Long held
Estimates
Suggest
Our star,
In main
sequence,
Will burn
For another
Five billion
Years.
And at that time,
A roiling
Ember,
Swollen from
Firesworn
Devouring
Of elements
It will
Embrace
The last trace
Of us,
The dust that
Knit the lattice
Of our form,
And welcome
Us home.
New
An Epitaph
Will the earth
With my bones
Swallowed
Find the marrow
Lacks?
Will the grey
Veined clay
Gather in the
Defects?
Will the stones
Laugh?
Carried in the water
In rivulets
With the weight of
Evaporated eons.
In red, roaring wastes,
Will the water wait?
Carving earth in
Mountain and canyon,
What will it make
Of the hollow things that
Once held this shape?
When scattered
Will I finally
Be lovely?
Will I finally be
Comely when
Rearranged?
A promise
Like feathers,
Like lead
Cradled in
The trembling
Of existence.
The ache
Burrowed
And silenced
In silt.
MJGS 3/2/22
Aggregate
Moss covered stone
Sun beckoned
The snow runs off,
Stays in shadow.
Petrichor and
Woodsmoke.
Its said to
Follow beauty,
But forgets.
Swift water flows,
Slows at the bend
In the middle frozen
Hand outstretched
Hard pack and
Hardpan
Veins of quartz
Veins of clay
Dust and ash
Pockmarked with
Grinding rock
Laden and vacant
A thousand years.
Shot rock
In granite
In agate
In aggregate.
Pine needles
In a panic.
Wind summoned.
The sun sets
And fills pockets
Valleys
Inlets
Seethes against
Mountainside.
Long strides
And echo
Against cliff face.
Falling and fallen
Pebbles and ember.
Oxygen fed and
Carbon starved
Stars burn and
Scatter
Then
Burrow
Nestle
Soften the
Darkness.
Disremembering
I have recently released a volume of collected poetry spanning 2014-2021. This visceral and revealing collection is available at the following links:
Digital and unsigned physical copies: Amazon
Signed physical copies: Etsy & Nihtgenga Press
Ladies of Horror – November
Jack’s Regret
by Michelle Joy Gallagher
“Jack hadn’t slept since he drowned Elise. He hadn’t set out to hurt her. She’d just said so many things that wounded him in short order, leaving him no time to recover. The passion and fire in her that first drew his eye quickly left him burned. It left no working patience in him. They had been walking along the shore when she’d brought up Beatrice. Beatrice. Why had he ever given her the time of day?”
Read the rest here
The Big Freeze
A part of me is perpetually afraid that whatever was within me that allowed me to write will one day go and not come back. An aberration that will finally and coldly be corrected.
The theory of the big freeze posits that our universe will end when entropy increases to a point of maximum value. Our inexplicably vast universe will become so large, gasses will be too thinly spread out to allow for new stars to form and ignite. That’s what a block or dry spell feels like. The words are there, just too distant from each other to connect, gather mass, catch fire.
I’ve flinched when it comes to writing for a few weeks now. Stops and starts. Chilling reminders of times when years elapsed between efforts, all my energy sunken irretrievably into survival rather than creative expression. Everything feels forced. The healing and thrill I get from writing something worthwhile delayed.
Art has served as a decent tourniquet. I’m a novice, so I spend a lot of my time feeling out of my depth. More trial and error than anything. Fumbling blindly in unfamiliar territory. Everything I draw or paint, fraught with heavy handed symbolism. A sort of shorthand for the poetry and prose I have neglected.
The first few shaky lines in a new verse are so important, the opening of a door I’ve pried at until my fingers are bloodied.
Café Macabre II
I received my copies of Café Macabre II today and they’re gorgeous! This is an anthology of short horror stories and art by women, curated by author and editor Leah McNaughton Lederman. It includes my short story “The River” which is about the terror of death and the horror we face in life. Beautifully illustrated by Keyla Valerio.
If you’d like to purchase a copy, please visit the following links:
Arbor
Tree removal is a violent act, even when done by a skilled arborist. There’s something hardwired into me that knows we shouldn’t destroy something that provides for life on so many levels. When I was a child, I would cry and obsess over the sight. Imagining the tree in pain, and the animals being hewn down along with it.
I especially worried about the birds that’d made nests in the tree, imagining them cowering as the machines whirred, watching the blades get closer and closer. I couldn’t conceive of the fact that the noise and the movement and the vibrations triggered an innate avoidance of danger in them, and they flew away.
I listened to chainsaws every day and tried to survive them by being very quiet and sitting very still.
Ladies of Horror – August
Brenda woke in a cold sweat. The gap in her heavy bedroom drapes let a blade of sunshine through the window that fell across her body, bisecting her. She watched the motes of dust floating in the light for a long time, wanting to delay the inevitable reacquaintance with reality. She could hardly remember the past week. Grief sharpened her memories of her father and dulled almost everything else. She kept thinking of when she was a little girl, feeling invincible, running around the park under her father’s watchful eye, wishing she could go back again.
She’d had an incredibly vivid recurring dream the night before and mulled it over, sitting up and gathering the strength to pour herself out of bed. She could remember a darkness, then a whisper. One that questioned her softly but had an edge to it. A hint of barely contained impatience.
“What would you give?” it asked her. She didn’t know how to reply.
“What would you give, to turn back the clock?”
Read the rest at https://spreadingthewritersword.com/tag/michelle-joy-gallagher/
Relic
The stars are a fragile constant. Their permanence only an illusion. A trick performed by size and scale and time. Ghosts in the sky.
Our sun is in main sequence. Main sequence means our star is of average size and luminosity. A flickering candle, glimmering in a cathedral at midnight. It’ll take billions of years for it to decay to the point that, when swollen, it absorbs us.
Our minds aren’t made to contemplate time on that scale. Our lifespan, laughably short, stunts our comprehension of it. It becomes an abstract. Knowable but unknowable. Unreachable epochs looming in the deep. Shadows and cinder forever on the periphery.
Light takes one hundred thousand years to reach the surface of the sun from the core. The density inside of our “average” star slows the progress. From the surface it only takes eight minutes to reach us. Standing outside on a sunny day, you are the recipient of something ancient, your skin bathed in relics.
You are also created with them. Calcium, magnesium, phosphorous, iron, carbon, hydrogen, billions of years in the making. The ruins of a long dead star with breath and pulse and synapse and neuron. A cataclysm that laughs.
Michelle Joy Gallagher Soffe 