Emily Winters                                                                                                                    

"And slip your jacket over my shoulders"

I'm overthinking things cause

I overthink everything.

But I do know that your smile looks

Beautiful in the harsh spectral searchlight

Of passing cars as they whisk

By our stationary forms, exposing us

To one another and ourselves to

The world.

But your lips and teeth were bathed in

Light, again. Again.

I see red lights up ahead and

Stretching a mile away from my breaching

Fingertips gasping for oxygen above the

Crimson heads of waves, I see

Stars that I wish into existence. Radio

Tower.

I lean into you subtly or rather I let

Myself lose feeling in my arms as they

Are assaulted by the night spitting its -

Bonfire embers spiraling away - grass

Wet paint wet - Dreams onto my lips and

I feel you painting my lips in the dark,

Shrugging your jacket over my shoulders.

I let the night take control of my body

And fold me into you, hoping that you'll

End my chill and slip your jacket

Over my shoulders.

Emily Winters

“The Swing at the End of the World”

Sounds like a Shel Silverstein poem.

I often wonder how I've gotten this far,

But more often I'm thinking what's next what's

Next? Basically: "When does my life begin?"

Fear, my constant companion, holding

My hand, sweaty palm to sweaty palm but

I want the tips of my chucks to kiss

The clouds, I want to feel the tension

In the air before a storm stretched like

Cotton-candy, like the space in between two people

Who would kill to kiss one another and

Undoubtedly will, kiss that is.

Would you kill to kiss me, I wonder?

I'd kill to stand on the edge of the world

And scream

You can’t beat me

I stand on many edges a thousand shattered

Mirrors, a thousand pathways balancing

Off of Frost's fingertips, a life a life or

A death on each corner of my cap and

Even as I stick a feather in my a

Flower in my hair with my fingers

Shaking clenching the rope handles, swinging

Untethered

Above the edge of the world

I know that I'm sitting in a field of flowers,

And there are a million more.

Emily Winters

 “Sounding like the early summer rain”

And each day, it gets

Harder to breathe. It gets harder to

Walk around as if I am not living beneath the

Constant blur, struggling under the relentless

Haze of the little things as they

Beat their wings against our window,

Sounding like the early summer rain to

Wake up to… if only I could still

Wake up next to you.

You’d grin if you were here.

Tell me to suck it up but I’m tired now.

I’m tired.

There’s too much futility to be invested

In the mundane, too much repetition to

Be excited anymore, too many

Gray days stretched ahead of me and I’m

Sick of the clouds. I’m tired of the rain.

He reminds me of you. The one sitting

Next to me while you’re away, melding

With the stormy weather as I’m finding it

Harder to remember all the times that we’d

Get lost together but how many times did I

Disappear into your eyes, drifting amongst the

Cliffs, my fingers trailing lifelessly over the

Tombstones of your youth, my mouth stumbling

Over your lips, your tongue, your teeth;

My words butchering all of your hurts

I guess I never could soothe.

Did I do anything right? Could I ever hold you

As strongly as surely as kindly as you cradled

My head night after night?

I tried. Damn it all I tried so hard to love you

And I love you

I love you.

Emily Winters                                             

“Squeezing through the cracks in my skin”

I wrote until my fingers grew numb and the Sun

Bled across the valley, saturating the ground with Its

Tender thoughts and sullied dreams - I do not believe

That when She lay down to rest, the Sun thought

Her blood could water our buried hopes.

I wrote until my pen ran dry; my bones withered,

Falling parched and barren. I myself could not imagine

The starving trees that could still manage to

Squeeze through the cracks in my skin.

I dipped my pen in the blood of the sun and went on,

Scrawling across the page and down the table and

Across the window, marking my territory with words,

Words.

My memories, scribbled in crayon up and down the

Insides of doorways, through each layer of legal pad as I

Peel it back. It reveals more and more like a coquettish

Princess, a teasing whore who senses your thrill

At the game more than anything else in this red world and

It’s a mad world. A red world. But not a big world,

Not anymore. I can feel the power lines leering and leaning

Into my window. I can see the blackbirds nesting in the crevices,

The cuticles of my fingernails and I have never felt so

Close so complete as when I danced cheek to cheek with the

Molten sky. And so I added my own blood to the melting pot and

Danced on, oblivious to the meteors, or seeing them feeling them

Apathetically as they bounced off of my imperious skin,

My pen and paper and imagination for a suit of armor…

I have never stopped to think: what would happen if

I stopped when my fingers grew numb and my mind seized and

My body seizured, flopping around like the spineless fish that I

Most likely am, underneath all of the hubris that my poetry

Grants me.

But instead of thinking, I write on, scraping my pen on the

Insides of my arm.