in parentheses

Gabby Catalano is a web writer, social media specialist, and music editor at the leading alternative music site, Coastal Beats Media. She’s a women’s rights activist and passionate artist whose work has been featured in LA CANVAS, FOAM Magazine, The FBomb, and IndiePulse Music Magazine.

Panic

Closing in all around me
Eroding, dwindling
Rattling bones
A fear addled mess
Forget my ambition
For I trail in disguise
Swallowed
By my own distress
I am sorry
That my mind
Is turning your sympathy
Into threats

Dreaming

In dreams
the exact terrible dream goes on.
Like some obnoxious French toy
the house has been redesigned
Upon its rose-colored lawn.
The exact dreadful display,
the exact family of yellow and blue faces
painted and dressed high-to-toe in fur
who wait for their eyes to close and open.

It’s all exact.
They’re at war with each other.
the women’s nipples as untouched
as cold starfish.
Their bellies sagging and soft like pudding;
down over the lips, those faces stink
like vinegar candy.

Father,
an exact bloated figure,
with his face red from scotch
in his custom-designed pajamas,
shouts at the television,
his tongue frolicking like deers.
Mother,
with her heels kicked off,
impossibly shiny and still
as she stands there in her kitchen
sorting her silverware like a bank teller
to see if they match up.

Child,
as thin as a toothpick,
eats dinner as usual,
rubs her knees with dirty hands
and barks like a puppy.
She knows something is happening.
She licks her plate clean.

This exact dream,
vague and cruel
of a yellow and blue family,
sits all day long like books on a shelf,
waiting to topple and explode.

Alcohol

Alcohol is worse than men.
It calls to a woman to empty her.
Under us,
Young women drink all night
Exhausting themselves, then giving everything up.
I have known alcohol
I have drunk all night
For the final ship of boys.
I have drunk all night
For the lips that sail back later
Night by night,
I have known alcohol.