ENGL 265

Nocturne

poetry 

Over time,
her mouth became 
a string instrument 
tightened with the tension 
of constraining her words.

Measures between her laughs
and ivory smiles grew longer,
each beat of silence 
lingering for just 
a note too long.

More often than not,
tired sandpaper lids scrape
against the white expanse
of her eyes, exposing the 
red vein strings
hiding beneath;
they turn the half note circles
below into shades 
of a minor key.

At night,
her heart thrums to the rhythm
of a staccato symphony:
rising, rising, rising,
as if her conductor brain
commands it -
faster, faster, faster.

Frantic thoughts 
create a polyphonic sound
of worry and dejection -
melodic harmonies to the
hasty trills within her 
xylophone ribcage

These sounds echo 
in the acoustics of her skull 
like the clicks 
of an 
off
beat 
metronome.

Prompt: “Write about a change you have noticed in your lifetime, but write only about the things that embody or illustrate this change. It might be a change you have noticed in a friendship, in the body of a loved one, in your hometown…” (Pagh 79)

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Thimble

poetry 
She holds regret between her teeth 
like a red thread of punishment
she can’t fit through a needle -
every time she tries to get rid of it,
his face pricks the corner of her thoughts
and she starts all over again.
 
She sits there, 
a reproachful patchwork of emotions
picking at the loose threads that lay 
between him and her,
like a vulture who picks 
at bones already clean of meat.
She was threadbare, 
hanging like broken seams
cut from blue muslin squares 
and bleached in the sun.
 
Smells of mothballs 
and old fabric clippings
rushed the insides of her nostrils, 
while she unspun a new spool of black thread, 
replacing the red one -
frayed and covered in her saliva.
The remnants of desperate attempts 
to force a broken thing into working.
 
When she pulls the black thread through -
when she no longer feels 
a familiar tug on the sinews 
connecting her heart to her ribcage -
she allows herself to take in the colours
of the world she knew before:
ochres, indigos, mauves, even pewters -
thimbles to the needle 
memories that pricked her mind. 
 
Weaving the needle in and out -
through loops woven from moments
stitched into her skin and mind,
she embroiders
the story of letting go.

Prompt: “1. … find a passage [of your writing] dominated by your attention to imagery and the way your language sounds… Transfer it onto a page and begin making a poem from this skeleton.” from Nancy Pagh’s Write Moves, pg 44.

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