Vulnerable

My virginity was stolen from me at the age of fifteen
No longer innocent, just impure and unclean
A few years later, thinking I was in love
I fell easily into him, believing he was the one
Giving him all of me, all the little pieces
Opening up and sharing all my secrets
But I was abandoned once again
Leaving me more broken in the end
Countless nights trying to drink the pain away
What’s wrong with me? No one seems to stay
No future anymore, no goals or happy life plans
Just being used and so many one night stands
Vulnerable to anyone who shows me any interest
I please them and then they make themselves so distant
Every night I know I’m being used and then forgotten
But I keep failing myself, falling for lies then feeling rotten
I’m trapped in my past and the ship continues to sail
I want to land on the ground and break free, but all my efforts fail
But still I refuse to give up shining hope
I’m choosing to leave my past and escape this sorrowful slope
This story is one I used to fear to share
But my past no longer defines me for one day it will end a fairytale

Morgyn Harris

Their haunt is the lakes and rivers

The Gwragedd Annwn (literally, wives of the lower world, or hell) are the elfin dames who dwell under the water. I find no resemblance in the Welsh fairy to our familiar mermaid, beyond the watery abode, and the sometimes winning ways. The Gwragedd Annwn are not fishy of aspect, nor do they dwell in the sea. Their haunt is the lakes and rivers, but especially the wild and lonely lakes upon the mountain heights. These romantic sheets are surrounded with numberless superstitions, which will be further treated of. In the realm of faerie they serve as avenues of communication between this world and the lower one of annwn, the shadowy domain presided over by Gwyn ap Nudd, king of the fairies. This sub-aqueous realm is peopled by those children of mystery termed Plant Annwn, and the belief is current among the inhabitants of the Welsh mountains that the Gwragedd Annwn still occasionally visit this upper world of ours.

Wirt Sikes
British Goblins: Welsh Folk-lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions

on the edge of things

I sense a creature in each room I enter, just on the edge of things. It watches wide-eyed as I pass, still. Claw marks on doorways. It does not breathe. It will not look away.

Benjamin Clime
Animals

mustn’t provoke the train

Attack of a Train

Mr Riquemale, the commissioner of police of La Ciotat, dreams on March 13 that a band of Italians are gesticulating in his office. Using their arms as semaphores, the Italians explain to him that the train from Marseilles is in a tunnel near Cassis, and it doesn’t want to come out. Mr Riquemale visits the scene of the problem: indeed, there’s the Marseilles train in the tunnel. “Come out of there!” he says. The train doesn’t answer. The Italians, who have followed him, gesticulate in a way that means he mustn’t provoke the train, or else, like a trapped animal, it will attack. Mr Riquemale doesn’t give a damn what a bunch of Italians who can’t speak French might or might not think. “Are you coming out?” he asks the train. “Or am I coming in to get you?” The train doesn’t answer. “All right,” says Mr Riquemale. “Then I’m going in.” He goes into the tunnel, followed by the Italians who go No, no, with their arms. The train attacks.

Paul La Farge
The Facts of Winter

IF ONLY –

WHAT THE BODY DOES

Our son plays a German child in Hansel and Gretel
and dances with a girl dressed in braids and a pinafore
once in Act 1 and once in Act 2 but when they do the show
twice on a Saturday, sometimes she falls
the third or fourth dance.
Later her mother tells me she has cystic fibrosis
but she doesn’t want him to know.
When I was 12,
there was a girl on our 8th grade cheerleading squad
whose muscles snapped like a rubber band
when she tried to straighten her arms
so I tried to hold them for her
like a violin. She had a limp
and couldn’t do the jumps so we put her
in the back row. She had blonde hair though
and a big house where we spent the night
sitting on our sleeping bags in the basement,
rubbing the plastic threads
of the red and white pompoms together
until they curled. We pretended we didn’t see
the girls on the walls, naked women in cheap frames.
He must have cut them out of magazines
but the way they look now
in the blue room of memory
is like paintings, their skin pink and thick.
I see him at the kitchen table
after his daughter has left for school,
dipping his brush in the paint and sliding it
like a hand over their breasts which some of them
hold in their hands like gifts, and they’re perfect, circle
of nipple in circle of flesh. He likes the clean lines
of their legs, how the muscles lie neatly along the bones.
Later when I no longer knew her
I read about him in the paper. They had a day care
in that house where I slept
under the kitchen and heard him open
the refrigerator at night and felt the light go on
and the pressure of the low arches of his feet
on the linoleum. And of course he touched them,
the young girls in their flat chests
with their arms they could hold up straight.
He was heavy so when he stepped
the ceiling sank a little and I wondered
if the other girls saw but I thought
they were sleeping, I could hear their soft breaths
like a metronome. His daughter was broken
and the basement the kind with fake wood
panelling and orange carpet with bits of food
caught in the shag and stains from the dogs
and maybe he hoped the girls
would help and he didn’t think of us
or maybe he hung them there so we would know
what he wanted.
Today I am 41 years old. I know that man
was wrong and I think of how it felt
to be young and sleep beneath
the cross of a painted woman.
I know, also, that he loved his daughter.
He came downstairs that night with her mother
carrying bowls of chips and plastic cups of punch,
and I could see it, the kindness that flooded him
so when he walked he spilled a little,
and he was ashamed like she was
of what the body does.

Laura Read

Reading today

sensual woman

A sensual woman is the one who inspires sex without being explicit; a woman who smells of ingenuity, even if she is not ingenious. Sensuality is the union between innocence and eroticism…

Gray Wolf

talk about incest

It’s something we’ve always known about fairy tales – they talk about incest, the Oedipus complex, about psychotic mothers, like those of Snow White and Hansel and Gretel, who throw their children out. They tell things about life which children know instinctively, and the pleasure and relief lie in finding these things expressed in language that children can live with. You can’t eradicate these feelings – they exist and they’re a great source of creative inspiration.

Maurice Sendak
King of all Wild Things
Interview with Jonathan Cott 30th November 1976

crept into morning

sometimes when the night has crept into morning and I am hungry for poetry I tiptoe through your words, I devour each syllable, let each letter melt on my tongue

Kalypso