Wrecked Chorus Blog

[wrecked]
Marie Marandola


A man burned his house down
trying to kill a spider. The smudge
on my bathroom ceiling
is a shoeprint, left over from
the cockroach I couldn’t reach.
That was before I saw
the other, perched quietly
on my loofah’s soft pink folds.


It’s hard to be alone, but sometimes
harder not to be.


You light a cigarette,
say you want to quit--
and drinking. You want to cook
for yourself, believe in love,
feel something again. But I’ve watched you
listening to poetry
with your eyes closed.


You take the first drag, and the end of me
goes to ash.

Untitled
Caitlin Spies

Through mist, behemoths rise,
Skeletons strange and rough.
How could you be Sleepless here?

Moisture adheres to every scrap,
To everyone.

This moss grows, drink it in.
Touch a hand to the bark,
Come away cold, but wanting more.

Water turns to Thunder in this hidden cove.
Silken against skin.

The temptation is too much, I am too close.
Eyes closed, breathe the forest in.
Breathe in your air.

Droplets in my hair.

I open my eyes.
I am standing on a bridge.
Two lines, two lives.

The path divulged, and I, coward,
Choose nothing.
And go back the way I came.

Relationship Haiku
Levi Rogers

A self body bag
I wrapped for you, trekked with ropes
From the sea, perfect: wrecked.



[wrecked]
J. Sam Williams


Never been drunk. Never been wrecked. Never smoked weed or a cigarette. Emotional trauma wrecks me enough. Gluttony wrecks me enough. Lust wrecks me the most. Sin is my wrecker and death my destructor. Try and purge all from my mind. I don’t have time to focus on the rest.

---

Soak
Cassandra Panek

I float like pots and pans
Left overnight
In the dark I salt the water
But nothing will cleanse your greasy touch.

My body made of pith
Jane-Rebecca Cannarella  
​
I am drunk on my mistakes and my love is a leather helmet. My body is made of pith and at every beginning and end, I supplicate my plant’s interior at the altar of my errors. Loneliness is a clay that has shaped me—fragile and brittle with a hollow inside. I plug my body with the frames of silt silhouettes that I melt into the void of my insides—I can almost see them for who they are. Mesmerized by their outlines, I devour them. Bodies that beg to live within me, I try to hold them to my figure forever.
​
Ceramics are breakable and every baked part of me is a splinter that once retained the bits of boys that lived in the gulch of my cavities. I am earthenware shards splayed across the kitchen floor. I am vials holding wet, salty, sand made-up of texts that go unanswered. Grind down the remaining parts of my body until it is gritty soil. Till me until I’m loam. And let the loneliness turn into a field where flowers are farmed.

living wreckless
Alex Simand

It’s funny how once you are whiplashed, it lives in your neck forever: that unshakeable kink, that muscle memory of scraping glass and crunching metal and torn jeans running along the concrete. I see it when I close my eyes, how close I was to departing, how close still, as the blood dripped down my leg and I picked pebbles from an exposed kneecap, hopped right back to a motorcycle that leaked oil, hopped up on adrenaline and the thrill of still being, and rode off. I should have been smarter, but there is no such thing as retrospect, which is an abstract concept best left for men with elbow patches.

I’ve lived so many alternate realities in which the white truck behind me did not stop, but instead ran over my body—thump thump—like a skunk’s slumping carcass on wine country’s winding one-lane highways. In which I was crushed by my own machinery. In which my arms were torn from their sockets, leaving me a chewed-up sock puppet waiting to be tossed in the trash. In which my ribs shattered into a million pieces like a plastic bag full of glass.

I should have expired, I think, that day. Carton of milk. Missing persons. A slumped slab of flesh in an ambulance. A wailing faraway relative. Instead, I have this mark where my knee used to be. I can feel through my scar tissue the part of my ivory I left in the asphalt. I pass the spot where it happened everyday on the way to work, unmaking myself, building a memorial for a moment that only finished partway.

photos supplied by Cassandra Panek with the exception of the last two