Poem Series: Regrets

~REGRETS~
Liz Fink-Davenport


I have regrets. Yes. Of how I loved you. Of how I did all the things I promised myself I would not do immediately after the promise is said. I lied to me. I dismantled me and showed you the pieces like a child with pride; an offering of scribbles and a cracked clay thumb pot and a seed sprouting in a styrofoam cup.

I broke my ribs and then rebuilt my chest so that you had room to crawl in.
I stopped all time and halted the world on its axis and boxed up the winds and shushed down the universe so that only your siren song voice was heard.
I rearranged my mess so it was less messy for you to have to look at.
I created nonstop earthquake dreams of you. I swallowed the ocean and ate the desert and lied and said I wanted more.

I have regrets. Of how I loved you. My heart beats no blood now. Air. Only air. My fingertips just graze the world, never plunging wrist deep again. My skin stands up and walks around and says hello to the greeter at the grocery and makes life roll forward. "Thank you, my day is well." No. Makes time roll forward. Life stopped. My chest rises and falls. Like it should. I fulfill my requirements. With no light. None. You turned off the headlight in a mine. Miles deep. You are not a good person.

I have regrets. But I don't regret my enthusiasm. I don't regret my joy. I don't regret how I freaking cannon balled into it. I don't regret my anxious fear that turned in to warmed honey. I don't regret how fearless I was. I don't regret my lessons learned. My heart. In pieces. Swept up with a small broom and a dust pan. It will get glue sticked back together. Someday.

Until then. I have regrets. I do. I have my heart to find blood for. I have my skin to keep walking. I have you. Imprinted. Damn. You. Imprinted. I have regrets. I want you to regret someone else. Please. Regret them until you want to shake them out like crumbs. I want you to regret. Have regrets. Am I one?

Artist Spotlight: Ashley Elizabeth Imaging

  

 Ashley has been capturing memories and creating visual wonders for years, and hung her own shingle in 2011 with Ashley Elizabeth Imaging. Below is a brief sampling of her work. Enjoy!

Kristen Smith

Haley Holmes

Poem Series: Until I Do

UNTIL I DO
Liz Fink-Davenport

The thing about love is that I can never do it right. I do it too hard. I do it all awkward and gangly. Like two teens with braces kissing. I do it too brokenly. I don't do it. Then I do it to wrong places. I do it and it gets handed back to me. Or thrown at me. Or pressed down under someone's shoe and stuck a bit there like parking lot gum. I do it with fear and holding. I never do it. I do it all over the damn place. I'll not do it again. I promise. I messy do it. I do it and then it does me. I do it like a shotgun flare into the dark. I do it with quaking hands. I do it tearfully and close eyed and a bitten lip. I do it with my chest thrown open and a wolf cry to the moon. I do it in inside pockets. I do it with a swear that I'm not really doing it. I stop it. I stop it. I stop it. I screw it all up into the worst kind of ugly. I pick it apart like tangled necklaces. I find it. I hide it. I hold it overhead and dance naked around the fire with it. I put it in a box, in the dark, in a cupboard, in a house, that is sealed. I hold it. I rock it. I soothe it. I toss it like a baseball and never go search for it over the fence. I kill it. I hurt it. I strangle it until there is no breathe and no beating organ. I bury it. I mourn it. I birth it and I cry how beautiful it is. I tuck it into my breast when it is frightened. I say nasty words to it. Oh, how nasty. I tell it I would rather never have met it. Never have laid eyes on its face. I tell it I hate it. I don't mean it. And I do. I want it back. I beg for it. I try to make it drink the water I bring to it...but it's not thirsty. I pull it along like a mossy anchor and a rope. I misplace it. I make it be sorry it ever met me. Regret my face. I make it look me in the eye and then I'm the one that flinches. I start it. I start it. I start it again. I do love all wrong. I never get it right. I will not do it again. No. Never. Until. I do. Dammit. I do.

Artist Spotlight: You Can Only Imagine

You Can Only Imagine is the graphics (photos, video, design, and more) of Damien McLean. His photos include everything from capturing the energy of live rock shows and burlesque performances to wedding day and newborn bliss, and his photo of Miles Osland was recently featured in Downveat Magazine.

