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Pocket Poet

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Dec, 2023

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23 Stories

190 karma pts

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Billy Joel

Weekly Contest #369

“Well, well,” said he, “do not make yourself unhappy. If you are a good girl for the next ten years, I will take you to a review at the end of them.” —Pride and Prejudice, Ch. 48 I pluck a book off its place on the shelf. I crack open a novel that is to be packed away and take a quick peak inside. That accidental distraction of moving and cleaning: reading. The sound of the movers is a movement in a sonata, soothing sounds of trucks backing up, the cacophony of the NYC street turns into one of those 20th century, avant-garde pieces by bizarr...

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Sean II

Weekly Contest #369

I regret my poor memory. It keeps me loving you so long.An unsweet torture made more bitter than a strong barley tea.It is more bitter than the dandelion root I blow on as I pray that God grant me my wish of an easier life. Hot, naked summer sun, unclouded kisses my skin into a reddish, tan hidden sleep of a wildcat, stretching and yawning and stressed at the great, dark maw within my chest. Swallowing up all joy and all romance, I beat my brow, I beat my chest. These breasts could not allure you nor like mountain mists cool your desire...

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Song Cards; or, Love Letter Shuffle【歌ガルタ；恋文をシャッフル】

We wrote each others’ dreams down on paper exactly the same, down to the punctuation. It was a game. A middle school syndrome that the two of us did not outgrow until after college. We’d pass the slivers of our late night films around the table in a great shuffle with friends. Sometimes, it was like dealing a deck of cards. Other times, we would play it tournament style: one against another until only two of us were left.  How well did we know one another? Even down to our dreams? Were we one-minded even down to that collective unconsci...

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Sean

It was a peck on the cheek. It was a sting on the cheek. The red welt of the wasp kicked in and the rosy color spread across the side of her face. I was afraid then. So afraid of him whom my heart loved. I had picked up a knife and tried to stab him to stop him. How could I? A five-foot mouse against a six-five monster on a tirade. It ended swiftly, deftly, with a slap to my face so sound that it rang across his kitchen. Why had it become like this with him? When had he gotten like this? His house had been my sanctuary, a reprieve from the a...

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Persephone Q’s Lesbian Experience With Depression

Weekly Contest #360

CONTENT WARNING: EXPLICIT GRAY AREA SEX/RAPE AND CONSENSUAL SEX; HUMOROUS MOCKING OF THE MALE GAZE THAT MAY STILL BE TRIGGERING TO READERS She writes like a man because she wants to be Ann Patchett: (whose friend told her she wrote too much about herself, so she went on journeys to write about other people). She typed in the short matter of fact way she reported when she worked as a newspaperman, like Hemingway. She writes herself like a man because God made man in his image, but I wonder if these man’s man writers are really as well read as...

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Dung Beetle’s Märchen

WARNING: PHYSICAL AND SEXUAL VIOLENCE, MURDER, AND GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS OF BUGS AND DEATH *********************************** Here are our main characters: a dung beetle and his wife. He is rolling his dung with his mate. A man dumps a pregnant woman’s limp body into the hole they’ve dug to bury their eggs. Animals are not ignorant or maybe they are, but this little dung beetle sees the lump in her stomach and it clicks. She carries her nest inside her. He wonders if they’re mates and looks on her with the same pity as he would the manti...

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Anemone: After Jamila

Weekly Contest #351

The windflowers wave to the spring. My red haired beauty moves through the valley like a memory on the stalks. I am with a gentle woman of the flowers now. No nymph, but a mortal moving in the hothouse. She was born here and will die here. Her roots are firmly planted in this place: she was not traveling through for a season. She didn’t stay for two more because she loved it. And she didn’t stay one more because she loved me. All in love is equal to that one year of her glances. I milk my cows and think of the stray cat that ran with its las...

