POETRYDestroy, She Saidby Antonia Wolf
You want to destroy me
with your tantalizing little riddles,
don’t you—
making me traverse the hells of
doubt, anguish, and helplessness?
My chest is a desert
and in the middle is a dot,
a vestige of my love for you.
You destroyed it once
with you nuclear tantrums,
poisoning the soil for a lifetime,
yet out of that dot,
the little black dot on the page in that desert—
remember?—
now grows out a new life
with monstrous flesh-eating blossoms,
mutating to withstand
the most earth-shattering cataclysms.
This is my new wicked love—
take it or leave it,
for you can’t destroy it!
Antonia Wolf is a young writer and blogger (www.wolfwrites.com) from Bulgaria, currently living and studying in New York. She aspires to be recognized as a poet and playwright with an affinity for reinventing classical themes in a modern context. Previous work was published in Peaking Cat Poetry, The Fountain, and College Life (at the American College of Sofia).
spider up her thigh in the dimly lit room
held down, stared down
embers of the abyss snap around her
My father sexually abused me.
When I got married,
I hyphenated my name.
No one questioned it at the time.
But in the middle of my parents’ late divorce,
everyone wants to know about names.
Nietzsche warned us not to look
long into the abyss, or it will look long
into us.
It was finally
his home until
abruptly
his mind flashed
all the times he had entered a
boy
i was depressed,
and i wanted
to take a
walk;
you said you'd join me—
didn't mean i wanted
netflix and chill,
it happened before words came
to tell me how to feel about it
newly connected neurons torn apart
or perverted—
forever firing blanks into the microbiological air
As a child
The lessons taught
Can bring a pain never thought.
The lessons on trust
And heartache
Sear the soul.