Winter by Shaunna Harper

She does not thaw in summer, her iced skeleton a visceral display of sapphire veins and pulses bolting in shock to the outskirts of her shores, splayed like a victim. She is perpetual frost, crying sharp diamond tears that leave chips across hard flesh like braille, like fallen teeth from a corpse; the sun bores […]

Twilight by Shaunna Harper

A prayer lifts itself from my mouth between tight teeth and soft lips, grows wings, leaves like a moth by the window trying to find the moon, sings, as the moist earth cools below. As always, twilight has come too soon. Lifted by light like a Chinese lantern, I watch the night sink, its star […]

The Other Half by Shaunna Harper

The Other Half by Shaunna Harper Your lips are still on my lipstick. Your eyes are still on my eyeshadow brush. You’re still wearing my favourite shirt; go on, keep it, if you must. The bags you unpacked are under your eyes; see that drawing? It’s tattooed on your skin. All those lies I heard […]

Saison Noir by Shaunna Harper

Is that Christmas falling in your hair? I can taste your past lover’s countdown kiss, I can smell the coming year; it smells like this. I drink this season’s red wine serenade; drunken romance is bliss. Your light spots me through falling feathers and snow; the instruments pick themselves up, tangle, reminisce; the songs say […]

River by Shaunna Harper

River by Shaunna Harper You can’t tell a river which way to run. Trees flank his cerulean depths like soldiers, armed with sticks and leaves, ever-reaching, seizing, only to be swept aside. A river has no place to hide. He is never the same when he comes back; a little older, a little darker, carrying […]

Prelude by Shaunna Harper

Prelude by Shaunna Harper Our bed screams red, gutted, split, under weight of wonderings in my head; bruised like a throat, crushed by hungry lips, gaping like a wound, stunning. The walls are indented and cannot be mended, colour of your temper in blotchy black and blue, handprints sink between spine and sinew, hollow concave, […]

Passing by Shaunna Harper

They’ve strung up your face on canvas carved in glass across the city’s overpass. Your eyes are bulging mole-hills. Your hair is sprouting grass. In the backdrop of a cheap shop’s parking lot, a broken sign curls around your head like a halo; when winter comes you will sparkle with snow. Each fractured letter blinks […]

My Modern Surrealist Mind by Shaunna Harper

The beer has drowned itself in the cask; I’m pulling brown air for punters. The fridge is baring its teeth to my throat; its inner cold works wonders. I’m falling out of love with myself and rising into bad karma, slipping in circles into wrong holes, the maelstrom enfolding this drama. The house is talking […]

Metamorphosis by Shaunna Harper

We jumped from the night and fell into the moon upside down in fractured dreams. He told me if I could picture it, I could live it. Reality is a broad market. He came with golden eyes, silver lips, quilted with satin like the finest-dressed mannequin. His puppet fingers dealt a card; a blow, hard. […]

La Fleur by Shaunna Harper

La Fleur by Shaunna Harper Shower rain settles on fine hair like dew, dying sunlight a halo aglow casting darkness in me, light over you. The evening is drifting with falling snow, pooling smooth marble into your pores, beautifying your every mistake, making miracles of your flaws. Autumn breathes its rustic applause as leaves once […]

Keeping the Dawn by Shaunna Harper

Keeping the Dawn by Shaunna Harper My mind’s eye sweats a tear. Solitary, it runs to the mouth, as though dying for a taste of its own bitter fluid. The emotional effort is a waste. We watch like two friends as the hand scrawls its script, full stop bringing the final act to an end. […]

In Measures by Shaunna Harper

He sleeps in the hammock of a silken, silver scar that curls around my arm like a chain; a creature comfort, a ghostly appendage, finer than a spider’s web and visible only to me. This is where he lives. Where snow half-falls in unreachable diamonds, becoming hardened rain that wants to wound. Where the sun […]

Hidebound by Shaunna Harper

Lust, the most intimate season; short-lived, dissolving as ever into dust. The crest of a wave still rides the perpetual earth of our honeymoon, though the inner life of the stone erodes, suddenly not so sharp, tough like a dried-up heart. The memory loiters like a dangerous desire, but these days I no longer feel […]

For Someone, Somewhere, In Relation by Shaunna Harper

You hold your breath, stagnant, absent in the station, trains grumbling about leaving and about waiting, people passing, chattering about nothing they are actually thinking about; sex, cheap wine, finances, time, romances and of course, the weather. The flurry of snow at the entrance has nowhere to go but down. You observe the drama of […]

Ellipsis by Shaunna Harper

In love, in letters, subversive in meaning, emphasized in casual italics, from my mind to your fingers, from soft bone to paper, the ink lingers like oil smeared between blood and tissue. For you, over and over, from font to font with changing hands that grow in time, proposing my heart in offbeat rhyme, these […]

Chanson D’Amour by Shaunna Harper

The piano plays its parting score as you lift your case like a child and back out of the door. For a greedy second, just one, before we are done, I picture you in the bath. Dressed in my bubbles, skin wet in candlelight, totally emasculated and with childish delight, I never loved you more. […]

Book Leaf by Shaunna Harper

They tread between lines, hanging metaphors like rope, veined toes curled around loops like branches. They reach from depths to skies, scatter each other here and there like soft blessings, seeping like ink into paper. They press between pages like insects, intricate, frail, anorexic outbursts in perpetual shock. They dance off-beat like drunkards, ignorant of […]

Blue Period by Shaunna Harper

A blue period, right where your face should be, nature’s way of rekindling hurt, of rubbing cold dirt where none should be, swathed in false colour, melancholy. Blue spaces, engorged, intermittent oceans, the old faithful morning voice of regret; nature’s way of tipping the scales, those blue melodies where a lover’s warm voice should be, […]

Amoraphobia by Shaunna Harper

Your vowels pull reluctant lips into something shy, vague, like the shadow of a coy smile, linger like light across dark in dying eyes, the fierce final breath hitches in the throat somewhere between tension and laughter, the ecstasy that comes after, fills spaces in my bones that you used to dwell in with your […]

A Eulogy by Shaunna Harper

With smoke in my mouth and a wine glaze shimmering over my eyes like a river in the wind, I wait for this home to grow old. For the windows to stream tears as they imitate the rain, for the fruit in its bowls to turn to Fool’s Gold, for the cats, perhaps, to shed […]