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Pocket Poet

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Dec, 2023

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10 Followers
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18 Stories

149 karma pts

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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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Dream of the Dream Eater 「貘の夢」

I am a unicorn in a lilac wood.I was one of those women living in the waveshalf way between the sea of dreams and the sea of tranquility. On Venus wavesthe sea she beckonswith Charybdis’ kissdon’t be afraid of the sirensthat pass by on the streets at night the red and blue lightsthe blood and blue whirl into one choppy purpleI feel a fin grope my legI twitch the foam is softagainst my facethe cool of a silken pillowI am waiting for someoneand forgot to stay awake I float up to the surfaceand fall back down into Lethe’s cold waters.I am shive...

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Yang Guifei; or, An Ode to Fat Girls’ Beauty

TW: SWEARING, MENTIONS OF FAT PHOBIC BULLYING, BULIMIA, SEXUAL VIOLENCE, ETC. 1. 26yrs old I’ve tasted love.You put in my mouth:the juice of fresh lychee,I suck until it cascades down my throat;down my bare,your beloved, well-visited mountainsit runs as refreshing as spring streams;How I could spend all daywatching the dew from the lychees drop! Have they never heard of Yang Guifei? I eat my feelings and I’ve tasted loveMochi-skinned, red bean heart beatChocolate strawberry in between teethsucked in a tongue, locked in a kiss;Selah You hol...

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Mine Hill, NJ

“It was a dark and stormy night at an old house, there was a long hallway upstairs with a warped—” “Stop it. I don’t want to listen to something like that while we’re here. My house already makes me feel like someone else is living there. I would rather hear one of those romance stories you’re always reading.” The moon was high and the gravel made a crushing sound under her feet as they walked. He moved closer to her because, in all honesty, stuff like that scared him. She kissed his upper arm. She kissed it again and then gave it one more l...

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Cassandra

He had no shame;Artemis was sleeping deep in the heart of the moonand it was as plain as dayno clouds would come nor rain to her aidno one would blot nor blind himhis light shown so strong, so hot the fire of him, of his vile desire, even from across a barren field, he burned her, her skin turned pink, her body blistered from that heat borrowed from Hadesshe ran near breathlessher feet kicked up sandThat coated her lungs the same as those poor souls who wandered lost in the wake of Pompeii Where were the four winds?Where was Hermes to take h...

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Recollections of the Prince of the Autumn Leaves

I returned to the past to come get you; to bring you back with me, back to me.I walked the way beyond time and beyond the gravity that exists further out, that keeps it all moving forward and round and round. I never knew the universe was alive before I walked outside of it. I watch it skipping as I walk by, flashing back and forth between its own memories. It’s trying to remember what happened and what didn’t. I am coming for you.I am going to make it forget you died.Let it choose the false memory where you are still alive. It would look fo...

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