#sinfulfolk

Maria Hummel’s book House And Fire was the winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, 2013. “Station” is a pantoum, a Malay verse form, imitated in French and English, consisting of quotations.

by Maria Hummel

Days you are sick, we get dressed slow, find our hats, and ride the train. We pass a junkyard and the bay, then a dark tunnel, then a dark tunnel.

You lose your hat. I find it. The train sighs open at Burlingame, past dark tons of scrap and water. I carry you down the black steps.

Burlingame is the size of joy: a race past bakeries, gold rings in open black cases. I don’t care who sees my crooked smile

or what erases it, past the bakery, when you tire. We ride the blades again beside the crooked bay. You smile. I hold you like a hole holds light.

We wear our hats and ride the knives. They cannot fix you. They try and try. Tunnel! Into the dark open we go. Days you are sick, we get dressed slow.

Source: Poetry (September 2010)

published on Derek Walcott’s birthday — Jan. 23, 1930.

Love after Love

Derek Walcott

  The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

[Read more Poetry Posts]

Mercy by Rudy Francisco

She asks me to kill the spider. Instead I get the most peaceful weapons I can find.

I take a cup & a napkin I catch the spider put it outside and allow it to walk away.

If i am ever caught in the wrong place at the wrong time just being alive and not bothering anyone

I hope I am greeted with the same kind of mercy.

[Read more Poetry Posts]

Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world. All things break. And all things can be mended. Not with time, as they say, but with intention. So go. Love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally. The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you.

— L.R. Knost.

I found a thread on Reddit that asked this question: “What is the best horror story you can come up with in two sentences?” I posted the best ones I found, as well as one more scary tale I created on my own. See if you can figure out which one is mine! With Halloween right around the corner, these two-sentence terrors fit the month perfectly!

Happy Halloween!

1. 

“My daughter won’t stop crying and screaming in the middle of the night. I visit her grave and ask her to stop, but it doesn’t help.”

Image Credit: Fivvr

2.

I woke up to hear knocking on glass. At first, I thought it was the window until I heard it come from the mirror again.

Image Credit: Vampyr Fangs

3.

I can’t move, breathe, speak or hear and it’s so dark all the time. If I knew it would be this lonely, I would have been cremated instead.

Image Credit: Public Domain

4.

After working a hard day, I came home to see my girlfriend cradling our child. I didn’t know which was more frightening, seeing my dead girlfriend and stillborn child, or knowing that someone broke into my apartment to place them there.

Image Credit: Dead Girl (film)

5.

My sister says that mommy killed her. Mommy says that I don’t have a sister.

Image Credit: Universal

6.

“I can’t sleep,” she whispered, crawling into bed with me. I woke up cold, clutching the dress she was buried in.

Image Credit: Cemetery Guide

7.

I begin tucking him into bed and he tells me, “Daddy, check for monsters under my bed.” I look underneath for his amusement and see him, another him, under the bed, staring back at me quivering and whispering, “Daddy, there’s somebody on my bed.”

Image Credit: Flickr

8.

A girl heard her mom yell her name from downstairs, so she got up and started to head down. As she got to the stairs, her mom pulled her into her room and said, “Don’t go, honey — I heard that, too.”

Image Credit: Random Geekings

9.

Yesterday, my parents told me I was too old for an imaginary friend and I had to let her go. They found her body this morning.

Image Credit: DeviantArt

10.

In the early morning, I could feel the cat purring against my side, nestled up against me in bed, but the cat smelled of blood. I woke slowly remembering that I had tortured that cat to death last Sunday, and scattered the body parts across the construction site.

Image Credit: DeviantArt

11.

The last thing I saw was my alarm clock flashing 12:07 before she pushed her long rotting nails through my chest, her other hand muffling my screams. I sat bolt upright, relieved it was only a dream, but as I saw my alarm clock read 12:06, I heard my closet door creak open.

Image Credit: DeviantArt

12.

The doctors told the amputee he might experience a phantom limb from time to time. Nobody prepared him for the moments though, when he felt cold fingers brush across his phantom hand.

Image Credit: MNN 

  (H/T Arts.Mic) (via Reddit)

HORROR WARNING:

Nicholas Hallum created a short and chilling  tale.

You can ORDER for Kindle here >>

Thank you for your reading and support!

New review of The Eagle Tree from South African writer Donvé Lee.

When this tender complex story found me, I was steeped in pandemic misery, lamenting the suicidal trajectory humanity seems intent on following. The Eagle Tree, told in the voice of a fourteen-year-old autistic boy, restored my faith in the world.

Peter March Wong loves trees. He is in love with them. He wants to be a tree. He lives in the richly forested Pacific North West, and his head is filled with a massive archive of facts about trees – their names, growth patterns, sizes, shapes, textures and so much more. He climbs on average 5.6 trees a day. Trees calm him down. They make him feel safe. Despite the fact that he sometimes falls and lands up in hospital and the state wants to take him away from his mother if she can’t prevent him from getting hurt. His passion for trees is so great that he is prepared to risk his life to save the giant Eagle Tree, an ancient Ponderosa Pine that is about to be cut down by developers. What fascinated me most about this book was the way author Ned Hayes managed to invoke the reader’s empathy for this unlikely hero. I was moved to tears at times. How do you express emotion when writing in the voice of someone whose unique way of seeing the world prevents him from expressing, processing or even describing emotion? As it turns out, with enormous skill. With gorgeous sensuous descriptions. With the occasional dialogue between concerned family members and teachers. With equal amounts of simplicity and depth.

This book taught me so much about trees, too much really, and reminded me of the interconnectedness of all things – people, nature, family, community. But what I valued most was the insight I gained into the mind of someone who sees things from a totally different perspective to mine, who processes the world through facts not feelings yet remains deeply, exquisitely human. By the end of the book, I was totally in love with this brave young man, humbled and inspired by his unyielding determination to make a difference despite enormous odds. I was also struck by the fact that his particular ‘disabilities’ were in the end his strengths, not his liabilities. Lastly, I was reminded that stories have the power to change the world.

Perhaps the planet will survive after all.

READ THE BOOK: The Eagle Tree.com

Rosh Hashanah – Sept 6 – 8, 2021

new year.

Ned Hayes

  Rosh Hashanah comes this year on a day of cool wind,

a breathtaking portent of winter

taking the world, rude lover tossing the sheets away.

in autumn the sadness of all things

is greatest for now the world was created.

the new fruit, shot through with decay:

birthed in the same moment, the racing seed and the worm.

  published in Twig, Seattle Washington

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Andrew Grace After my father died I should have gone to therapy. I tried instead to solve my grief with alcohol and poems. Now I am almost 40 and all I can tell you about grief is that when I found my father on the floor of the machine shed the radio was on and wind pushed against corrugated metal. Of course I still hear it. I should have talked to someone before now and not you. Poetry is not talking. This is just art and therefore could never cover my ears when I, suddenly, am back in the shed and I learn again that my father has died every day since he died.