One Small Lamp Next to the Body
Hastily posted and forever unfinished. A (sort of) poem about losing
I don’t think I can make poetry from this
Your twisted body on the floor
My careful breaths in the dark
The masked cop watching me leave you here
Months my heart stopped before sunrise
Months without sleep
Months without food
Months I drank my days and waited to find you
I can’t make poetry out of it
How I tried to stop it
How I’ll never know if I tried hard enough
My tragic story and my party lines
My boyfriend pulling knots from my hair
As I reached for the razor
Sleeping on the floor
Begging to leave here
Begging not to feel anything anymore
The starting and stopping of healing
I can’t make poetry out of any of it
I’m just one grieving person in a world of grieving people
And it isn’t special
And it isn’t art
It's just me sitting up at night
Remembering what your laugh sounds like
And the brown spot in your eye
And your voice on the phone at night
I can’t turn it into poetry
About the Creator
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In Eclipse Challenge Winners
Creator Dane BH is one of our Vocal stalwarts. We’re so grateful to all of your in our Vocal community, and so thrilled by your achievements. This is the third time Dane has won one of our challenges, and she appears too on our Vocal podcast, Write Here, Write Now — take a listen if you haven’t already. But she’s not our winner because we know her: the subtlety and simplicity of we watched the world go dark. together. is what made it our winner of the In Eclipse challenge, with the grace and ease of its lines and observation. As it happens it also expresses the community spirit that means so much to us.
By Vocal Curation Team6 days ago in Resources
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