STORIES
by Elizabeth Morse
They make up stories for each other like children,
drinking tea and leaning together over the couch.
Their laughter crackles through the rooms.
Heat fills the midnight windows while each tale
bounces and glows. Even the electrical storm
beginning outside cannot shock them apart.
ESCAPE
It’s hazardous outside.
I’m double locking the door to protect you.
I’m your mother and I want to keep you safe.
You’re escaping? They’ll eat you alive.
Don’t you know they all have knives, guns?
They stick up banks and pawn shops.
Supermarkets, too. Watch yourself.
Why are you running away?
You never had much common sense,
never return books on time to the library
Do you think you can just leave?
Your father and I are so concerned.
You can’t just live on the sidewalk
or under the trees in the park.
You’d be reckless enough
to eat a pigeon.
IN THE DEPTHS
In memory of Zach Harris
My cousin died in the coal mines on his twenty-seventh birthday
in the highlands of West Virginia. He dreamed of the Milky Way,
that walkway of stars. Biscuits and gravy for breakfast,
then work. That afternoon, he fell into a lost mine,
cavern of nightmares, stepping on the paper-thin edge of sky.
Accident in the coal fields, the news reports announced.
Every song about the coal mines is a dark ballad,
a room without windows. The mines take and don’t return.
So many think they are secure from the depths of earth.
My cousin died in the coal mines on his twenty-seventh birthday,
expecting his days to be the same, counting on it in ways he couldn’t,
dreams reaching upward, away from the deep that killed him.
BIO
Elizabeth Morse values the quirky, the darkly humorous. She is hard-wired to be a night-owl and writes exclusively after 9 PM. Her work has been published in literary magazines such as Ginosko, Survision, and Kestrel. Her poetry chapbook, “The Color Between the Hours,” is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in late 2023. She was a finalist in the Blue Light Press full-length poetry collection contest and has her MFA from Brooklyn College. A job in information technology supports her writing.
