Category Archives: Fiction

Songs of the Dead

The following is a spoken word poem that alludes to the rippling framework in which death and indifference function. In place of a final suicide note, this piece is an ode to a childhood full of neglect. It speaks for a young man who never had a voice of his own.

The message that I was trying to get across, through this poem, was that memories never die. Beyond the grave, they echo, haunt, and sing to the living. They sing of a life, of tribulations, of sorrow, and of happiness. Unlike people, memories are impartial, transferable like ink to paper–eternal. However, much like people, they are also easily soiled by the passage of time. The scars they inflict, all the same, are unforgettable. Therefore, this piece is about the burden and destructive nature of such history and what it can amount to. Continue reading →

Yours Truly

My love,

It has been three years since you left me on the docks, blubbering and gasping, feet tangled in nets, scaling a wall of despair. It has been three minutes since I last traced your picture with my hands.

At night, even though I know that you are three oceans away, I sometimes feel the phantom of your body lying next to mine–a phantom warmth. It presses against my back, spooning me, as my mind wanders to thoughts of you.

The would haves, the should haves, the could haves–sweet nothings whispered into my pillow. The words buzz around in my head like bees, producing honey, a sickly sap that slows thought, moving time at the rate of cold molasses. The nights stretch out for days, and before I know it a lifetime has passed. To fill in the ceaseless passage of seconds thought unending, I write sonnets expressing love, novels condoning bereavement , and eulogies recalling forgotten kisses on sunswept plains. I mail you my works in moments of unconsciousness, over the precipice of reality and in through the threshold of the abstract, stamping them with emblems of tears; telepathically communicating to you. In my dreams I send to you my thoughts and prayers.

Three of your friends have returned home from war today, while three more just enlisted. I had no tears to spare for them, neither in greeting nor in farewell, as my concerns and sentiments remain bounded to you.

My entire existence is a contradiction. Hating yet crying over you just makes me hate myself more. It seems as if every three seconds I fluctuate between decrepitude and infatuation. I hate that you make me feel so open to attack, so rooted in ambivalence that I have begun to doubt everything from my reflection in the mirror to the rock on my finger. I can’t sate this burning inferno any longer, the heat is too painful to bear. As time passes the memories of our life together waft up in vapor, escaping me as I slowly forget why I love you and sow a seed of resentment.

I don’t want to forget.

There are only three words that can bring me any comfort, and despite how selfish they may be, I ask of you to indulge me this one last time. Although they might not hold any truth whatsoever, I need to see these characters scrawled out before me, crafted in your bold arches and pregnant pauses. For this one last time, I want you to lie to me.

I need you to reply:   I’m    coming    home.

 

Yours Truly,

Joyce

The Expanse of Green

Belize Backroads

 

The rush of cold air as I accelerate through the night is always a welcome relief from the conventionality of suburban life. The open roads are a stark contrast to the narrow walkways of my neighborhood streets. Here I can practically taste the frost that caps the frozen blades of grass, each blade unique, deformed in its own special way, yet still part of the stitching of the expansive green blanket that protects me from the hardness of the earth.

It seems as if the endless expanse of green is the only freedom that this open roads has in common with my suburban lifestyle. A part of my home that I do not absolutely despise. The grass serves as a reminder of the safety of my norm. Of the Sundays on the dusty pews of the neighborhood church, of the Saturdays basking in the heat of the barbeque. Strange, now that I think about it—all I have been doing lately is thinking—the grass was always there. When I was seven and the handles of my shiny new bike shuddered under my grip, the promise of the ground had been so unrelenting, the sky fleeting. But, as I tipped over, to my greatest joy and surprise I was welcomed into the embrace of the expansive green of the blanket that I had overlooked my entire life.

It still makes me wonder what else I have overlooked… Continue reading →

every John has his Rose

The following is a short fiction piece incorporating several
 of the items and concepts from a scavenger hunt list 
that I completed in the month of September.





John was a man with many demons. Since childhood, they followed him around no matter what lengths he went through to escape from them, no matter how many oceans he crossed. They knew exactly how find him, how to toy with his mind, how to slam his self-worth through a cheese grater and successfully convince him that he was still whole—that he was still a man.


At the age of twenty-five, John couldn’t take the torture anymore. Every day it was the same sound. The ticking of the clock as the seconds went by, the ringing of telephone lines, the aggression of the typing, the gulping of the coffee, the desperation of the sighs, the confines of the walls, the people—the shells. The cycle was so loud, that he would put a probing finger to his ear every hour, always surprised when he never felt the dampness of blood. He was a man slowly dying, and no prayer would provide him any solace. So he found it at the bottom of a bottle.


 Continue reading →