Blood and Cost
The blood of my blood is my brother,
The cost of my sin is my lover.
Sacred is the line for which we all die
Lest victory meet us halfway.
One sign determines our fate:
Keep sharp your eyes,
With a pen at the ready,
For treaties are fickle treasures.
One wind can drive us away:
Winter is seldom sweet
To those who wish it farewell,
Seeing all and never backing down,
Much like how you wished to be
Before the seasons drifted out of reach.
Each new color means nothing in our wake.
That could not matter anymore;
We are blind from ambition and disease
We fight for our sight and our sanity –
And victory –
The blood of my form has yet to recover,
The cost of my pride is that of another.
Navigating an absence of Zs
My voice takes on a different tone at three in the morning
Robbed of sweet variation from the grog behind my eyes
and dispassionate to the spinning of the world just outside my closed curtains
A deep sound, like the one I’ve always heard bouncing between my ears
But missing something of my afternoon spark
It dances across the same note
With nothing on my mind except sleep deprived ramblings
and the motions of a heart that’s forgotten its rem stage choreography
Myself, a blurry portrait of a nightmare
Calling my lifeline to dreamland in a cold baritone,
I move past my fears in the silences and count sheep by his consonants
Breathing with the rhythm of white noise
and closing my eyes against an outline of the stars
There is nothing to do but think and listen
He tries for a smile in between my dreams of dreaming
As small as it might sound from the other end, I couldn’t fake it if I tried
Not when he calls me silly or laughs me softly toward feeling at home
Each minute rolls gently into its hour, a careful subtraction of my energy for the next day
But worth every second to feel alive in my stubborn awakeness
solipsized
My fogged glasses
slow down this choo choo train,
Frosting reality as we know it
and dimming the colors
to a dull fragment of their 20/20 portrait
These eyes see nothing
but steam off of hot asphalt
in the summertime
The bottom of a hysteric waterfall
Microwave fresh delights
Tea kettle announcements
Warm words on a cold window pane
The music of a humid rainstorm
Tear-hazy compositions
Kisses for the sight-impaired
Seeing anything and everything
from an annoyingly new perspective
And taking note of the world
from behind a wall of clouded glass
while waiting for poetic inspiration to slap me in the face
receding blinds blinding
from the beyond beyond my window
the one that opens only a few inches
we all know why but it doesn’t meet
the criteria of polite conversation
the trees outside seem static but I
know they change with the seasons
perhaps I look like that too to
someone who only sees the surface
fake flowers line the windowsill
silly me, thinking I could make
a forest wonderland in my sixth floor dorm
the one with a desk and a closet and drawers
and drawers and a carpet that hasn’t been vacuumed
since the dawn of man
at least, other than the single gnat that won’t
leave me alone, there is only
one living thing in this plastic jungle
just one reason to keep the window shut
Biographical Note: Mare Hiles is a senior at the University of Georgia, studying English, Women’s Studies, and French. She gets her (quite limited) talents from her parents and her writing ideas from the wild world around her, as well as from years of having her head buried in books. She hopes to attend graduate school and to never stop learning.