1.

Posted on 2018-03-252019-01-10 Posted in Poetry, writingTagged cities, dark, death, depression, dreams, ghosts, memories16 Comments

a city map is sewn in the scalp;
looped in the goat-milk, or spit out,
tongued in silky blades of stomped
down grass.

i’m crowned with high-pitched fingers
clenched in fur.
in octaves only shades can bear, i simmer
in their holy cradles.
i become the roughened corner of a mouth
grinning at its own joke.

there, the receding home in ranch-style polaroids of a dirty blond stranger and my mother squinting in the sun; some home not mine or yours.

ventricles, which
in a woman’s left grows tiny,
and in a man’s more supple.
i keep alive by milking goats.

some like lifelines, some like ulcers
the city streets are braided in my hair.

samantha lucero 2018 ©

2.

Posted on 2018-03-132018-03-13 Posted in Poetry, writingTagged depression, dreams, life after death, lonely boy, memories, nightmares, old age, past, poem, Poetry, songs, vintage16 Comments

where memory rusts, limp on a clunk of

dry land & dragging me through the sequins of a

small earth

i croak to the fractured window of a bone-white ford truck groaning down, shambling up a shaft of dreary road.

i, a silver figment or mislaid filament, a filigree wafting bare thru realms hot & rose-gold, loom where the skeleton of the truck is parked eternal: i see the rotting choir of burst leather spaces, vacant, on which the sun has dug its holes. little else remains within apart from remains; i’ve loped from one graveyard to the next.

840 minutes in a warehouses’ baking mouth bending metal out of men, where oil-dyed hands stain wonder-bread or stay-at-home wives’ necks, they used to make trucks like those. and like the one that was his daddy’s buried in that old garage. all he had was that truck

and all I have are his songs.

you’ll never feel young in your old cage—that’s old age—

a cage.

and all you’ll have are songs.

samantha lucero 2018 ©

a shriveled love note in the barrel of an empty gun – samantha lucero

Posted on 2017-04-122017-04-12 Posted in Poetry, writingTagged dark, dreams, love, poems, Poetry, secrets, unrequited, writing, yearning1 Comment

more of my night-work at SD.

Sudden Denouement Literary Collective

the man i loved who never knew
was tall like most men girls love & never tell
he was t h e unreachable one in missing scenes of my other life — one i could’ve had, but couldn’t, & now i can’t at all —
he was that untouched n a m e i never murmured aloud
a strangled sonnet that i would recite to achasm in eachyearning lover’s prison-grey heart, wet-eyed with a desert-tongue and a diamond gun,
because you’re holding the smeared organ
the holy medal in my scalded dreams, where no one can hear what i whisper into my own nebulous mind,
so i scream in my head when i see you,
even in this inner-woven world where i can confess
to the fake piece of you that isn’t really there,

i don’t, i wouldn’t dare.

[Samantha Lucero writes stuff sometimes at sixredseeds.]

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let’s be strangers in new orleans – samantha lucero

Posted on 2017-03-212017-03-21 Posted in Poetry, writingTagged creative writing, depression, dreams, love, new orleans, poem, Poetry, stories, writing2 Comments

more of me from SD.

Sudden Denouement Literary Collective

next-day sore, fabled romance memories we’ll never have again hang themselves over the morgue of myshoulders. they sling there on the murderess hews of my collarbones like a noose. over the rubble of me like a shapeless dress, they cling. my sadness is a one-size fits all.

there’s a bad mystery of stitched up, prayer-words smothered & held hostageunderneath the humid crucifix gameof your nails. maybe we could be in love.your calloused hand, my beating throat. memories are ghosts that can physically embrace me; embrace us.

likedirt-sweat in a ghost-tour day of that hot mouth street in New Orleans, where the grinning specter-folks wanna stay like pastedgaslight posts in booze-colored hurricane beads. where there’s oiled-up candles in the balmy night lining decatur& quivering tarot cards in a sweaty palm telling me i’m meant for greatness. hail the votives for a virgin or a saint-chief, & watch palpitations at…

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meet me

Posted on 2017-03-192017-03-19 Posted in Poetry, writingTagged blood, creative writing, death, depression, dreams, hate, horror, life, love, poem, Poetry, smoking, snow, vampire, vampires, wolves, writing8 Comments

there’s a splintery hand on my itchy throat

Y E S

chain-smoking chemical lights with a cat-grin
fangs winking & biting into the swan-lake
neck of the unloving moon
& a peace that’s always prayed for festers in the ears
but the knock that never comes to say
your wishes have arrived pales in your vampiric heart.

