Troupe-of-Writers

Little girls in pinafores and blue jeans Lithe figures, their hair Dancing in the breeze, smile with Blackberry-stained teeth. Moths Soft grey wings labour To reach inky skies, but can Never grasp the moon. Hidden brook Sun-dappled water Gurgles down a tiny stream, Unknown to mankind. Gardening at gloaming When the sky turns grey, Fingers dig into cool earth And the crickets sing. Reading The outside world fades As I thumb fragile pages, Lost within the words. University Chemistry and maths, I owe you no love; you fill Me with tedium. Summer sidewalk Horizons warping In shimmering mirages As the sun beats down.

The dragons just kept getting cuter. I'd meant them to be scary, with snakelike heads and pearly fangs, but as my fingers gained more practice the dragons they shaped became younger and more innocent, their wings tiny and their eyes wide. Dull spikes lined their heads and tails, not yet sharpened by age. They lay on their bellies or sat up and watched with good-natured curiosity. They were friendly. They were sweet. They were flawed, and there were a lot of them. I experimented with color and pose, sculpting the way others would turn a stress ball. Every morning I baked the newcomers in my oven, and within a week my desk was overrun. Rows o

He would often catch the coursers of a newly printed page or lock upon the wingspan of departing poetry. But once the years corroded and the pages crumbled, fantasizing was no longer enough Soon he found that these shallow fabrications had all the depth of a black and white page.

Goldenrod fireflies erratically sign their names inside a jar that once held pickled beets. On a Georgian night, katydids screech chamber music Mozart forgot to write on his five staffed bars. The music reminds me of the tart taste of grapefruit seeping slowly into my mouth, and I swallow it with delight. But the world becomes a jar into which I scribble my name, as if writing it will somehow make me free.

Adults never have their dream jobs My father once said. "Money runs thicker than blood,   everything boils down to cash, breathing is never free." He was serious when he told me. But inside my bohemian bubble I laughed to his face, convinced myself that corporate drones often forget how sticking with the system results in slavery. One day Reality and its accomplice, The Economy without warning knocked on my door, sawed off my head and hung me to dry. Dripping one sweaty dollar at a time I (unwillingly) put my soul on the market And by now the bloodstains never really left my uniform, my teeth are fine sand. All I

i. we dusted dreams off people like the first snowflakes of the season. you'd take one and rest it on the center of your tongue because you hated the taste of ice cream and wanted to reset what cold tasted like to you. you taught me that the cold could be bitter, and so could people's dreams. you drank out of out-of-order wells because you believed they still worked and that the government was keeping it all to itself. i never realized how insane you made me before i wrote this all down. ii. i wished on the sun because i ran out of shooting stars. and just to spite me, you began wishing on raindrops because you believed that they were so ma

you've a soul of gold, a feat untold in our lonely rusted world you make clouds more than a fable- you enable beaten down dreams to finally soar you have words like oxygen, necessary to live, treasures you would readily give      we wish upon them all who try to stand so tall.      in the end, why is it every person seems to fall?      not you. I imagine your chest sings all answers, which your mouth then tries to translate and share does your heart grow weighted or are you really free? if you're truly so wonderful, why stick around with the lost and found? t

They take her on her honeymoon. The wedding was lovely, or as lovely as it could have been with a couple that were more polite acquaintances than anything else and two sets of in-laws as stuffy as a dusty pile of money. They grab her when she sneaks out for a walk one night, two men, beefy, not even bothered to arm themselves. Her last thought before the bag is shoved over her eyes is to wonder how much this would ruin her parents' plans. She comes to in a small brick room on a sallow mattress, windowless and lit by a cool yellow lamp. There's a man there, standing just outside the barred door. "Kelly Shale," he says, voice nasally, greasy