A Tear, pH 5.6
I had to stomach a great man, a gray man with
mismatched shoes and a somber coat
slosh through nuclear waste; the kind that free falls
from a third story window
trickles down the chin in a misled victory.
lonely battle!
fearsome battle!
(warrior fighting fossil fuels and acid
rain in a stony wasteland-jungle)
see, Oeschlein said it would be a heavy one so
I donned my worn thin suit.
I watched the soil saturate with human populace.
I listened to a long-lasting plea greeted with misuse/
abuse.
I tried to breathe in eighth notes but
my lungs capsized at the quarter-
a side effect of air pollution.
Marianas
where love’s true nature lies marianas deep,
lungs of good fortune capsize and are
shoveled by aphrodite’s bloody palms into a well of
lovesick prophets and star-crossed soothsayers:
in the fathoms, they bellow sweet songs of solitude-
bite at the wrists and twist the atrium until it remains
a pulpy, writhing tragedy
immortalized by a divine left hand.
there the sunken skeleton weeps, a shadow
of yesterday’s faint outlines.
fingertips ruddy with dirt and stone;
crimson painting ladders up the rear wall.
the heart tries to
break surface
but is suppressed by false notions of love.
Pirouette
broken top spinning
spinning
topples over, touches ground
and cannot be righted by any means of measurable force
broken top twirling
twirling broken ballerina feet
wrapped in ribbon and raw skin
tumbling to the ground with bruised knees
legs that carry the dance away
broken top spiraling
lost its balance, centripetal force
this here is a life, good sir!
decent man/ballerina:
this here is a
robbery
and our ski mask facades are but
broken tops
Georgia Beatty, a junior at Weir High School, placed first state- wide in the 2014 West Virginia Young Writer’s Contest and is a 2015 alumna of the WV Governor’s School for the Arts. There isn’t much to do in her hometown of Weirton, WV, so she writes words a lot. She likes The Beatles and coffee mugs. @n_patrickharris is her Twitter handle, because apparently everybody else is also named Georgia Beatty. Her Instagram: @georgia.beatty.