Prose
Elegy for a Country Once at Peace
There was a morning, once, when we rose unafraid, when dawn came like a friend who knocks at the door, certain of its welcome. We opened our eyes to a country still whole, to the people who had learned, by long and faithful labor, how to live beside each other in the ordinary grace of the uneventful day. Oh, what were we then, who did not know how rare a thing it is to dread so little? The newspaper passed beneath the elm in autumn, and its news was only news, only the slow procession of the known and mild. We received it calmly, the way a still pond receives the rain and settles back to calm.
By Tim Carmichaelabout 4 hours ago in Poets
Sitting with My Self-Hate
Some days, the ickiness eats me up. What I see in the mirror: my face or that part of my body I have touched. That ickiness eats me up. I look and see the emotional disgust erupt throughout, like so many times before. Fractured ribbons of hate, self-loathing. An explosion of discomfort insidiously batters through every metre of my digestive tract, through each pore. Through every nerve. I feel cold inside out.
By Chantal Christie2 days ago in Poets
