I trace the things on your desk with my finger.
Each word we speak is ice.
“I won’t marry you. I must marry another.”
You speak your piece and fall silent.
I cower in my mind’s dark recesses, praying for escape.
I thought I was a treasure you’d do anything to hold on to.
Because what have I ever done besides follow orders?
I breathe it in, as much as I can hold.
I want to run away, fly away.
It seems I have always been alone.
It’s a yeah write January poetry slam! Some of our editors and friends are working on centos this month. Want to give one a try? Check out the guidelines in the yeah write coffeehouse. In the meantime, check out the other centos this week!
- Hypothetically Writing: Tragic
- Graceful Press Poetry: And how the silence surged softly backward
- the relative cartographer: Long Distance
- Textwall: Cento: With Childe
- Pigspittle, Ohio: War Poem in the Snow
Arden Ruth 
you clever, clever girl. =) well done!
Thanks Jenny! At first, I completely missed the part about only one line per piece so I had to start over. Haha. It was fun though!
Love it, smoothly cobbled and poignant story.
Thank you Jennifer!
This is seamless, so I wouldn’t have known you pieced the lines together if I hadn’t know about the cento slam.
Thank you Cyn! I confined myself to the yeah write slams. Otherwise, i would have been lost in old works. Too much to choose from! It was fun!
Yours is cohesive, flows great, and makes perfect sense (unlike mine). Nice cento, Arden!
Oh stop!! 🙂 Thanks so much Meg!
Haha, this was exactly my first thought: “makes perfect sense (unlike mine).”
Oh my god, Arden, this is fabulous!! It really *does* flow perfectly, so much so that, as Cyn said, if I didn’t know it was a cento I never would have guessed!
Thank you so much! I had a lot of fun with this 🙂
It really is the smoothest cento, I think. I thought it would be too hard to piece together lines that end with periods and have it flow. But you’ve proven me wrong. And that last line is perfectly placed!
Thanks Nate!! 🙂 I appreciate that. Wonder what we’ll try next?!