Rachel Dula
April 2015
Rachel Dula is an exuberant graduate of the Publishing Major at Illinois State University with a high passion for all of the arts. She’s read for the Festival and A Reading eXperiment at the 2015 AWP Conference in Minneapolis. When her parents ask her what she wants to do with her life, she says she wants to “become a comedian.” She has been published in StarWallPaper, a Chicago anthology for young writers, in 7th grade because of a poem that just happened to be her homework. Find more of her work at http://figment.com/users/237709-Rachel-Dula.
Wasteland
Beer cans and whiskey bottles
Drunken attempts, sliced skin, and dopamine pills
A garbage dump for a pathetic waste of space
A recyclable piece of pixel paper
Blank like an artist’s untouched canvas.
A stroke of a quiet quill
Dancing letters, daring desires
S̶c̶r̶a̶t̶c̶h̶.
No.
That’s wrong.
Hours tick tocking away.
Tick.
Tock.
Tick.
Tock.
Yearning yawns of crumpled crap
Crackling of crinkled sheets.
TOSS.
Missed.
Eyes drooping as a hand caresses a cheek.
The artist’s canvas still untouched
B̶l̶a̶n̶k̶.
House of the Suicide Sleep
The loneliness of the hour came home to me
In the salty eclipse
I pick stars
I saw the night on the outer rim of the drinking glass
In the severing cloud of the sow
A broken armada.
A rainy disease of jittering drops
The state of the tear that slips off
The house was submerged in the cool lake of air
Lakes cannot drown me
I am circling passwords.
Everything down to the words was in motion, in expectation
We fantasized foreplay with the person standing next to us
Buried in skin
The house gave a long answer
In the moment of ecstasy
A spreading of good news over an area without elements
Without words,
Without voice,
Without speaking identity.
The music was light in its sound
I play songs for the errors
A breath was enough for differentiation
Of the suicide sleep
The day was without hours.