These visual prompts from ReadWritePoem continually work me. I don't know how each one is just the right balm for me... usually they look like just the right torture, actually - but when I meet the prompt and allow it to make its presence known... I tend to be grateful for what appears.
This poem was like stitching a quilt together. I gathered memories and words from the past... sought out a poem I wrote when this incident happened - one too painful to remember... and found some journaling from a month or so ago and brewed the pieces together and here you have it.
(Visual Prompt Image from Sepultre
at Flickr)
A Crooked "Handle-with-care"
Sign - Hand painted in
purple, girly-lettering
Hangs across her throat
Unseen
much like the invisible
to some fourth leg of
her chair: if he
had only reached with his
heart laced fingers
instead of the intellect
of a shattered other
He would have felt it
Unseen
There, right there
In the space between
his quoted "bullshit"
declaration and her
imploding eyebrows
and belly, he would have
felt that leg, piercing
through her core and
Unseen
He would have known that
in one single moment the
breath left their love
behind in its scent, not
its form: The Coyote smelled it,
the howl crying it into
the darkness
Unseen
Shadows, alone in mere traces of
shale-shell-locks-of-her-
hair-sewn-into-rosemary-
laced-gift-envelopes
for the now absent fourth
leg of their connection
There was nothing left
to teeter upon
Unseen
