At first the trespassing goes unnoticed:
the shape shifts seamlessly
to the opposite side of its possibility:
what has been is no more
(was it ever?)
You, the one that lies alone in bed
You, the one that feels everything
You, who thinks
Stop
Cries and bawls won’t save you. I’m immune to seeing
Pain after all my wife went through. You held her
Captive for months, then tortured her until
She bled her organs and soul out. Now you dare
Lie in front of me, and believe you’re unreachable,
A simple, metallic gateway
Keeps the dead from the living
Like a prison its inmates from
The save world, and right behind
These bars hide the saine world
Of flowers and bouquets
It could have been another ordinary morning
like all the other mornings of all these ordinary days,
but this morning was not like all these other mornings
because of its shape or more precisely my own shape
or more precisely the form of my body which was
quite deformed that morning in comparison with
all the other mornings because I found myself in
another body which was not the very same body
It is their freshness that hits me first
(the smell, the bright colors that recall
the innocence of a happy childhood.)
I was walking down the street,
The one that you love,
The one where we first did meet
Twenty two years ago
Welcome to the first publication of the Université de Neuchâtel’s Introduction to Creative Writing course. This seminar is offered to second- and third-year students who are studying English as a foreign language. While some of the students have written creatively before, many are writing poems and short stories in English for the first time. The work you see here was all produced during Fall 2020 in response to weekly prompts. Over the course of the semester, students…