Contributor: Monica Rose

- -
I’ll do anything to prove to him
that I am the wickedest witch of them all.

I sensed his intentions from the start,
I had already begun to plot my revenge,

I didn’t even give you the chance
to hurt me yet...

How did I end up in the same time,
at a different place,
with a different person?
This clash to ache,
maybe I let the ghosts linger
for too long?

Karma...
I could feel her weighing heavy
on both of our ends.
She revealed our biggest wounds to each other,
and made us believe we could never be able to stop the cause of our bleeding.

Only this time feels different from the first time.
I now know you’ll keep arriving
in forms I didn’t know
I could make manifest.

That time will come
when I have completely shed this skin,
when my downfalls fall humbly.
When my ancestors give me the okay,
“you have made it right for us, too.”


- - -
Sometimes here, sometimes there. Psychology major with an art history minor at the University of California, Riverside. Rekindling my passion for poetry one heartache at a time.

Contributor: Monica Rose

- -
Their story was written in pencil.
Scrawled on a mere two pages of his moleskine,
promises of new beginnings dripped from his lead tip.

His words colored their moments,
fleeting memories printed boldly onto soft white sheets;
their time together summed up in incomplete poems and entries.
His sentences flowed free of grammatical errors,
edits and erase marks unnecessary;
their story not needing to be fixed.
His letters intertwined as his lines were written in cursive;
their embrace complex and striking,
beautiful and unordinary.

Their story was written in pencil and somehow, somewhere,
he stopped mid-sentence.

Turning back to bent and ripped pages, he rediscovered his past.
Although broken, the old stories he wrote still remained fresh to him;
flashbacks he held onto that were printed in ink, bleeding with permanence.

A confused author unwilling to continue a new tale,
his moleskine is open on his desk to the pages of ink.
The pages in pencil are no longer touched,
as the reader runs her fingers
along the moments he once wrote of.
Their story was short, with incomplete sentences and unfinished phrases.
Their story is now abandoned and fading;
what they shared and what they had now disappearing
into nothing but faint words, erasable figures.

Their story was written in pencil - temporary.


- - -
Monica Rose is a floral soul left to blossom in the Southern California sun. Her work has been published in her school's paper the Informer, and hopes to spread her pieces to new journals and sites.