Weekly Short Stories Contest and Company! discussion

You have until the 30th of September to post a poem, and October 1-2, we’ll vote for which one we thought was best.

Please post directly into the topic and not a link. Please don’t use a poem previously used in this group.

Your poem can be any length.

This week’s topic is: Snapshot

The rules are pretty loose. You could write a poem about anything that has to do with the subject but it must relate to the topic somehow.

Have fun!

Thanks to Maya for suggesting the topic!

Thank you, Leslie!

Changing Beauty

There’s the goddess with the pointy eyes and the porcelain
veneers
A smile that could slice through a sunset
Nails like barbed wire
A dry wit like a can opener
The popular political violation
A catalyst unhinging the mandible of every drooling monk
Serving the dark mistress with the flaxen hair of fire
The death of a star, its lineage, its perfect people
Fame had changed the belle into a feral beast hungry for
Compliments that were worthy of a fair maiden
Kissing death was like kissing a scouring pad but, the lust for
needful things was worth the risk
and the wish was granted and nothing was normal anymore.

Title : One Moment In Time
Poet : Edward Davies

One moment in time
Forever preserved between transparent sticky sheets
Kept safe in tightly bound confines
Rarely looked at, often forgotten

One moment in time
Uploaded to the world wide web
Shared with all who choose to see
Remembered for a while, then vanishes into the abyss

One moment in time
Forever embedded in our minds
Looked back upon with limbic thoughts
Never mislaid or put out of your mind

One moment in time
We will never forget

Perfect Crime
by C.P Cabaniss

I caught you smiling
in a Polaroid picture
But it didn't
reach your eyes

It's hard to decipher
the truth from the lie
When all you have
is an instant
frozen in time

You pulled off
the perfect crime

Sweater


In the dim light, the watchful eyes follow,
as the needle swims across the fabric,
in and out, up and down, in and out, up and down,

matching the slow rhythm of the frail hands,
creating a pattern as the yarn unfolds
a snapshot of the grandchild in her mind

wearing the sweater; untired, but fazed
only by the slow ticking of the clock -
the winter could not come any slower.

edit.... I meant to say, as always, please feel free to give me any and all feedback and critique on this and any other poem I post. Maraming salamat.

Photographs Under Plastic Sheets


The skin on my mother's arms
begins to resist the mid-afternoon
humidity by pushing
out beads of sweat.

While we flip through the pages
of family albums with cracked
spines and bent corners,
our elbows touch.

She runs her palms over
the fine bubbles of air
trapped from the time
the photographs were pressed

in position with sheets
of adhesive plastic.
It is too late to ease them
out. She pauses two fingers

on the chest of each person
captured in the moment, as if
to check for a pulse.
She gropes for names.

An aunt in Mindanao
wearing a sarong.
A cousin in Saudi Arabia
in flowing white thawb,

his tilted turban and thick beard
drawing a chuckle from us.
A godchild in Canada
standing stiff next

to a snowman. Knowing
she'll never set eyes on them
again, she turns to me. Her smile
so still, I freeze.

-o-

Sept 19, 1961
      by Guy Duperreault. (Comments and feedback welcome.)

From the corner of my eye I saw it fluttering down.
The sky was blue and cloudless, the air warm but not hot.
There was no wind, and I was far from tall buildings.
Instinctively I put my hand out and it fell into it.
Before I looked at it, I looked about and all around me.
I even looked at the ground,
as if to confirm I was still standing on something solid.
A puzzle.

I had seen enough of it, as it fell,
to know that it looked like an old fashioned black and white photograph.
The back was facing me,
and on it was a date stamp: Sept 19, 1961.
When I turned it over the image was fuzzy,
out of focus or perhaps snapped with unsteady or moving hands.
It was clearly a quick snapshot of two boys,
brothers, maybe, maybe six or seven years old,
playing in deep snow in front of a tall tree and wooden fence.
There was a seriousness in their faces
that the fuzziness did not soften,
that their bulky suits gave weight to.

I turned it over to re-check the back,
hoping that my eyes would see something more than a date.
And pulling it close to my eyes did not change anything. Sept 19, 1961.
I turned it over again,
And now I saw a young woman with a nervous smile.
She was impeccably dressed in a tight yellow dress and gloves.
The dress reached just below her knees
and didn’t properly fit her small chest.
A small hat with an undetermined flower was held in the left hand,
the other raised up as if to tell the photographer to wait.
Or maybe she was moving it to adjust her hair.
The image was sharp and in colour.

I forced myself to start breathing.
My hands were shaking.
I hesitated, but could not stop myself from turning the snapshot over again.
The date stamp appeared to be the same.
This time I tried to impress into my memory the subtle nuances,
variations in ink and thickness and location. Sept 19, 1961.
I hesitated, took a breath, an almost unsteady gasp.
And I saw a stage with the heavy utility of a grade school’s
filled with a large band, obviously the school’s band.
The faces on stage were small and largely indistinguishable from one another.
In front of it well dressed youths in black and white suits and dresses,
the boys in ties the girls with necklaces, pearls mostly.
The backs of the heads of the men in the audience had a uniformity of hair cut
varied only by how much of their scalps were visible. The odd one had a hat.
The women wore caps that had a military-like conformity.

This time I waited before turning the snapshot over,
and then, maybe to surprise the date, snapped it over as quickly as I could.
Sept 19, 1961. Unchanged.

Imprints by Vivian Ann

Fragmented we race through our lives
While the images of our soul are imprinted
in the intricate web of reality that unifies
all of existence.

Our mind, the vehicle of our soul-
photographs everything we touch, feel, see, hear, and taste.
Nothing is lost or wasted.
Every single minute detail is recorded.
Each day’s imprint is like a ring in the core of a tree.
It contains our histories, our outlook, our growth-
Our unique signature in this world.

Thank you everyone for a great collection this week. Well done. :-)

Actually I liked them all but I think I liked Polaroid the best - short and sweet and meaningful plus just the word Polaroid took me back in time.

I am trying to figure out how to vote though so if my vote does not count this time it will next time!!

Congratulations Edward :)