Maxine Fickenscher
Poem: A Cry of Hope
Poem: Un-Obituary
Story: The Mother of All Murder (Chapter One)
Slam Poem: Yukon's Cherry Coke Phobia Experiment
Slam Poem: 13 Steps to Successfully Kidnap Someone
Group Poem: Melting Into Beauty
Screenplay: The Junebugs' Night Out
A CRY OF HOPE
If gravity were to grasp onto me,
if it were to pull me down.
Would you be there?
Would your hands entangle with mine?
Could you save me from the dark,
from crying at 2:45
while the rain hits old foggy windows?
If you were to hear my silent sobs,
would you comfort me?
Can I trust you to take on evil with me?
Like a naive little child
playing make-believe.
Rescue me from my dragons.
Remind me of who I am,
because if you don’t
I will drown.
And you will be taken away with the current,
a figment of my past,
a name whispered in my melancholy thoughts.
What if…
UN-OBITUARY
The burning desire to search my name,
to see what my legacy is.
I swipe my thumb across my phone's cold screen
I see stories folded in old smiles,
and joy reflected off of square wire frame glasses.
I let out a soft chuckle
drawing the attention of my father.
He asks me why I laugh,
and I tell him my story
of scrolling through the dead.
And what will you do to change that?
A question I have never really wondered:
How do you shut out the shaking laughs of the world,
trying to make you just another life,
how can I carefully mold a life into a story
that can be tested by the heat of flames to become legend?
MOTHER OF ALL MURDER
(Chapter 1)
Staring at the bullet wound, I go through the questions that always flood my brain at times like these. What kind of bullet did that, and who could have looked at this person and thought, yeah, today’s the day I’m going to shoot them?
“Mommy! Mommy!!! MOMMY!!!!” I hear a little kid yelling their lungs out.
“Kid, get back here!” yells the raspy voice of a tired man.
“No!”
Two frantic figures dash past the lab window: a little girl with her black curly pigtails flying behind her, mud-caked on her worn-out My Little Pony onesie, and an officer questioning his life decisions.
I stare at the spot where they once ran for a while then I rip my attention away to focus on the job at hand.
I carefully pull the bullet out of the wound, found in the middle of the forehead, and take it over to the microscope behind me. I feel a tug on the bottom of my lab coat and look down and see the little pigtail girl’s mismatched blue and brown eyes baring into my soul.
“Hey science lady you found my mommy!”
I turn to see pigtails holding the victim’s hand, which was hanging off of the examining table, and my heart drops.
“Uh, honey could you not do that?”
“No, Mommy and I need to go home, I want to go home,” she says quietly and a little defeated.
My heart breaks for her, I take off my gloves and pull her hand off the victim and cup it with my own.
“Honey, Mommy can’t go home anymore.”
“Yeah that’s what the other guy said, the one with the uniform,” she sighed tears welling up in her eyes, “He was mean.”
“Yeah, most people here aren’t the nicest…I’m sorry about that.”
She slips under my lab coat and hangs on to me like a lifeline and I hold on to her, scared that if I let go we would both fall apart.
“You smell funny,” she observes with blunt honesty.
“Thanks kid,” I say with a little laugh.
“You’re welcome,” she replies not understanding my sarcasm.
“And my name’s not kid, it’s Anastasia Nikolaidis. I’m also eight, that’s hardly a kid.”
Despite Anastasia’s confidant words, she clung to me, like a leaf on the tree in the middle of a storm.
That’s when I knew I had to protect this child at all costs.