The Writer’s Block

Getting Creative…

At the University of Warwick there are many students who not only love to read literature, but excel at creating it. This is why, here in the Books section, we are introducing a space for writers to publish their work – be it poetry, short stories, screenplays or comedy sketches. If you write it, we want to read it.

It is during these formative years at university that the next generation of talented writers will explore and develop their creative skills. What better platform to have your work read and celebrated than here at the Boar? You never know, in these pages we might read work from the next T.S. Eliot, J.K. Rowling or Tarantino.

Email books@theboar.org with a creative piece for your chance to be featured in the ‘Writer’s Block’.
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Villanelle – Sam Steiner

He made sure she only ever saw him after dark

when she could only half-know the grey in his eyes.

She wished that every time he touched her left a mark.

 

They’d meet at bus stops or by swing sets in local parks.

She would bound up to him like blind rabbits and grasp at his insides,

but she couldn’t see them for she only ever saw him after dark.

 

“But I like watching you live,” she’d tell him in the backseat of his car

as he lay limp and lethargic in between the axis of her thighs.

“I wish that every time you touched me left a mark.”

 

She wished that every time his fingers grazed the ghost-skin above her heart

beautiful would kiss her white chest like brides,

though never to be seen, for she only ever saw him after dark

 

when the lights were so low that without the sound of his gravelled bark,

hoarse like mossy sandpaper, she may not have known a love of such size

that every time it touched her left a mark.

 

But he’d known it too. For his invisible figure was riddled with scars,

thick, pale, and ugly scars from a death before hers, a ligament’s worth of lies.

And so he made sure that she only ever saw him after dark

and that every time he touched her it never left a mark.
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Thoughts on Villanelle – Sam Steiner

More people should read Constantine P. Cavafy.

***
Distance and separation is intrinsic in any villanelle. It is, formally, about the struggle to be together. I literalised that – hence the title.

***
The dominance of one rhyme over another somehow encourages empathy. It is as though the reader wants to stick up for the little guy.