Bruise - Tatum Ozment

I saw him somewhere in the strobe, between the fingers of pressed purples and nickelbacked

naked grays.

There stood a man in a locked lament and mocked the way I breathed.

And what good it did us all –

a fount swallowing cracked mortar for years to remember what a spring

tasted like.

It didn’t take a day to spell the word

“wind”

but we found it in the folds of

broken tides and spaced out verses.

And even then,

I still cleaned my gun for tomorrow.

For if the air whistled a certain way,

I was sure to hear its siren.

Somewhere else I could be better.

In someone else I could be something. Not this rendered grain of a

battered folly

and not this guitar of one too many strings for a melody.

I say in the strobe I see a man

of snowy prospect,

but the purple has already

melted him and I both away.

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Tatum Ozment is currently in the creative writing program at the University of Georgia. Through her literary fiction and poetry, she enjoys exploring themes of grief and the psyche, using slipstream and liminal spaces to explore deeper character. She has had work published in Pressfuls Online Literary Magazine, The Blue Route, shoegaze literary, and Appelley Publishing’s Rising Star Collection.