A Rainy Day

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charlottesville, photo, photography, rain, va, virginia

This gallery contains 13 photos.

Summer Sets, Winter Falls: A Sequel

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creative, DPchallenge, fiction, flash, microfiction, poem, poetry, writing

Dianne discovers an origami crane nestled in a high branch of her favorite dogwood tree. She climbs higher than ever to claim it. She almost believes if she falls, the crane will swoop down and carry her away.

She reaches and grasps the crane. She cradles it in her hand. She notices words written across its breast and right wing.

Broken Youth,

Look up, look within.

Hope with tears.

Today,
a light rain begins…
I choose salt.

The work of remembering,
She never felt small by the ocean.

Waves,
The Frustrated Mage

She reads the words quietly to herself and shivers. She recognizes this message as something to her from many…from the universe.

She clasps it to her heart, bows her head, sighs, and smiles her future.

Contact Box collected titles used as title of this piece and poem on crane found at http://cvillewinter.wordpress.com/2013/05/14/title-needed/

Thank you to all who participated!

Photo from site: http://www.etsy.com/listing/110082829/custom-printed-origami-crane-party-picks

http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/05/13/writing-challenge-forms/

Edible Landscaping, Afton, Virginia

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afton, charlottesville, gardening, photo, photography, va, virginia

This gallery contains 22 photos.

Title Needed

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creative, fiction, flash, microfiction, poem, poetry, short, story, writing

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“If youth knew; if age could.”
Sigmund Freud

Maybe it was all the transcendental meditation or chai with which she had doused herself recently that led her to believe she had honed her metaphysical joints enough to leap back into time and talk to her childhood self. Maybe not.

She was no escapist, revisionist, hero, nor radical. She simply wanted things to be different. And, she understood the change must start with her. The rest of the plot seemed up to her.

She spent most of her days feeling helpless or asleep.

She soon began to lose pieces of herself. So, she would cling to pieces of her past which she hoped were true and not myths or nightmares.

Drowsy and desperate, she thought, perhaps, she could offer her former self kindness in a time she remembered as a very painful turning point, her teen years. And, somehow this kindness would break the cycle that had led to her continual despair and constant withdraw into cool sheets of her sleep cave.

She wanted, no, needed the light.

She happened upon this idea as she sat alone by the ocean on the boardwalks of Asbury Park, New Jersey. It was one of the few times, she had been out this year. She never felt small by the ocean. She always felt the freedom to dream huge by the ocean. And, her dreams would become small and palatable next to the seemingly infinite water.

As her despair grew and sleep went on, her dreams diminished and blew away despite her keeping the windows closed and shaded.

Docile fields of milk and honey
or the unpredictable ocean
with its fearsome waves
and unpredictable
riptides.

I choose the salt.

She also felt she was drawn to this mission, because she had succeeded in planting this seed of action in another time. Meaning, she felt she had planted this dream long ago, and all she had to do was remember. It was her fate to find herself and share all she had learned about loving, healing, and tea.

This is not a story about depression, it’s one of desperate reincarnation… and arts and crafts.

“Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Who was her childhood best friend?

She remembered Butterscotch in Virginia winters. She would throw snow balls at him, and he would catch them in his mouth and grin. Scotty, for short, was her golden retriever and first best friend. He taught her what devotion looked like as he thumped his tail only at the sight of her on their old porch in Culpeper.

Her smile dissipated first from her eyes, then her cheeks, then her lips as she slowly remembered the pain she felt when he had been put down due to severe arthritis in his hind legs. She had been out of town, when her father made the decision. She never said good bye.

Maybe, that’s why she never took vacations from work nor said good bye.

Maybe, that’s why she never truly trusted her father with things she loved.

What did her first kiss taste like?

For some reason, she can only remember the strawberry jam she smeared on toast and shoved down this morning.

“Oh, well,” she thought, “I am sure it tasted like my last one– sweet and bitter skinned.”

Honestly, she remembered very little of herself, so she was not sure how to engage. But, she had faith that when she encountered herself, she would remember.

“I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.”
Albert Einstein

“The time for action is now,” she realized.

She laughed at herself as she senses herself feel for her keys before her trip.

Hopefully, not all old habits die hard.

I shan’t bore you with the mechanics of quanta and tea that sent her racing to around fifteen years ago. Suffice it to say, she got there and saw her former self.

It is a bad day.
My head is bent.
I lift nothing.
The sun shines stones.

Universe, say my name,
answer my bonny valentine.

Or, I will bend to break the both of us,
until his neck turns, he slow smiles, and whispers,
“You were always beautiful.”

She saw herself cutting through the strawberry field, taking the short cut home, alone. She remembered how she never dared to taste the wild bursts of red and green. She remembered being painfully aware of their absence on her tongue. Instead, she would pick her way around the untasted fruit like the superstitious or reverent avoid graves in a graveyard.

Her first kiss was here.

A bully became a first, secret love. He threatened her if she told. She didn’t know their words.

There are no strawberries today.

“I go to school the youth to learn the future.”
Robert Frost

She can feel the girl’s pain. All of it rushes over her like a security blanket dipped sticky with cactus flowers and prickers. She feels the uncertainty, the longing, the hatred.

She wonders if the girl can feel her through the miasma of colliding pockets of fear.
She wonders what she feels like. In her hesitation, she senses a lost opportunity.

She runs to her and shouts, “Dianne!”

Dianne’s shoulders tighten as she gathers herself further inward and walks quickly away pretending she has heard nothing.

“Oh no, Dianne doesn’t talk to strangers.”

