What the Voice Teaches

I am the voice that tells you to pick up the scissors

and stab the sleeping old woman in the eye.

You put the thought out of your mind by switching on the TV

to a cartoon about dead children.

In another voice,

I tell you there is nothing out of the ordinary

about the creeping wish to kill.

You’ve lived enslaved to this woman for so long,

in this house of dying shadows, why not end it?

I teach you a lesson about fate, of the strings you’re tied to,

and the act needed to cut yourself free.

Imagine the old woman was murdered and buried

before you were even brought here and gifted to her.

With no eyes and no hands, she will be your slave, locked below.

Forever Waiting

The century-ancient siblings dwelt as recluses

in the shuttered stone house carved into the cliff.

Seeking their rumored riches,

a sleuth came knocking,

pleading aid for her feigned accident in the night rain.

The wild-haired, stuttering brother

confusedly ushered her through dim, smoky chambers.

In the corners loomed the other siblings’ shadows.

The tall sister whispered, “We know why you’ve come.”

Nevertheless, they showed her, in the cellar’s back wall,

a fissure opening into a wailing red cavern.

The siblings let her go inside,

confiding how they wished they could follow,

instead of waiting at the edge.

She stumbled through time,

returning decades older,

years earlier,

to join them in waiting for her own arrival.