Author: andivandenberge
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Declaration to Self
To my true self, I am sorry I abandoned you to become a version of myself more easily digestible to people I wanted to like me. I am sorry I got lost in the tangle of trying to understand what the world wanted from me, rather than asking you what you need. I got so…
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Southern Values
I’m American, face down in the soup. Only fools wish our names to mean somethin’ ’cause we gon’ die a glorious death- hunny never learnin’ to taste the water.
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Wasteland, TX
Finding answers at the bottom of bottles that you forget by the time you wake but you’ll || grab the poison || You’ll || try again || You look back wondering why the clock never stopped—for You. The clock wondering, how You— got || stuck || on replay ||>
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Urban Stew
California blankets- soggy, a week expired They say one man’s trash is, Well- it might be asylum. We wait, in a dust jungle. Resting and reading our shelter, around the Mulligan stew. Carcass for marrow, onion scraps for a punch We wait. Then we haul– with haste, locomotive Displacement.
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Obedience sold at market price*
She’ll be lovely and quiet pink and delicate like an oyster drooling on the floor lipstick in place. Insert through eye and strike the chisel A mere tap with the hammer and she’ll petrify to breath-taking stone and you’ll restore peace at home. Never mind the detachment, you like your coffee poured from an empty…
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Your Precious Abomination
Pearled decay with the pull of a cheek Expose your canines— playing fortress to a cursed tongue with your ears, I hope you see me—as I am. Your Precious, Abomination
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If you call it cutlery, let it cut
Reflective surface given power by flame. Forged in a pit of hope, beaten to elegant form. Silver eager to mold- a spoon if that’s what you need a spoon here to please Please, a powerful beginning. Why a flattened start? Pummeled on the anvil of servitude- a hindsight bias, she could have used in the…
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I Don’t Need Nicotine Patches, I Smoke Cigarettes
Images of a Swamp Willow weigh me down Statue my presence, petrify my face Perhaps the monster’s toothed margin its scattered warts on its alabaster belly spare my fear a touch. For its tentacles that root it still, terrorize me the most. The hush is almost tranquil, noiselessness serves a calm but the tick of…
