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avalanche.The Ogre rises up among its brother and sister peaks, the Monk and the Virgin, a craggy limestone buttress looming above most of the north-eastern part of the Bernese Alps.

The Eiger: 13,042 feet of sheer rock, cracks and treacherous ice-fields.

Many attempts to scale this uncompromising weather-battered mountain have been made over the years, but successful attempts didn't begin until 1938, with the brave perseverance of a team of four German climbers. As a twenty-year-old eager climber myself, I knew all the facts. The windswept North Face (Nordwand) was the height of all climbing careers when I'd been growing up. 1952 - the great year of
for a friendThe sky is captured in his eyes, clear and blue.
The weather etched smile is honest.
The slender face says sixty; it lies.
It is that and half again.

Knobby hands sun baked and brown
peek out from ragged gloves.
They seem part of the old split locust post
where they are resting;
one of the row of soldiers
that keep watch on their field and its occupants.

The smile broadens as I approach.
I help stretch the wire.
His archaic dialect fills the road
with cows and snow and the yankees
that his grandparents saw marching.
The hours pass pulled by the mule
he plowed with as a boy.

He mentions his wife
they'd been marri
A Constellation of Scarsonly long-term lovers take the time
to ponder the origins of marks on skin

the first thing I notice are her scars:
she's a wandering tomboy
with more cuts and scrapes
than a hardbody Buick in an action film
but she's never been broken

I chart them as she sleeps so I can write poems later
these fingertips can still recall them
the way surgeons never have nightmares
about patients they save
but they're haunted by the faces they lost

she says she wears her scars like a constellation

I chart them like Galileo
trying to map her ancestry
circumnavigating her body as if Magellan
hired me as helmsman
and only I can get us safely home
FuneralFuneral

A funeral was no place to have an epiphany. Epiphanies galvanise people into action and the only action you could get away with in a church pew was discreet fidgeting. Even that was considered unseemly when a heart-felt eulogy was being delivered by the deceased's mother, as Mary was finding out to her discomfort. The priest was beginning to shoot her dirty looks.

But really, as epiphanies went, it was a brilliant one. She couldn't believe she had taken this long to realise it. She was fat. Plain and simple. Mary was much too fat. It explained everything. Her husband had left her for a skinny bitch because she was fat, the universit
Perfect ContritionIn a proper Catholic church, everything echoes. Any sound uttered within the building bounces of the floor and the walls and the high, vaulted ceilings, so much so that I imagine that they could easily reach the ears of God himself. It's a rather poetic thought, the voices of mere mortals ringing towards Heaven with the help of good acoustics, but that thought's tempered by the fact that it includes every single noise: the coughs of emphysemic old men, the rustling of an impatient young girl's dress, and the taps of even the softest rubber-soled sneakers are no exception. On rainy days like this one, those shoes tend to squeak, which probably
Joel is Having a Bad Day(And He Really Needs A Smoke)

CHARACTERS:

JOEL, male, mid-twenties

BILLY, female, late teens to early twenties
Lights up on JOEL and BILLY, who are sitting outside on the back porch.  The three or four chairs are mismatched and seem to have been salvaged from the reject pile of a Salvation Army store.  A wooden coffee table hails from an indiscernible decade and holds a glass ashtray with dozens of cigarette butts sticking out of it. JOEL is smoking, trying to ignore BILLY.BILLY
You know, you really shouldn't; I heard somewhere that those things can make your teeth turn to mush and your fingers grow all bendy and twis
Across the Sea and Around the KotatsuSpring

Taco Rice

Mom starts with rice. Japanese rice, one, two, three Japanese cup-fulls of rice grains into the cooker, because Sis eats a lot of this stuff. It's one of her favorite dishes, taco rice, and Mom's always happy to make it for her because it's the only way Sis will eat her tomatoes. But back to the rice. "You want to rinse at least three or four times, until the water's kind of clear," Mom says as she cups her hand under the cooker pot, letting the cloudy water wash over her hand.