my lips, lost in thought, are clotted by an amnion of flesh
to the golden filter of a yellow pack of american spirits
thinking of your living hands, thinking of danger, thinking about
getting out of here, of everywhere
the enemy-skin bleeds of hesitated words or held breath,
i taste my own blood
& like the soft wolves of sudden-grey sleep
waiting there
i lick, fetal-lick. curl & lay.

i’ve got half a mind left, the other half obscure, and that barbed-wire boundary can’t even seek refuge in its own cage. half my mind is somewhere wailing in a hellkitchen into a hollow-bone bottle of blackwood. half my mind where it begs for retreat, for an unexplored path to surrender, raises a white flag into heaven that just comes back down with bullet holes.
& the knuckle-numbing snow days
i miss more than i love my own life linger like smoke outside that bar.
the smell’s in the edges of my hair. the smell is waiting there.
with you. s o m e where.

smoking

Posted on 2017-02-042017-04-24 Posted in Poetry, Short stories, writingTagged cigarettes, creative writing, dark, dreams, drunk, grave, life, merlot, prose, smoking, stories, van gogh, wine, writing16 Comments

i live at the end
vanishing in the bed of a wine glass,
a stuck-stain that only dissolves in hot water.
l et t he d a rk o ne i n,
& maybe your wet fingerprint can rouse me again.
i breathe deep when i’m alone because it’s the only time that i remember i’m alive. i’m here. where are you?
i want a cigarette w/ hot chamomile. it’s 11:59pm & you had a fireplace that night, naked on a floor. the miracle of sleep skips my window, no wonder. the undead mouth of my house is ice-teethed, damp skin emerging from the tub steams. it’s sharp, the air, comforting.
i want the wild-hunt smoke in my throat; the drifting dust in my head, the slit feline focus on the void that softens into ridiculed slumber. the sex/bonfire scent in my hair. dreams with no fingers; no remorse.
i want the way that it made the cold feel like part of my skin. how icy, small, spidery my hand crawls in the winter-white outside reaching thru the firmament of a ripped screen in a tiny kitchen into the starry night, hey, nice apartment. empty as my swallowed eyes.
i lived there when i could smoke.
me & van gogh & christmas eve.
i was alone then, & now
i live at the end
vanishing in the bed of a wine glass,
a stuck-stain that only dissolves with a tongue that can’t reach it.
i breathe deep when i’m alone because it’s the only time that i remember i’m alive. am i still here? are y o u?
i want to remember what it’s like to love you, to obsess, when i’m at my best.
but love leaves like seasons.
& now i’m the tear in the veil.
the venom cup of breastmilk that waits at the last table.
of all, always ending in the end.
burn me when i die. put me in a dry merlot.
drink my ashes & tell me you’re my grave.
i live at the end
vanishing in the bed of a wine glass.

if i had a heart

Posted on 2017-01-102017-03-10 Posted in Poetry, Short stories, writingTagged creative writing, dark, dreams, life, love, Poetry, prose, writing22 Comments

he ripped into my dreams again last night. my long lost friend.

he’s the familiar shadow of a silver-tongued deceiver prowling on the wine wall, amnesia like sequins beading from the rusty valley of his pores, wet grass, filthy winter rain for eyes & i wrangle it all in my mouth like a siren capturing sea-gems on her tongue-bed, held like a bullet caught between teeth. a chthonic jeweler fashioning a ring from heartsick-heavy brows overburdened, incurably lone, melted down to the joint, onto the bone. but he’s just an old year’s specter. a christmas carol. the hot graveyard dust my breath makes in the cold. like always, never truly him. my pulseless chest is sore from pressing against empty air.

i don’t remember what his kurt cobain, dirty-blonde lips tasted like, except for when they tasted like me. i tore apart a red rose and walked to the corner of your street. burned secret words. littered the ashes & petals on the concrete. maybe i ripped you apart, too. i begged gods of love to tell me like so: if you love me come back, if you don’t i will know, ~~i will know~~. & i knew.

i whisper in a jar, a hole in a tree

~~i love you~~ & you’ll never know

the words are trapped there waiting

like the ocean’s song

twirling its hair inside of a shell

already spit out

but still saying its name

over & over.