I Hate Lamplight
100 word prose poem
I hate lamplight. I hate the way it distorts objects I view from a distance, objects that slap me with clarity as I approach. I hate the way it highlights what I don’t want to see, and the way it narrates your thoughts without you uttering a word. I hate that it witnesses my devastation when you whiplash my heart, and how it betrays my grief—every distortion of my facial contours, the ugly droop of my gaping mouth, and how it spotlights the tears rolling down my cheeks. I hate how it illuminates my wail like it was mist
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Thank you for spending a moment with my words. If you like the way I play with letters from the alphabet, I would be honoured to have you as my guest, on my profile, where you can read whatever takes your fancy.
Teresa Renton has a first-class degree in English Linguistics and Language Creativity. Her work has previously been published or is forthcoming in Ink in Thirds, Flash Fiction Magazine, Across the Margin, Stick Figure Poetry, 101 Words, and elsewhere. She has recently been a finalist in Women on Writing’s Autumn ‘25 flash fiction competition.
Here’s a recent prize winning poem:
About the Creator
Teresa Renton
Inhaling life, exhaling stories, poetry, prose, flash or fusions. An imperfect perfectionist who writes and recycles words. I write because I love how it feels to make ink patterns & form words, like pictures, on a page.
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More stories from Teresa Renton and writers in Poets and other communities.
Standing While Falling
Quotation from Friedrich Nietzsche "He who wrestles long with monsters should beware lest he himself become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you. Man is not destroyed by suffering, but by the meaning he makes of it."
By LUCCIAN LAYTH4 days ago in Critique
Comments (3)
Good
Oh, I never thought about lamplight in such a way, but now you wrote it down... I was just thinking yesterday, we have two lights in the kitchen/living room. One is bright white and the other is warm yellow, and there's such a difference when one or the other is turned on. They really narrate your thoughts, as you wrote.
Intense. I like the way you build this to that wail and how you cut it off punctually with "mist" like you've dissipated with your anguish being expressed.