There Is No Love Here

8-word prompt: elegy, obsidian, margin, origami, deepen, gnaw, wheeze & lacerate.

Our story reads like an elegy
written on old paper:
obsidian and melancholic
with words scribbled in both the body and the margin that
cut and lacerate,
taking away breath and reason,
making us wheeze and gasp for air.
There is no relief in this poem of ours:
it’s a verse of tortured stanzas
and misbegotten line breaks that
bend and fold and twist like origami,
but into grotesque shapes,
with ugly creases and rough edges.
There is no love here; it does not deepen,
it is not tender or profound,
but rather, it would gnaw at our spirit,
the way silverfish gnaw on paper,
leaving rot,
or like a rat nibbling cheese,
chewing away, until there is nothing left
but tasteless crumbs.


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