Manifest Gothic

#vss365 #micropoetry Without Knowing

#horrorprompt INSIDE The #windshield caught the sunset. Not gold, but a warning amber, like swamplight on still water. Then the forest closed in, gloomed, watchful. A shape not quite human, not quite spirit, pressed its handprint onto the glass from outside. Or was it inside?

#vss365 THE BROKEN FENCE The white fence I helped mend as a child is silvered now, inlaid with slow moss. A crow arrives. He isn’t afraid. We look at each other almost in remembrance. Then he’s off, into the undergrowth, and I remain— not sure what part of me he carried away.

#vss365 #micropoetry TURNING FIFTY Middle age will have fewer names. Rain will come uninvited. I’ll forget to close the gate, and something wild will enter— not to ruin, just to look around. I won’t mind.

#vss365 #micropoetry Sometimes, Somewhere

#vss365 #micropoetry FUNNY THING I passed your house today. Same curtains. Same wilting plant in the window. I felt nothing— which, oddly enough, felt somehow like betrayal.

#vss365 #micropoetry Direction of Travel

#vss365 #micropoetry A Song For Apollo

#vss365 #micropoetry Manentia

#vss365 #micropoetry A Room Between Worlds

#vss365 #micropoetry MINOR LITURGIES In the old, overgrown chapel open to the sky a snail moves across the altar. There is so much patience in the small things. The saints knew this. We have forgotten.

#vss365 #micropoetry SIN OF OMISSION Miss Pauline told the prayer circle her news both bad and good: her tumour was shaped like a dove. They wept and passed the casserole. The damn thing turned out to be benign, but she said nothing, and still got a casserole every week.

#vss365 #micropoetry REARVIEW ELEGY Desert night. Ashtray full. Radio cracking like bone. Tonopah getting closer. Somewhere on the road behind me— everything I ever meant.

#poetry #writersoftwitter #WritingCommunity A Deal With God

#vss365 #micropoetry LETTER FROM THE RUBBLE Your sky, a torn silk flag in the evening, crimson with trade winds and spilled wine. I spoke in the tongue of Virgil, and smoke from burning Rome— but you did not listen, being marble.

#vss365 #micropoetry THE VISITOR In a dream a woman made of light stood in the soybean field behind my childhood home, watching the stars fall. When I asked her name, she said: Why would I need one?

#vss365 #micropoetry KANSAS 2000 I was driving at night near Jetmore, chasing the tail of a storm and a girl I barely remembered from a Polaroid and something written on a bar napkin. Moon over Kansas— that’s what’s stayed with me. Flat as a busted tire, just as romantic.

#vss365 #micropoetry FRAGMENT FROM A DIARY WITH NO DATES […] again last night, and someone is singing in the basement. We do not have a basement.

#vss365 #micropoetry IT DOES There is a tree at the edge of the wood, older than language, whose leaves fall exactly when they must. You might sit beside it for a hundred years, and still not know what it forgives. Only that it does.

#vss365 #micropoetry UNSENT I wrote you a love letter once, but burned it. The smoke rose beautifully, like my feelings before the words got in the way.