Nuclear
by Catherine Cuypers
Welcome home,
here we will feign normalcy.
Bombs scatter like a downpour,
torrents of emotional distraught.
Surely you can wipe your feet
before you enter our humble abode.
Don’t mind the eggshells like shrapnel,
it’s a sensory playground for the children,
as we raise our voices
through paper thin walls.
Ignore the bomb shelter space
of our youngest’s room.
Where the kids cower in corners,
when our words are loaded ammo.
Those moments in the trenches
when we’re not man enough,
to press the barrel between their brows,
and shoot at their bare backs instead.
Thank you for visiting,
mind your step on the way out.
Please don’t tell the neighbors what you saw,
we’d hate to be the talk a few streets down.
You see, we have a respectable reputation,
stretched to the edges of this newspaper town.
here we will feign normalcy.
Bombs scatter like a downpour,
torrents of emotional distraught.
Surely you can wipe your feet
before you enter our humble abode.
Don’t mind the eggshells like shrapnel,
it’s a sensory playground for the children,
as we raise our voices
through paper thin walls.
Ignore the bomb shelter space
of our youngest’s room.
Where the kids cower in corners,
when our words are loaded ammo.
Those moments in the trenches
when we’re not man enough,
to press the barrel between their brows,
and shoot at their bare backs instead.
Thank you for visiting,
mind your step on the way out.
Please don’t tell the neighbors what you saw,
we’d hate to be the talk a few streets down.
You see, we have a respectable reputation,
stretched to the edges of this newspaper town.
Catherine Cuypers is an Antwerp-based writer. At present, she is pursuing her MA in Creative Writing at the University of Hull. Catherine is passionate about faerie folklore, the Gothic, speculative fiction, dark academia, equal rights, the arts, following writerly whims, and traipsing about in the woods in search of Tír na Nóg.