Fossils

Sixteen years ago I promised myself I wouldn’t tell anyone
about the fossils underneath my house.
Bones, remains of monsters that evolved, reasons
why I never went near the basement door.
For sixteen years, life was being brutally distracted
from the rescue I wrote about.
Sixteen years I felt the house decay into my body, pull me
towards the foundation. Prophecy, ritual, ceremony.
Bones sang, called, wanted.
Sixteen years with their voices, begging me,
until a gun barrel learning self-control showed up.

Your trigger had been pulled before, but you figured out
you didn’t always need to be loaded.
We’d sit in your car & you’d draw me
pictures of skeletons fondling for their skin.
It made me laugh & taught me how to fall asleep
without being nauseous about tomorrow.

I still cant work up enough courage
to tell anyone about you, or how you left.
It hurt. Still hurts.
Won’t ever stop hurting.
I know you have prophecies to dismantle,
& I wouldn’t want to stop you. Besides,
I’ve got to make silence tremble.

Beetles

I taught myself at a young age
that people’s eyes looked like beetles.
When I was seven & told my 2nd grade teacher this
she said eyes look like eyes, so I listened.
But when I finally learned to look myself in the mirror
I knew for sure they were beetles. I knew,
because they crawled back into my head when startled.

There are days I wake up,
blood hanging onto my knuckles.
I’ve worked so long in my tool shed
dismantling planets with a jeweler’s screwdriver,
working the gems out from them.
They line my room like Christmas lights, it’s home
to be so close to nostalgia, soon
strings of moon shards will replace veins
& crawl into my eyes.

***

Scott Sherman is a graduate of Ursinus College, where he earned his BA in the field of English. He has been writing poetry for six years, and his work often focuses on abstract depictions of his youth, dreams, and relationships. He breathes nostalgia, and tries to include his past into the majority of his writing.