SICK LIT MAGAZINE

PERFECTION

 Drink your feelings

eat your fears

Swallow a pill of depression

soak up the darkness

Of your own mess

it’s not easy

Being perfect,

you see

I have dead bodies

hiding in the basement

Ghosts who haunt me

while I wake

They’re not demons, you see–

they’re you;

And they’re me.

and supposedly we’re free–

Except for these

chains

That weigh me down

and make me

Perfect

PARASITES / A DROWNING

We dream a dream of darkness

where sadness turns to light

It eats up all the parasites

And makes the wrong all right

---

But when I wake,

the bugs–

they’re all still there

walking, crawling, feeding–

digging through my hair

---

you whisper things that

I can’t comprehend

Don’t you see that all of

my bones

Are still on the mend?

---

Why can’t I move?

Where are my lungs?

You’ve tied my shoelaces

to these…ladder rungs?

---

I can’t see through

this underwater

air

wait…wait–

why are you

pinning down my hair?

---

It’s so hard

to breathe now

Every time I try to move

the laces on my shoes only

tangle up into more intricate knots

and my hair is wrapped around

your fingertips

so I writhe and struggle

before I just sit

and let the water envelope me

and enter my lungs.

---

INSECURITIES 

Looking through blind goggles

Speaking out of turn

Writing all in hieroglyphs

Smiling all the while

Your teeth are falling out, Miss

Don’t forget to

Take your amphetamines

With your coffee

My teeth are falling out, Miss

there’s too much for me to hold

the boat is leaving me behind

You look

Nice

Will you be

My hand

to hold?

---

***Kelly Coody is the Editor-in-Chief and journalist for SickLitMagazine (known more affectionately as SLM). She decided on a whim that she’d contribute some dark poetry to end POETRY WEEK on a somber note. You can definitely find her on Twitter either @kellycoody or @sicklitmag (PS: she loves Twitter. Tweet or DM her and you can be published, too!)

She’s been writing for as long as she can remember; fiction, poems, journalism, etc, etc… But the most fulfilling and exciting venture she’s tried yet has been creating SICK LIT MAGAZINE. She loves her contributors and her husband wants her to SHUT UP already about it!****