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Weaving Princess【織姫】

Weekly Contest #341

Their eyes met. He jolted in recognition.This is the man she would have married had she not married another already. Her friend re-introduced them to one another at a brunch in the Meatpacking District. Between his husband and work, he had little time to spend with friends and decided to merge friend groups. He wanted to announce he and ***** had finally found a surrogate while they were all together, but her and her ex couldn’t help, but stare at one another, paying little mind to what he was saying until he was drowned out as the memories ...

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Cape May

I have never understood great American poetsThey talk about the mountainsthe wheatthe cornthe middle of nowhere, a landlocked country that I know not by sense,but by beach reads I bought from the Strand when I was last in the city:Whitman and Walden I am from a peninsula of rivers that with soft rains seethe themselves into quiet swamps,furies that flood valleys, where Poseidon engulfs the land,his turbid waters rise half to the height of hills,and it becomes a country of Charybdis’ keep I am the oceansreflecting myself in the myriad of tide...

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CHAI【चाय】

Weekly Contest #339

WARNING: MENTIONS OF SEXUAL ASSAULT, HOMOCIDE, GUN VIOLENCE, ALCOHOL, AND GENDERED CURSING My cousin is making chai in the kitchen. I am at the table with my mother. Her husband is sitting in his chair in the darkness of the next room. The television flickers on and a commercial for a new movie is playing on the television. It’s called My Subconscious. It’s coming out soon. The sound of the microwave is humming a song to my loneliness. I want for warmth against my lips. I long for it on these dark month’s cold nights. I’ve never been singl...

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Agape; or Snow Elephant 【 哆；还是雪白象】

Weekly Contest #338

he came from the woodsfive hundred years, the body’s beard, a roaming cloud of the forest floor wanderedeven to its brancheseven in the lightest steps of a cloud dancerhe was the heavy snow that blanketed the harshest wintersbursting the sides of treesuntil in warning the trees barked to their fellows of breaking ranksice weighing down their boughsto bowing the knee before a new emperorlike to inconstant willowswho would pledge their fidelity to any man or season Snow Elephant, they called himthe wandering beast had strayed from a shepherd l...

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Edmond Dantès

Weekly Contest #338

Fac et spera. I put the book down on the grass beside me. I had laid under the shade of a dead tree’s dream broken and at its end, awoken. My eyes crawled out from the darkness of the tome and into the sunlight. ‘For what?’ I wondered, ‘Have I waited all my life for a good equal to the evils done to me? Will I lie down once and for all and die before I am redeemed by love?’ Bound up like a Maidenhair tree, an innocent cruelly cut down in its first bloom. Some protestor may have tied their life to this tree to save it from the fate of what it...

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WING【翼】

Weekly Contest #335

TW: THIS STORY CONTAINS CURSING AND CONSENSUAL SEXUAL THEMES/REFERENCES •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• I run my hands through your hair again. It is so soft that it drives an ache through my heart. I wish my ribs were softer so when my heart thumps against them, they would not hurt so. At least then I would be able to do without that physical pang, pang, panging against my most longed for desire: that I overcome this love for you it causes me a persistent sighing that is near as troublesome as an obstinate coughingwhose root cause is a ...

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St. Peter

Weekly Contest #330

‘Can dolphins eat earth fruit?’ I wonder as I look down at sea starsat sands more numerous than the starswe are made of the cosmosand we are fashioned after God in the mudand to dust we will all return It is so early that the stars must be sleeping;and I watch the coral blooming in the wilting light of a passing turtle’s eclipse. I swim upward in the dawnand think of the fires of the Wide Sargasso Sea,Mother Earth,Mother Ocean,all the flutter and fury and fire that swims within my breast I miss the weight of the sea every time I leave,but I ...

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Peaches of Immortality【蟠桃會】

Weekly Contest #330

TW: SWEARING It was amongst the songs of Jupiter,that one day the former vestal virgin laid aside her bow.She thought of an urn that had been placed in a grave;a graveside that had turned to grass;a parched grass that had turned to dust; a traveling dust that loosen its hold on the roots it had laid and turned into desert;and a barren desert that had become rejuvenated earthenwhere the people built huts and cities;and had turned those sands into glass from their caravans’ firesfor which they built bridges that connected cities in trade. She...

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