Thinking About It

I fold my death neatly
And slip the small, smooth, white notepaper
Into my front jeans pocket.
I like all my options to be close
Near my warm skin and underclothes
So only I know its there
So no man can steal my secret.

I love the fall
The season of my life
But it’s like bad fruit
Summer’s sloppy seconds
Sees everything rot
Blood blossoms bleeding
Into a starved earth
Sucking in sustenance
For winters starvation

I imagine my dead body
As a town for worms
Brightly lit and crawling alive
Under my best black suit
As the green grass glees above.

by Julie M. Alden | Poetry Home | Next 

A Relationship Before Marriage

Spilt milk dripping
Off our kitchen table
Is the saddest fountain
In the world.

Life’s liquor
Ebbs away from us
Across the tile
Like this winter’s icy tide.
How could such a baby
Such a child
So unskilled in the shaping, shaving
And crafting of words
Spit such simple poison.

All the beauty of my aesthetic articulation
And carefully plotted
Syntactic revenge
Is reduced
By your cruel silence.

by Julie M. Alden | Poetry Home | Previous