Three New Poems by Emma Foster

The Heroes

Things were so gray when we were young

We just didn’t know it.

Till now,

The world was sky-stabbing castles of stone,

Dragons gutted through—

Warm hearts of obsidian flesh—

Thrust into pieces by gold,

Before the day was saved

And the hero could be return home victorious

By dinner.

The Monsters

High school, the limbo years,

But we still don’t know why gray is so garbled.

One day we witness two girls in the hall

Engage in hand-to-hand combat

Between Biology and Algebra.

Blood and hair under their nails, they fling

Their makeshift kennings at each other.

We can’t understand

Why it’s so hard to be good

Before we realize we are monsters too.

 

The End

Now in our twenties

We confuse storybook endings with catechisms.

Back-alley sunsets

Like cut lips and bruises

Smear our faces—we sit in the gravel

By the abandoned train tracks.

These ashen bones, our unforeseen inheritance,

Feel empty at 4:30 am.   

We sit and scream, O, Wuldor-Fæder

Where did our castles go?

- © Emma Foster 2021

Emma Foster is a recent college graduate, fiction writer, and poet from Florida. She can be found in the Cedarville Review, Voices of the Valley, Ariel Chart, and she is forthcoming in Sledgehammer Lit and Nailpolish Stories.