The Sunstroke Monthly Poetry Compilation is a collection of poetry submitted by Sunstroke readers and staff members. Take a seat, light a candle, grab a cup of tea, and dive into the intricate words of our community.

Face the Footsteps

She lazes in the footsteps of sunflowers
Standing by paths that play a game against the breeze,
Horizon hazes distant from the bowers
Where only there she could come to cool among the trees.

A hidden track worn down by desire
And fringed an entranceway of petaled things,
So coloured could mistake a flaming mire
For the way, the flora burned and bullfinch sings.

Ventures down the lanes of long-lost travellers
Gleaning whispers of the older ways the landscape led,
But none to remember much of the unravellers
Or the mystery folk she meets inside her head.

Conversations played out in theory
While thinking thoughts donated to the air,
But soft and fleeting falls each query
And evaporates away without a care.

So stops and waits among the flowers
That stack as stories toward the hazing sun,
And looks back before the distant bowers
Forgetting how her footsteps looked when she’d begun

skin

By Camille Bokesch

german supple skin
over the limbs you broke
then tried to mend.
you say you’re sorry
over brunch, but i wave you off—
i forgive.

i pull at my romper,
then my almond-colored hair.

irish red freckles
spread over wide planes
of my cheeks and nose.
you laugh at my round face
and i stumble away
broken and hurt.

i pull at my skin,
then off with my nails.

You Taste Like Space

By Gaby Vivolo

Will you go when I’m like this?
leaving the door half open,
while I sit on my bed
holding the pillow that you’ve left.
Your warmth will leave in a few minutes,
while I drown in the sorrows
of broken promises,
long days where we would lay
counting each other’s freckles
like galaxies,
your hand on my back
fire on your fingers
while you whispered that I was a star.
A star that turned the sun in envy
and deserved to have a name.
I looked at your eyes in hurry
searching for the answers
of the universe,
a place so mysterious only you could show me,
only your presence I would trust
in space
so vast and undiscovered
I couldn’t trust anyone else.
My name became yours
your space became mine
and together we became part
of something greater than life.
I hold on to your pillow now,
half a name
half a space
hoping to be discovered.

Blue Sweater

By Brooke Hannel

You wear the same blue sweater
And still hold a lit cigarette

Yet your hands no longer reach for me
They reach for a girl in red

A boy made of sweetened smoke
And filled with a melody of cheap crescendos

Called me cruel
And left me out in the cold

For Whom The Bell Tolls

By Anya Wiggins

Time
Every day I sit passing time, or rather waiting for time to pass me by
Every day I forsake oblivion to do it again
A dozen times a day I hear the church bells chime the completion of another hour
The mourning bell of another, better, way I could have been using my time instead of just
Waiting
For what?
For the idea of sudden psychological metamorphosis clung to with blind faith
For the hope that one of these hours I will be pardoned from the sentence of being forced to exist as singularly myself
Every hourly chime is a death toll for those selves of mine conceptualized and petrified under a glassy veil
Fated to remain pristine and untested within my mental menagerie of Who I Could Be

June Poetry Compilation