(Image: barbwire and dark Christian Spies (@seelove) on Unsplash )

A BRIEF PRELUDE TO THE LONG-DELAYED DEMISE

Boys used to love my ass
It reminded them of a pear
said it was a fine balance
of softness and firmness
and my skin
you’d just want to bite into
its tender peel before
sailing into the jaws of a
hurricane

it seems like someone else’s life
now

crater-sized holes gape
in the ceiling and under the feet
cutting through that same skin
colorless and hard to travel through
like paper

The soup plate teeters on the edge
of the table and falls with
an uninterrupted drop

What a spectacular crash

IN AN EGGSHELL

Don’t you hate movies with an underlying theme of
grief and loss of what once was full of
shiny happy people then and those same people now
who look like something big is missing
movies that make you wonder which came first
the chicken or the egg, and see things in a new light
and want to be more than just a name and shit

I love being my name. It can’t give me burns like
the sizzling oil waiting in the pan and no
I don’t care that all definitions of loneliness are
blood-related. I wish I were without others somewhere
in the middle of nowhere. I would feel less alone than
a lonely egg
in a box unadjusted to its size

LIE IF YOU HAVE TO

a stranger told me
you’re a hard woman to pin down
and I felt like dying that day

my boss told me
we are reluctant to weed out
less qualified applicants

my president told me
women of indomitable spirit with
a fervent desire to change society
are precious yet redundant

my teacher told me
we are in dire need of organized
religions and primitive discourse

my mother told me
you need to learn to launch
your missiles yourself

I can almost make it out baby
my lover told me looking at my reflection
intimacy hidden by a swirl image
on the mirror

let’s do our bit to save the world today

you grow through the loss
of what you value most
I told myself and

felt like dying again

Bojana Stojcic @BoyaETC ‏ teaches, bitches, writes, bites and tries to breathe in between. Her poems and flash pieces are published or forthcoming in Rust + Moth, Anti-Heroin Chic, Down in the Dirt, Mojave Heart Review, Dodging the Rain, The Opiate, The Stray Branch, Tuck magazine, X-R-A-Y Lit Magazine, Nightingale & Sparrow and Visual Verse. She blogs regularly at Coffee and Confessions to go.