Chasms in my palms

If 100 mere flicks of my hand/could swat away sweaty nights and days;

If 100 mere blinks of my eyes/could wash the grain of y'inz;

If 100 words chorusing far away heralds/could shatter a bandaid of superglued hearts;

let octopus jars spill from my ventricles

If/If/If/100 times. Maybe I could etch melted sand deep enough to see through yr'alls cardiac crystal. Maybe, then, no one would witness aortic hoarfrost. Maybe grace would turn us royals from cows ears, red velvet streaks mingling with oxygen hungry blues.

Lay your heads 100 times on my lap/and I will give a century of gentle butterfly kisses right between y'inz eyes.

A hundred, a 100, one hundred times my loves. If only your echoes would chorus back.

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123 words by Vocal's counter

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I like to put a picture of what the piece would look like off of vocal since vocal isn't really set up to showcase poetry, so here it is.

Vocal requires 600 words for publishing and can sometimes hold a story if its not. I don't want to add 600 pieces of fluff, so below is a little more about the competition and me.

About the Challenge

This piece was written for D.K. Shepard's "Keep It 100" challenge which is an "Unofficial Poetry and Microfiction Challenge". Basically this means the regular every-day-joe vocal contributor (not vocal staff) D.K. Shepard gives a prompt from their own brain to challenge other writers to answer, and then we do, if we want. This challenge celebrates the challenge author writing their 100th piece on vocal and requires participates to write a poem or microfiction that includes the phrase "one hundred", "a hundred" or "100" in the body of a poem or microfiction. You can enter one microfiction piece or one poetry piece (this is my poetry entry) by November 21st at 11:59 PM EST.

About the piece

My favorite reference is this piece is the octopus heart, which is how I selected the cover photo.

As much as I would like to be a plotter, at the end of the day I'm a pantser, and even with prompts, when I sit down to write, I have zero idea what's coming next.

For this piece I started with the first thing that came to my brain and was like, Welp, I gotta mention 100 so let's just do it out the gate. It quickly became a non-romantic love poem to people important in my life.

Too often when we talk about the way people impact us, people we love, people whose absence feels like hollow hells, the end result gets imputed to romantic love. It was my goal to reject that interpretation while injecting the complexity of missing someone(s) you wish to dearly see.

I tried to signal that its not about **lurve** by using plurals, and I realized I wanted to inject some of the culture of my grandparents into those plurals because standard English is often terribly unclear, lacking a plural you.

I immediately sensed the disjoint between how we experience English dialects (often as less educated), and the more highbrow approach to describe this feeling (some would call it purple prose but I don't think mine is purple enough, just a reaching violet). It felts very dissonant, as if the quality of the poetic experience is threatened, but I opted to keep that structure for its dissonance; a tacit way to encourage people to sit with this discomfort and judgement, which is entirely separate from the theme and topic of the poem.

About me

I'm a long time lurker, recently popped up to do a little creative writing after having only two pieces up for a ridiculously long time.

They are my favorite pieces and you can find them here and here if you'd like to take a gander:

Butter Cream: https://shopping-feedback.today/poets/butter-cream%3C/a%3E

When we were young: https://shopping-feedback.today/poets/when-we-were-young-m7bv010dxa%3C/a%3E