poetry – Page 17 – Jordyn Saelor

4- kid

The kid had a name. Most kids in The City didn’t. The City discouraged naming people, said names distracted them from their jobs in the factories, in the farms, in the offices. Only the patrollers got names: if you chose to join (technically, everyone who joined chose

My first hero

The copper dome could’ve been a school or a mansion or a hill somebody polished. But people definitely lived inside, I could hear them talking, their machines buzzing, noises drifting to the mesa like heartbeats through a demon’s

Strings of Fate

My two elective Strings of Fate classes had the names “divining the weave of the future” and “karma as a lens for interpreting the past.” In my fifteenth year I studied karma and in my seventeenth I studied weaves; yes, I know the stereotypical approach would be to

Pocket of Rage

Sorry, sorry, my bad, I don’t have the words for why. Make a mistake break a cake freak out and shout end the tear duct drought stab Gacks and slay racks, I’m so angry I could just cry the whole time.

3- born

I emerged from the school in a thunderstorm, surrounded by strangers banging pots and tins and wearing crinkly aluminum clothing. Of course the lightning struck them.

Witch names/from that age

Upon my graduation from the demonic witch school in my hundred and thirty-second year, I chose the name Kook, Witch Kook, and didn’t care how silly it sounded. At least it wasn’t Isabel. Witch Isabel sounds like a question my second grade teacher would ask, “Which Isabel does this

2- from this feeling

Examine, Isabel, why you removed yourself from all this feeling. Isabel, Clarissa, sitting in a tree, best pals forever, don’t you see, first leave family then hurt friends then earn witch names on a graduation stand. First comes love, then comes terror, then comes capture at a dark school no one’s ever heard of.

Sisterhood of Spite

Do you remember any of our friends’ whereabouts from witch school? I know Dylanthia went back to the ancestral lands, Pogoth crossed the rainbow snake and got eaten, Xlthan fell into a mirror and met a new crew to hang with. Sometimes, though, I wonder if any of my friends were actually friends.

live forever

What’s the biggest asteroid of my heart still spinning ‘round inside me? I don’t think it’s you. Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s the knight I killed on my seventieth birthday

1- Examine

We went to witch school, you and I, hidden in the outback of Australia– which witch school, the one shifting between realms of new times and wild climes, the one with the potions plot and the spellcaster squad, the school for the demon kids who drew fickle fire from the air.