Thunder

Thunder

I lived in the thunder of white cracks in a broken sky. Its shattering gray and violent breath strained my wings, streaking my soul with bitter rain, until I saw through the eye of the storm a heart that could not love me.

©️ JM Tiffany

Gravity

Sick with sadness and wretched with longing, I found you in a night of smoke and poison.

Crooked reptiles leered through alcoholic distortions and I burned myself to check the nightmare for substance.

Twin blue flames cut the haze.

Your gravity drew me closer and, like a star of grace, or a sign of calamity, you cut through the clouds and crashed straight into my heart.

© JM Tiffany

Vampires

Light as windborne leaves, you were soft and pale as down, your cornsilk mane a midday fire that framed haunted wells of profound blue. You were prettier than anything I could have hoped for and crueler than anyone I’d ever known We had both been torn from the bellies of our worlds and met at the bottom, on the cutting room floor, with scalpels in our hands. Pain filled our cups and told us stories of happier days as we drank each other like vampires in the dark rooms of our hearts. It was no secret that I was a mad dog, a stoned stray, feral and desperate, and you howled with me in the canyons of my wounds. I clawed at your back as you drove a stake through my plans and I paid you, happily, for the pleasure of losing my mind. I carved your name in my chest. Parts of you were stitched into the closing gaps, like buckshot buried in the scabbed-over graves of a few brilliant moments. Hot breath and cold kisses. Love-drunk and wine-stupid. Children making children in the shadows of oblivion. © JM Tiffany

🅼🅾🆂🅰🅸🅲

Sometimes falling in love means shattering on impact. What follows is a mosaic. Pieces of you, and pieces of me, fitted together. Sharp patterns, our edges pressed tight into a single being. Endlessly broken and endlessly mended. A mural of tender wounds held together by trembling arms. © JM Tiffany

Chrysalis

Gasping for air in chrysalitic translucence, I am the liquous anticipation of transformation and the lucent opalescence of nascent life.

I am a new heart pupating at the edge of death.

See me as I hang, swaying from the Tree of All Worlds?

My markings shift like turbulent, melting tattoos, all dreams and memories of flesh mixing like blood in water.

My iridescent sarcophagus cracks and oozes: metabolic scars, glistening, drip the clear fluids of birth. As the luminous crystal membranes of new wings unfold, I am joyous in my terror and shudder with the paroxysms of my becoming.

As my bright wings spread in the darkness I am made again of living fire.

© JM Tiffany

Disremembered

I lay with the lights off and whisper to the Night. “I feel sympathy for monsters,” I say to Her, “Because I know what has made them.” My wounds are invisible in Her darkness, but the cuts and contusions are everywhere. Little valleys and hills, amid coarse patches of lethargy. “Must those broken continue to break?" I cry. She is quiet. The Night is a good listener, yet she never offers me any advice. I bind the cracks with chemicals and sink away, slipping into Her belly to be disremembered until dawn. © JM Tiffany 3.18.2024