Nichole Shinn — ✧Bitter Poems

Three Poems

by Nichole Shinn ☾☁✦

Wet Earth ✦

You’ve Swallowed Me

As I Am Nothing Without You ✦

As I’ve Never Been With You

And Will Never Be Again

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Tense, Fevered Rhythm ✦

✦ As The Shell Shocks

& Tides Wean

Further

Further

Distant Again ✦

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Hearing The Bells ✦

✦ Or ✦

From Empty Compartments ✦

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Amongst Shadows Turning

Holes Inside Mortars

While Laying On Rocks

In All Things ✦

Or Infected

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As Faces Turn Green

From Sand In Eyes

Smallness of Glass ✦

Cutting Sharply

Or ✦

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To Focus ✦

Acutely In Fiber Coils

Broken Down ✦

Ash

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As We Lay Dying

In Our Rose Tinted Glasses

& Silken Fabrics

From Rotten Cores

And Seedless Grapes

As Things Go ✦

Relatively Speaking

If You Were To Grow

A Thousand Times Fast

Would You Be More Or Less ✦

Afraid of Dying ✦

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Splintered ✦ ✦

Compressed Cubes

For ✦ ✦

✦ Morning Consummation

And

Ritual Surfaces ✦

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✦ If You Were Plucked ✦

From a Fresh Fruit ✦

✦ Scattered in Palms ✦

Floating ✦

✦ Between

A Hard Membrane

And A Soft Core

✦ Would You Be More Or Less ✦

✦ Capable ✦

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✦ Without Tactile Facility

Or ✦

Uncertainty Amongst

✦ Crows ✦

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Are Omens ✦

From False Skies ✦

And

Driftwood ✦

✦ For Sore Hands

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Amongst Scribes ✦

Dominion On Earth

Throws Flint at Bare Feet

Sparking Human Flesh ✦

And Desire To Consume

All Else In His Likeness ✦

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✦ To

✦ Terraform Seedlings ✦

✦ Saplings

&

✦ Varnish Channeled Orbits

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✦ As a Raging Fire ✦

✦ More Or Less

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Unfolding a picture ✦

In a frame

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✦ Trickling down throats

A strange and delicate poison

Like plucking petals ✦

From a flower

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✦ Is a diamond crushed

Velvet dream

Sequenced in each

✦ Particle of sand

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And the heartbeat drops ✦

Below Zero

An Exploding Rhythm ✦

✦ As in space

Sound does not travel ✦

✦ Lungs filled

Stuffed

As a Buttercream Puff ✦

Painless

Sweet ✦

Mushroom Outward

From chests ✦

Whispers end ✦

Fountains stop

Stillness is the air

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A Fantastical Spectre

Weeps Crystalline Structures

To tell stories

Of fallen stars

Upon the Dead Sea ✦

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☾☁✦