A Black-and-White Movie
Forgive me for being a black-and-white movie:
depressing, and bleak,
and dull, and naive.
Forgive me for being abrupt,
my green lips off screen,
grotesqueness of speech,
and the infinite gray.
Forgive me for being your pretentious refuge;
the load-bearing wall
of your performative play.
Forgive me for being anachronistic,
obscure and forgotten—
original
to the point of
predictability.
The Dying Sun
you woke up to the dying sun,
softness pulsing in your chest.
you woke up overwhelmed,
this is your first day off,
in many, many weeks.
you zipped your suitcase
to drive to the seashore—
to eat a hotdog at the gas station.
you harbored a vain hope
to soak up the sunshine.
when you woke up
it was eight in the morning,
it was an eerie, pitch-black night.
you woke up to the sounds
of the agonizing sun.
it whistled,
clapped,
and screeched.
you told me to unpack our things.
we woke up to the news
of the ruined weekend,
and of the dying sun.
— Nora Ray’s fiction appeared in MoonPark Review, Ergot, Guilty, Surely, Cosmic Daffodil, and is forthcoming in Propagule and Flash Fiction Magazine. You can find her on BlueSky/Twitter: @noraraywrites