Moment of Transformation (reimagined)

Christine Ray – Releasing the words

Brave & Reckless

You ask me when I knew
ink flowed through my veins
like blood
the moment I understood
that truth
simmered in the cauldron
of my belly
conscious
alive
impatiently waiting
for the moment
I would pick up a pen
and see it as more
than a tool
but instead
an extension of my arm
of my soul
that I only need listen
into my own silence
to hear true
the words that have always
been inside me
and in a transformative moment
let them finally take flight
across the page

© 2017 Revised 2019 Christine Elizabeth Ray – All Rights Reserved

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There Is Strength in Our Stories: 37: perpetual victim – Katharine Love

At Blood into Ink, Katharine Love tells a tale of bad advice.

Blood Into Ink

be quiet. be quiet.
i told you –

be quiet!

you are weird. you are ugly. you are strange.
be normal. be pretty. be happy.

always be nice. always say thank- you, even if you
aren’t grateful, especially if you aren’t grateful.

take it – you deserve it – you are a feral thing.
don’t act like an animal. act like a good girl.

act like a good girl.

marry well. marry wealth. marry a man.
money is important. power is important. love is irrelevant.

he yells? so did mine.
he hits? so did mine.

you deserve to be choked –
you are making me mad –
you did this to me –
i should die if I’m lying.

i have friends, you don’t.
i am right, you aren’t.

be like me – perpetual victim.

---

Katharine Love is a psychotherapist and poet. Her poems have been featured in several anthologies…

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Escaping to Deep Creek, Bryson City, NC

LuckyOtter – escape and restoration

Lucky Otters Haven

Everything is terrible right now.

Future history books will not be kind.

I need to escape into the woods.

I need to feel the rush of cold mountain streams.

This is what I plan to be doing this Memorial Day weekend.

There’s always time for joy.

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Raven

Christine Ray takes flight.

Brave & Reckless

it starts as tightness
tingling
across bare shoulder blades
becomes an itch
I can’t quite reach
stretch my spine sinuous
slow
vertebrae by vertebrae
long for a shot of whiskey
or three
liquid gold disinhibition I can blame
for the reckless choice
I am about to make
I finally let go
tightly coiled control
gasp with relief
as I finally unleash the darkness
onyx feathers rip
sharp and true through the flesh of my back
talons shoot from fingertips
toes
bones burned hollow
by demon fire dwelling in my belly
exquisite pain of rebirth
brings me briefly to my knees
I arise something new
wipe the blood from my mouth
spread fledgling wings
and with the lift of the north wind
I claim the night sky
mine

© 2017 Christine Elizabeth Ray – All Rights Reserved

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Red Flag

At Hijacked Amygdala, HLR and a warning.

hijacked amygdala

Overnight, Cordelia built The Ritz out of silk.

It was extraordinary. I’ve never seen a spider web so complicated, so stylish. Multiple floors, layers upon layers of intricate netting, stretching from one corner of the window to the other, with apparently solid foundations and an impressive roof that glittered in the sunlight. It was too big a space for herself alone and every day I expected to find that her family or her lover had moved in. But no, just a fly here and there, caught, I imagined, when I’d carefully crack open the window to let out cigarette smoke. I loved her. Even when I was alone, I wasn’t, because Cordelia was there in her castle of cobwebs in the corner, working on her art or dozing in her floss-like hammock, listening to me sobbing, or distracting me from stabbing my thighs with a steak knife by nimbly dancing…

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There Is Strength in Our Stories: s.k.

At Blood Into Ink, s.k. offers the danger and strength of being soft.

Blood Into Ink

somewhat lost.
burying pain in shallow graves within my heart;
temporary people/permanent places.
this is my punishment for being soft.

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Furnish in her own time

TheFeatheredSleep – “eyes wide and seeking”

TheFeatheredSleep

It’s the fantasy

something out of summer, as you’d dream it

bare legs tucked beneath white cotton and trimmed thick lace

laughing clavicle, slipping straps

the long necked wonder of descending evening

that sting on skin from days in sun

I’ve been here before

the last time, I lay beneath a boy with cut glass eyes

who bought me flowers from the night market

before they bombed Bali and innocence was our town

wearing a sarong of blood red and mustard, half grown

walking beaches at night fall, crabs coming up through sand

scuttling into still water, the recede and ebb of thought

knowing he wasn’t the one, still desiring the idea

of love and its myriad faces, the strange places we

take ourselves to feel alive, writhing beneath

his pinion and faith, you’ll stay with me, I’ll

make you like my kind, turn your eyes away

from the obsidian…

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Spilt milk

TheFeatheredSleep at Hijacked Amygdala – Unlike the parent, a changeling child now grown

hijacked amygdala

I don’t have your poise

or formidable intelligence

I haven’t inherited your coloring

or the savagery with which

you tear people out of your life

I used to believe I was weak

because I felt so much and could not

turn away in anger

a trait much prized and perfected

no, I was

clumsy enough to be feeling

and try as I may, the ice

did not stay in my veins

just as resentment doesn’t hang on me

an internal coat

nor grudges devour

my peace.

While i am not always happy

I do not fashion that unhappiness

to break and grind, the bones of others

I was told so many times

I was nothing more than a dumb beast

trying in vain

but those people were proven wrong

for this dumb beast

accomplished everything she attempted

perhaps just to prove them wrong.

It is my road

the one alone

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Why I Write

Christine Ray – More than reason enough – necessity

Christine Ray – More than reason enough – necessity

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IT’S DARK IN HERE

HASTY – No way out – No way in

HASTYWORDS

I’d never been afraid of the hallway. The echoes it carried. The voices. The feet. The light that zigzagged across the floor. That landed on the walls. That rained from the ceiling.

It’s always been there to welcome and carry me from one room to the next. And there were always countless rooms. So many open doors. And those doors that were shut were easy to open.

I have my own room, It’s where I reboot. It’s where I go when I’m overwhelmed. I sleep. I cry alone. I bang on its walls. I scream. I sing. The room is filled with little pictures, trinkets, and notions. Filled with good and bad moments that have created me.

The hallway has always been there for me. But not today. Today it’s dark. No echoes. No open doors. Only silence.

I try the doors. Locked. Locked. Locked. Locked. My own room. Locked.

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