David Estringel is a ‘2019 Best of the Net’ and ‘2019 Over the Edge New Writer of the Year’ nominee, whose work has been accepted and/or published by Specter Magazine, Literary Juice, Foliate Oak Magazine, Terror House Magazine, Expat Press, 50 Haikus, littledeathlit, Down in the Dirt Magazine, Route 7 Review, Setu Bilingual Journal, Paper Trains Literary Journal, The Elixir Magazine, Soft Cartel, Harbinger, The Blue Nib, Fishbowl Press, Horror Sleaze Trash, Rigorous Magazine, Corvus Review, Spillwords.com, Proletaria Journal, Cherry Magazine, Bleached Butterfly, Poetry Pea (Haiku Pea), Sub Rosa Zine, TL;DR Press, Spit Poet Zine, Arthut, ICOE Press, Logos, Poetizer, Channillo, and The Good Men Project along with many, many more. David’s first book of poetry and prose Indelible Fingerprints was published by Alien Buddha Press April 2019. David can be found on Twitter (@The_Booky_Man) and his website at http://davidaestringel.com.

little deaths

 (originally published at Cajun Mutt Press)
  
 We implode—
 explode—
 in raptures
 of liquid light
 that set the skin 
 to sizzle on the spit
 like slow-cooked meat,
 pulled apart
 in greedy clutches,
 peeling
 skin from skin,
 limb from limb,
 sinew from bone
 until all is gone,
 fallen away
 in shreds 
 and trickles.
 Tongues prodding,
 hungrily,
 for the taste of coppery bliss
 of chewed lips.
 Beautiful bodies—
 diminished 
 into heartbeats and exhales
 of viscera and vasculature 
 with eyelids, aflutter—
 fade 
 into black, into white,
 into black, again—
 dick-teasing,
 mind-fucking
 strobes of abstract consciousness.
 Hand-in-hand,
 together,
 we die 
 little deaths,
 again…
 again…
 and again—
 every morning, a resurrection. 

Duende

 (originally published at Cajun Mutt Press)
  
 Green is the taste of bitter rind that lingers on your fingertips,
 cutting through the sweetness of icebox orange smiles 
 bursting on my tongue, lovingly fed,
 conjuring the salty sting of solitude’s imminence,
 as if a shade.
  
 How dreaded the tic-toc of the clock—
 rhythmic shower of dying heartbeats—
 hanging, sourly, above us in white clusters,
 promising much, offering little 
 but that which is within our fleshy grasps.
 Before dawn breaks and you slip away—a shadow
 fleeing the Eye of Day—
 you reach backward, hand upon wanting hip, pulling me inward, 
 stopping time if but for a second longer.
  
 O morning thief! 
 I am bound by your fragrant tethers
 that permeate, infiltrate ‘the everything’ under my skin
 through the hole in my chest that once held a beating heart, 
 long-since cast at the pink of your delicate arches.
 My soul quivers as you turn and smile,
 then walk away, 
 leaving behind your indentions and a tattered Lorca,
 tossed afloat in the rising, orange currents of morning.
  
 Still, I am drawn to the darkness of my corners, 
 where Death has found a home.
 The purity of her black light defines, reveals all
 within this drowned world of light and shadow.
 There is no love without fear of absence,
 no hope without doubt,
 no fulfillment without the memory of Hunger’s dull stabs.
 We savor and rejoice these fleeting moments—
 all that is good under God’s blue heaven—
 for in the end
 all we are left with…all that is true…
 is that cold taste of green.