to see her insides.

The house next door they called the sea house because it was two stories of cerulean blue. Through my bedroom window I could see naught but an empty bedroom. But late September the P

you can't feel through fabrictonight the rain becomes the earth
falling from hidden spaces in the sky and swollen clouds
i hear it make mud of dirt, and lovers of friends
and ask, quiet, where are you going but down?

i’m not all there in the head
you’re not all there in the head, my mother says
i’m not all there in the head i repeat
sometimes i’m there in my toes and fingers and heart as well

and now - in this downpour moment- i lie on the street
so warm that i think well that’s where love’s gotten to
but where is your shirt n? oh someplace else
and is that a light flickering in the house across the road? hide!

i rush in soaken w

this aprilThe moonlight falls through squinting blinds, bowing softly to hug the arc of his naked body. The blankets are strewn about his toes as a girl, no more than sixteen, lays wide-eyed and warm-bodied beside him.

She silently watches the dreams come and go beneath his eyelids, she quietly feels his chest rise, rise then fall and she listens to the heavy breathing that accompanies it. Beautiful breathing, she thinks, tracing generous lips with fingertips.

The air is cool but she is alight.

Everything in this room bathes in blue shade. She watches the alarm clock beside the bed, numbers coming and going out of fashion before her eyes.

oh the little thingsIt’d be nice if he'd let me breathe. Just inhale a little air to keep my teeth company- maybe even exhale again when they grow tired of one another. You really don’t notice how wonderful it is to breathe until you’re lying stomach down with empty lungs and the creepy man from the corner store sitting on your back.

But what can I say? Not- ‘please get off of my back, I can feel my spine against my stomach and I don’t like it.’ Because I really can feel my spine against my stomach and am breathless to say such. My cheek makes like feet against the wooden floorboards. This man has a whole forest of trees in here! A

strings of pearls and breathunderwater they are mermaids. patterns of poolwater-caught sunshine dancing in soft-edged white upon their long legs (tails). red hair like ocean fire and fingers ever reaching for the bubbles, like pearls but from out their mouths. darting up between their fingers.

there are places here, beneath here, beneath the sound of their mother yelling at their father and the loud rough of the neighbour’s dog’s bark, where they can breathe. breathe the dead leaves in water whirlpools beneath their feet and breathe the chlorine, leaving eyes red and hair green at the tips. breathe the quiet of their bodies and their imagined underwater world

dear diary, today i diedshe's a ghost of a girl in the mirror. dark hair tangles like weeds below her shoulders and cuts at grey eyes. harsh shadows don't leave her with a skeleton like she sometimes hopes, but she feels it in her mind. feels the sharp edges and the trembled fragility, the silent cry for another's flesh and that outward plea of don't break me. cold fingers make love to cold glass while the sky cries over and over for sun.

this afternoon death made to kiss her lips but missed. he'd come so close she now knows what nothing doesn't feel like and she cannot fear it. it's a blankness so removed from consciousness she cannot reach it with thought- but sh

intoxicationi see naked bodies in the gutter as i walk queen street at 3 am. they make love, awkward but warm in the concrete curve. i don't place their clothes. i think it is wonderful though. the heat, the heat.

my entire body is rolling from heavy to light, like the shore. my head is humming and my limbs ache dull. there is a sickness in my stomach or in my throat. i think that maybe my stomach is wanting to force itself out my throat- but i won't have that.

i walk further. there are no straight lines to follow but i picture them in my mind and still cannot walk across them. i trip, tumble on the edge of the pavement and no one sees. the alcohol pul

crashing.'think of yourself as a breath of air,' he tells me. 'compared to the overall atmosphere, you are tiny. insignificant.'

'but someone out there is breathing you in,' he continues. 'they're living off of you. you are the oxygen in their lungs, running through their veins and keeping them alive.'

i think that i'd be the polluted kind of air. the kind nobody wants. the kind that ends up killing people.

but i keep these thoughts inside.

.

'if i fell, would you catch me?' i ask, your fingers cold in mine.

'the crash is never as bad as they make it sound,' he says cryptically.

i take this to mean no.

.

'what do i remind you of?' you ask.

i

leavemedon'tleaveme.you make me sick. you make my stomach fold in on itself and press out against the lining of my flesh. you put lumps in my throat and you tie strings to my tear glands and tug until the world is just a panoply of blurred lines, hazy colour and bokeh.

you made me do this. you put the knife in my fingers and you told me to tear, you said you would care if i hurt myself like this. you said you’d care if i opened my flesh up for you like a gift of blood and flesh and tissue. but you never really did.

i like being small, i like being the blue eyed girl sitting amidst background noise, rubber band arms holding the necks of her legs together.

the fluttered- a collectioni

Hear my joints dislocate, coming apart at the notion of sunlight. It falls and it settles in pictures of loveliness, golden tree branches and hints of leaves; of autumn, of spring.