Below is a samplig of his surrealism. Enjoy!

Artist Spotlight: Gregory

Musician, author, poet...and visual artist. Original art taken from a sampling of his baker's dozen of solo releases over the years. Enjoy (and enjoy his music at the link HERE).

Poem Series: ~The Creases~

~The Creases~

Liz Fink-Davenport

It's late. So stop. Just...stop. My heart is broken enough. Splintered. And scattered. And all the pieces have spun and slid under the refrigerator to mixed in with the sticky dust and in dark corners and settling into cracks in the blackened floor next to the crumbs. Never to be swept up. Never to rejoin with the whole. Always lost always left always less. I have little. And it is fragile as the web across a lamp, heated until brittle and brushed away with fingertips clumsy and cruel and selfish, reaching for the switch. Off. On. Off. On off. You want light. Because you are frightened. And you want to visit now. Sit in my room and rewind days. Talk softly in the glow. Rewind and watch the good parts. Rewind. "That was the best...when you put your long fingers across your lips to hide your curled grin...but I saw...oh, it was the best. Remember?" You poke and touch with a thick thumb. Pick at all the scabs and raised pink scars. What's this? How did you get this? Why is there a bandage? Let me see.

Leave. Get out. You are unwelcome here. Not in this room. Not this touching. No rewinds. No fingers tangled in my hair so familiar. No reward of a memory for you. The parts of my heart all over the house...shards...cry out together. Get out. Get the hell out. You shake your head no. You have tear welled eyes. Get. Out. And then....it's just me. On the floor. In the creases. In pieces. And draped over a lamp. In the dark. Until you come again...and switch on the light. Unwelcome but missed.

Artist Spotlight: Joshua McLean

We've featured his work here before....and now FIVE more, just for you!

Poem Series: WHIM

WHIM

Liz Fink-Davenport

You are the closest thing I ever felt to home.
A welcome mat smile with a fireplace laugh,
Knowing I could collapse into you when the gravity of everything else
turned my bones to shackles.
When life held me down against my own will,
Shoved my face in gravel, gasps for breath between mouthfuls of dirt.
I could kick off my shoes and rest in you.
Rest in a place that I was always meant to be.
Because it was always supposed to be us.
At least, that’s what I tell me.
And I never feel more safe than when I can look up at your constellations.
Slip off Orion’s Belt,
And you can slip into me.
Every song that’s ever given me tingles.
Every hug that reminded me why humans need to touch.
Every moonlit secret that traveled from my lips to yours.
Every broken promise to myself.
Every sleepless night trying to figure out when the path to your door became so hard to find.
Every attempt to cling to us.
My heart broken and mended and rebroken infinite times an hour.
I think you need,
Happiness that lingers over your days and stabs joy into dark recesses.
You want play. And light. And no mess.
And I'm mess. And I'm undoing. And I'm chaos.



My heart is strung to you by a tiny red thread that is tied at your wrist.
Like a child's balloon. Tethered. And I wait. Poised between heaven and sky
And your wrist,
That tugs. To home. At its own whim.

Poem Series - Jolted

JOLTED
Liz Fink-Davenport


"And on that day when I am not sure if I can take my heart and jam it back into its tight cage. Or force my lungs to repeat a rolling rhythm. Or pull one muddy foot from the sucking ground and burden it to move a heavy inch forward. I can't. A levitation at the corners of your lips pulls my intentionally forced life into lightness. Oh, that smile. From across the room and through a mass of nondescript faces on the sea, it puppeteers my mouth with invisible threads and curls what was flatlined, jolts a heart into beating. It shoots out from where it hits hard first until even my fingertips and hair is on glowing blue fire."

Poem Series: Liz Fink-Davenport

The first in a series.....

Watch

I measure time in the moments of being with you and without you. And the longing in between.

It is ticked out in the second hand of your blink and your sigh and your warm breath and each small movement of your hand.

So stop the harsh clock in the hall and quiet down the world while I keep my own time. By the soft beats of my heart...waiting. On yours.