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POETRY BY JESSICA HERON

JESSICA

Jessica Heron is working toward her MFA Creative Writing at Cedar Crest College and manages life with hidden disabilities. She has been published in Wormwood Magazine and Pitch/Niche. Her poem “Holiday” is being considered for the Able Muse Write Prize for Poetry 2021. Jessica’s work is forthcoming in Black Petals Horror/Science Fiction Magazine.

POINT OF NO RETURN

humid yard barbeque
familiar hands grip wet
plates of ziti crammed
under tents; they swarm:
small persistent gnats.
I swat away but they
Swarm at me harder.
I swat away but they
won’t be swatted away
but I swat away anyway and now
there are so many, they’ve collected in the bucket of my mouth
and I can’t say anything.
I gurgle and choke;
my eyes fill with bugs and
I can’t see anything, but I can
Feel the family looking

PAIN POEM

Through left eyelid ice pick
Jab, stab, pierce wrong word choices
Rest of world don’t feel like I did.
Rest. The world don’t stop spinning.
Stab, pierce, throb; squint, shine, night death dark crept in left whole body gone spirit gone
Note: keep throb in. Down the whole left side but
Stab, pierce, throb,  jab don’t sound right
Line Break
Don’t sound right
Line Break
Change
How
You
Feel
Through
Line
Breaks
Break through left head holed by ice pick
X-ray prove this ice pick piercing
Through top of skull behind the eye
Yet still here to prove it. Pictures paint
Far better proofs of suffering. Picture a death
Bed picture me in it; please don’t flash photography, me picture me dead, dark silent in it

A FUNNY STORY

Two women walk into a bar.
They say ouch.

They say they get knocked
Down now and again.

They say
they met Death

in a bar, south of the border.
They say believe them;

they were both there.
He ordered them tequila.

They liked his bony fingers.
They had a threesome.

They say they woke up with
headaches. They say they said

ouch. They say at least
we got cleansed

from the inside. A fate terrific
as Death’s bed.

They sit, stuck at the bar.
Two more women walk in.

They ask for Death
By name. They say they heard

he lasts. They say they need
to get knocked out.

They follow a bony finger
into the darkest corner.

They writhe and shake and
stay forever.