“For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they are born, the city apartment or farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you can’t come to know by hearsay…” ― W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge” ____________________________________________ I reblogged this from … Continue reading
Author: Charlotte Hamrick
Charlotte Hamrick’s creative writing and photographs have been published in a number of literary journals and anthologies. Her debut prose chapbook, Offset Melodies, is included in Grieving Hope (ELJ Editions), a collection of five microchaps. She is Managing Editor for Reckon Review.
Luminosity
texture air and light a thousand worlds unfurl rising in golden dust mornings blue and solace soft loll in velvet intangible prayers exalted Continue reading Luminosity
Conversation, Laughter, Whispers
I want to hear your music, to feel it wrap around my body sliding into my pores, dancing around my veins, penetrating my marrow, infiltrating my blood, becoming the stuff of my life. Your voice blocks out all other noise and becomes the molecules that gives life to my rhythm, my thoughts, my reason (or lack of). You. You are more than life itself, you are the atoms that make it Continue reading Conversation, Laughter, Whispers
803 Monroe
I needed to call you but I’d forgotten your number, the one I always thought was burned into my memory — for hours I anxiously thumbed through white and yellow pages, forgetting then remembering your name. Between the pages I could see your dining room, the floor tile cracked like a spider’s web, the old fridge where all your kids stood before the open door to feel the frigid air on desperately hot days while upstairs pretty ladies on a calendar lounged without a drop of sweat to mar their fleshy perfection. Continue reading 803 Monroe
Mad Poet
Today, for the third time, my work is featured on Mad Swirl. I’m also now a contributing writer there with my own “Poet’s Page” so I hope you’ll bookmark Mad Swirl and visit me there. I’m excited to be in such great, mad company! Continue reading Mad Poet
The Roach In My Bathroom
A roach has been dying on my bathroom floor for two days. Lying on it’s back with it’s underbelly exposed I imagine it feels vulnerable as it waves it’s legs about in an effort to overturn itself. I think a couple of its legs are missing or maybe only one. I haven’t counted them but it looks like there are less on one side than the other. Sometimes when I go in there the roach is completely still and I think it’s dead but then it’s as if I’ve awakened it because the antenna begin waving around as if it’s … Continue reading The Roach In My Bathroom
A Hot Steaming Roiling Glut of Adjectives
I have a thing about adjectives so when I read something that someone has written that is chock full of adjectives inserted willy-nilly it makes me feel like I feel when I can’t open a new jar of preserves or pickles or spaghetti sauce or whatever the jar may hold. It makes me feel annoyed and exasperated. In the hands of some, adjectives become the written equivalent of verbal histrionics, descriptive word acrobats jumping and tumbling all over the page to the point that it completely distracts from the story itself. Overload! Whew! Descriptive writing doesn’t need a glut (love … Continue reading A Hot Steaming Roiling Glut of Adjectives
Sandy
I just want anyone who lives in the path of Sandy or has relatives in her path to know I am praying and thinking of you. I know what it’s like to survive a catastrophic event and I know how difficult the aftermath is. I am with you. You are not alone. Continue reading Sandy
My Brain Is Like An AK-47
It spits out memories like bullet rounds at unexpected times, short bursts of power that leave me momentarily maimed & gasping & completely unprepared for the fallout. It takes me back to a dark, dank closet with a locked door, to a room bathed in twilight and ice that still feels like my fault, to a dusty country road where I turned back when I might have escaped. My brain is like an AK-47 but isn’t that what makes us human? Taking a bullet to the gut now & then, absorbing the pain but not allowing it to kill us. Continue reading My Brain Is Like An AK-47
In Limbo
life’s flow is dropping blue-veined eyelids with lashes of cobwebs against a face so still milky skin smooth as marble reveals cheekbones chisled in sharp relief silver hair as fine as silk fans over a cloud a body levitating between earth and eternity Continue reading In Limbo