I am so tall in the water. My legs are never-ending, crooked lines of peachskin- watching my fingers draw out ripples until they strain and buckle and fall into the cool. I’ll touch my toes and loop my figure and I’ll make giant ripples, abhorring fallen leaves and sending shivers of blue through his legs.

It’s a faded crimson red holding my breasts, tugging my hips and leaving my ribcage bare to the current. It’s smudged lipstick and smear

colour blind.She saw him at the park once. He was the colour of dirt; with bird eyes and white, mapped palms. Her little forehead lined as she felt the bile force its way up until her saliva was acid. She counted her toes and bit the inside of her cheek, should she run? Are they fast runners? She figured this one must be if he kept himself out of jail. The dark man flashed a mouthful of pebbles and held out his hand- which would have swallowed hers.

'Don't touch me.'

Her hands were all knuckles and her baby eyes tore into his. He faltered and stepped away, a half mouthed sorry. He looked upset, a grin spread like fire between her dimples.

Suddenly she

picture death.I couldn’t bring myself to bury her.

I couldn’t bring myself to empty the ground of dirt and of earthworms and of the spindly weed roots, and fill in the ochre gap with her body. Her coffee-cream fur held her tiny skeleton from falling out when they hit her. I try not to think of miniature beat-less hearts and mute lungs. I never saw her dead, but I can imagine.

They found her on the median strip. Breathless and still by the endless whoosh of traffic.

In my mind I see Mum’s face; I see her heart throbbing at her feet and her cradling the dog, like a precious baby to her chest. I see the love flowing down her withered cheeks

asthmashe smokes marlboro cigarettes with the bedroom door locked. i taste it on her breath, lips and skin everyday after school. her bed is a mattress on the floor. sometimes we make love on it and i wonder if she'd rather have her mouth around a cigarette than me right then. she has asthma too.

she is my second cousin. i didn't know this until two years after we began fucking and three years after i fell for her. i don't think it really matters. emily says if i ever made her pregnant she'd make me punch her in the stomach, heavy and hard. but i never would you know, i love her.

the smoking is killing her. i hid the cigarettes beneath the sink,

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she sold seashells

by ~Pretty-As-A-Picture, Jan 21, 2009, 6:04:12 AM
Literature / Prose / Fiction / General Fiction

francesca sits at the sill with swarthy legs dangling seaward. their holiday home cliffs off to the heaving ocean and together they sigh in a breathy unison. wind gushes around her, quieting her with a 'shhhhh' and gently suggesting a fall. she licks dry lips and almost succumbs to the wind's murmurs. how easy it would be for her to slip and fall weightlessly into the warm sea that held her as a child.

every april they come here and every may they leave once more. francesca leaves the city behind- and with bottles of sand and broken shells she tries to bring the sea back with her. but inspiring smoke and exhaling city air will never really be breathing, as pavements and bitumen will never be hot sand between her toes.

the ocean does not hide its desire for the girl. it aches to swim across her baked-earth skin and cling to her heavy eyelashes long after she has surfaced. its throbs and crashes against the shore with a reckless yearning. look at that, her mother had sighed once, even the sea has fallen in love with my francesca.
and only the sea has my heart, she had whispered.

arcs of birds skylarking above the horizon cry aloud for the setting sun. it will rise again, francesca tells them, smiling. they break into a birdsong of beautiful girls upon ledges and below water. they sing for her the way she sings for the world in the morn. the sun sets in golden hues and the birdsong stills into the ever susurrus of sea. sun becomes moon. it leaves a pool of white light on her ocean; flickering and flashing bright in the almost-night. she watches with reverence and the world watches back.

she sold seashellsby ~Pretty-As-A-Picture

Literature / Prose / Fiction / General Fiction

my short attention span means myriads of unfinished stories; this is one i started a few nights ago.

i'll try and finish one soon, lover-lys, in the meantime pretend this was meant to be so short or use your imagination and give life to francesca.

exohexoh

love 1 1

~~joy 0 0~~

~~wow 0 0~~

~~mad 0 0~~

~~sad 0 0~~

~~fear 0 0~~

~~neutral 0 0~~

~licoricefactory Mar 14, 2009

That's short but really sweet. It's kind of refreshing to read a piece of yours that doesn't really contain angst. I mean, I love angst. It's actually the genre that I enjoy the most since it can evoke so much emotion but reading a lighthearted piece such as this can also evoke the same amount of feeling albeit more positive.

~Kaeldra-1 Mar 7, 2009

francesca already has so much life in a few short paragraphs. Your words are written like breath is taken in, naturally and beautifully with barely a thought, and then you realize how vital it is and it is awe inspiring.