Sometimes the aroma of your gardenia perfume finds me in a crowd, curling in my nose and clogging my brain with unwanted memories.
When I throw vodka down my throat, I think of you. The taste of nausea and bad decisions and good nights and worse mornings.
I hear a ukulele softly strumming and I think I’m dying. That was the sound of peace and comfort and now it is the tell tale tune of being buried alive.
I run my hand along the scrapbook you made for my eighteenth birthday, map out the creases in the paper. Because I tried to grasp your goodbye but it was just thin air pulling me into nothing.
And sometimes, occasionally, I see you out in the world, the girl who looks enough like my friend to suffocate me and different enough to make me bleed. I look at you and know, there is nothing left to mourn.
About the Creator
Poppy
poetry in progress
Violence Begets
"Any last words, cowboy?" "None you'd understand, sodbuster." "Funny. That's Marshall Sodbuster to you. But I meant some last nugget that would help us in the adjudication of the myriad offenses counted against you and your gang. I wasn't asking for penitence."
By Adam Diehl4 days ago in Fiction
Comments (30)
Absolutely love this, Poppy! So breathtaking and poignant <3
So well-mapped, and the sadness poignant.
so beautiful!
You’ve done it again! I see this as so much more than just a sad story. It’s an ode to the senses, the ability to feel-hardship and all.
Well done on placing on the Leaderboard ✅
Back to say 'congratulations' for placing 2nd place for Most Popular Story on this week's leaderboard this amazing piece. Well done.
Poppy!! Way to go with second place on most popular story this week!!
Congratulations on your beautiful TS
Congratulations on your Top Story 💖.
Woah! Such hurt woven so beautifully in such stunning particulars! Congrats, Poppy!
💝💕💖
Heartbreaking but beautiful poem! Congrats on the top story!
Love it
Congrats on your Top Story! It often amazes me that certain things like scents, sounds, etc, can at one point trigger happy memories, then make you sad at another moment. The power our senses can have.
Awesome work, congrats on TS
Congrats on Top Story! It’s well-deserved.🙂
Back to say congratulations on the Top Story!
back to say congrats on the TS.
Yay Poppy!! Back to say congrats on Top Story!! 🎉
I mean. I'm not surprised, Congrats on Top Story, PopStoryPoppy.
This is beautiful.
Wow. There are times when this would have been the story of my own lost friendship, yet this is uniquely yours. I feel the sensory focus makes it all the more impactful. What a great entry, Poppy.
I like that this almost felt like a response to 'the fruit section at the grocery store'. Most specifically the first stanza that creates this sense of longing and then the last line where they say there's nothing left to mourn... feels like a reference to them being a corpse.
This has a sense of mourning, even though, as you said there's nothing left to mourn. Well done.
To know that a person presented investment rather than bestowing it is really hard to acknowledge without feeling betrayed.