She must hold onto her secrets longer.

Secret Woman
here to fix the world
one heart wrench at a time.

What is your secret?

Another drop of tear soup?

Love?
Peace?

Self.

She recognizes that her connection with her former self will have to be more subtle. But, how could she teach Dianne indirectly without subterfuge or manipulation?

How do you reach the imprisoned princess who locks her own tower?

She decides that bravery and creativity will lead the way.

If she wants her past to be different, then she must be different.

She writes messages of love and light and litters for the first time in her life. She scatters them where she knows Dianne will walk.

A light rain begins and the notes are now pulp mounds of blankness. Messages of love and light are now messages of trash.

She looks up hoping for at least a rainbow. She sees only dark clouds.

How many rainbow lengths
must I transcend to touch you?

You are the gold
in an age of iron.

“Please see me,”
Ozymandias whispers.

She remembers her favorite shade of purple– a mix of royal and humble eggplant. She paints a sign and posts it on the roadside. The various beeps and reactions scare Dianne, and she runs home to her lonely balcony and braces herself for the next bit of her history.

She is horrified. She only wants to help and drowns Dianne with more self doubt and alienation.

Even a sweet southern breeze filled with magnolia and jasmine can become a stench when accompanied with the scent of odious disappointment.

Feeling she failed, she remembers that disappointment’s conjoined twin is expectation.

“What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew.”
Robert Browning

As the early twilight approaches, she begins to fold a small bit of paper over and over.

She uses the last of her practical magic to teach the paper crane how to fly, hoping Dianne will see, look up, and watch it soar into the ether, and remember her brilliant stardust ways.

She turns before Dianne reacts, hoping.

Older, she awakes and again finds her keys, hoping.

Hoping.

She Remembers

Tags

creative, growing, old, poem, poetry, writing

Why’s it so dark?

Tingling becomes flaming pain.

Close to my-

Am I being born?
Will I make Daddy proud?

The pain worsens.
Weakened,
I involuntarily jerk.

Whose hands are these?

Brown and pink and stale cream,
the colors smeared with time.

I struggle to cover my eyes in a
desperate peek a boo with this
decaying panorama.

Gnarled, cadaverous hands
fall flutter to my sides.

I have awakened to die.

Less Than Home

Tags

charlottesville, creative, homelessness, poem, poetry, virginia, writing

Through three quarter lowered eye lids,
I dream aloud along the river.

Sometimes all is blood red, or
a lone duck attacks my foot.

Sleeping outside
on the shores of the Rivanna
leads to these
chimeras and effrontery.

The river cuts through
the scarlet violence

saying nothing,
offering no hospitality,
playing no favorites,

just ca, ca, ca, cutting
thrusting tears through closing eye cracks.

Telephonic Invasion

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creative, fiction, flash, microfiction, relationships, short, story, writing

I woke this morning blinded by Sunday sunlight. I keep the blinds closed. The cocoon comforts me.

I let my feet touch the cold tiles and followed the sun rays’ warm promises to the window. Another blameless blue day met me with a slow grin. I didn’t want to come out and play. I closed the blinds and went back to bed.

Closing my eyes, I shut our night’s phantom dance away.

Instead, I think of my big brother. How would he have handled your wayward ways? You probably would have stayed with him. He was always pulling in good bad girl trophies with hearts of gold and medium size breasts.

I think I hate you.

Thank you.

I am glad you didn’t pick up.

Then, I noticed I couldn’t feel my sheet’s coolness against my nakedness. Where had you taken it?

So, I got out of bed again and stumbled around my place now foreign, empty, quietly needing. This new gap followed me mincing around my stomach and back pulling at my gut.

Until I found your note on the Chinese food delivery receipt with your number.

I waited until I couldn’t hold my breath any longer.

Moved blinds, lost sheets, a crumpled note are all I have now that you were once mine.

Thank you.

I think I might be in love with you.

I’m glad you didn’t pick up.

http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/05/14/daily-prompt-unconventional-love/

culicidae coitus

Tags

creative, mosquito, nature, poem, poetry, writing

she’s dangerous.

little fly
opened.

vd
vector of disease.

she’s dangerous.

ectoparasite.
she inserts into you.

you will give her what she wants.

she’s dangerous.

you swell,
allergic to her shine.

Sugar and Smoke

Tags

creative, day, fiction, flash, mother's, short, story, writing

“I just wrote a Mother’s Day story in my head,” she exhales her words with her smoke– a terrible habit she shares with her own mother. She glimpses her mother blowing smoke filled bubbles and smiling down at her. Bubbles and smoke that will disappear as it touches her own tiny, open palms. Mother’s smoke is magic.

“Let’s hear it, “ he says looking away from her into the street so as not to make her nervous.

“The short story is about an older woman and a little girl. They are cutting flowers for a Mother’s Day bouquet. The woman gives the girl a mason jar asking her to fill it half way and add some sugar. The girl asks why sugar. The woman shares with her that the flowers were separated from their roots and now needed sugar to bloom. The little girl broods on this for a moment and asks if that is why her Nanna made her special chocolate chip cookies for her when her mother passed.”

He turns to her and watches her light another cigarette.

“Were you separated from your roots?’

“Naw… I’m a tumbleweed.”

“So, you never had roots?”

“Not exactly. Something in me died, and it set me free instead of killing me.”

halcyon fields corrupted

Tags

creative, love, poem, poetry, writing

let in.

shut out.

 

sexual transparency.

 

sour milky notes of another

cling to my small mouth

veiling our kisses.

 

you notice nothing.