Rice cooking's easy though – just fill enough water to the point the rice's covered, punch in a time (or set it to "Quick Cook," which with our cre
JarsMy childhood home, a gray, old farm house, sat nestled near the small town of McKean Pennsylvania.    My father moved us there from Pittsburgh in 1954 when I was no taller than a limp potato sack.  I was their only child at the time. He said the city was no place to raise a family. We needed room to run and explore and my mother needed a quiet place to work on her writing. However, in three years of living there she gave birth to four of my brothers.  So much for peace and quiet.  There must have been something in the water.

Folks in town liked to whisper about that house like it was some kind of architectural Jezebel.  By the time I could s
leavetakingi.
the world is brighter where
dregs of strangers' revels remain --
i keep this half-light for my own.

ii.
i'll stay until the wind sighs a scotch-and-smoke
cliché, til the Muscadet's slipped from the lip
of my wayward
hello.(i know you're there before you do.)
iii.
your night is told in
patchouli-pulse wanders; mine,
in whorls of liqueur-breath. come
close and i'll find the warp
through the weft, the trails telling tales
in synaesthesia --
Platinum Blonde's been 'round and gone.

 iv.
(-- closer, find syllables strewn
 in an exhale's wake; stolen from my throat-
 ful of careless farewells, spin and sway
Wild Hunt :: LongmaLike any good story, this one does not begin where it began. It does, however, begin where it ends—at a funeral.

The village was not particularly big. Rather, it was frightfully small, and just as frightfully remote. That said, it was little surprise that every denizen turned out for something so important as the funeral of a good man.

—and it truly was each and every one: every man, woman, and child; every son, brother, and father; every maiden, mother, and crone. It was said even the dogs followed at the heels of their masters, even the songbirds gathered in the trees, and the livestock unable to free themselves from their pens
Uncle Tom's CabinFor those of us who grew up on Evansdale Street, Uncle Tom's Cabin had a double meaning: first, it was a book on every parent's bookshelf that was both a regret and a reminder, and second, it was that ugly old shack that stood (well, sort of stood) at the end of Evansdale Street, where Brookwood's residential area finally gave into the woods. The older kids would spread the legend that the shack once belonged to an old fisherman named Tom, and that we were allowed in it every day of the year except September 1st, because that was Tom's niece's birthday and we had to leave them the house so their ghosts could celebrate.

Aside from that, Uncle
Tea for TwoI observed her fragile corpse upon the cemetery seat, looking to and fro like a lost pigeon. She blinked her watery green eyes at me just once as I approached, then let them oggle wide.

"Madam," said I, "have you any need of assistance?"

A soft moan echoed back across the dying rhododendrons.

"Are you tired? Lost?" A quick glance at her spittle-slathered chops. "Hungry?"

She nodded vigorously and a bit of froth flew loose to stick upon a nearby leaf. I watched as it slowly slid its way to the very tip and plopped with a light "thwack" upon the freshly upturned soil.

"Er, there ought to be a dead squirrel or two out back by the fence. I i
Expedition Letters to GraceDear Grace,

You told me, back when we were visiting Peru and I was feeling down, that I would eventually find my calling in life. I write to you now to tell you, quite happily, that I have.

I can't explain much about it at the moment, only that my sudden absence from the university is for a reason. As I write, I am currently en route to New York City, to visit their museums and get a taste of the culture. I told you before how I wanted to visit New York while I had the chance, and now I travel with purpose.

I will say now, that while what I am about to do may seem strange to you, even mad, I can promise you that I am of sound mind and am d
comfort, crawfish boils, and port vincentand you and me, we got the whole of
Saturday, you and me, we got car grease
streaked straight up to our grins and

let's high five when you triumph over
mom's sneaky nose, her teasing and coy and
i wanna be that kind of wife to a man

like you. i wanna be the kind of woman worth
changing with, sacrificing for, going crazy
over as the years collect in bank rolls of nickels.

i've been called a menagerie of names by
the older, the wiser, the wrinkled; they
call me pretty girl, sweetheart, dollface,

sugarplum as i stir splenda into their
brewed coffees, but they ain't got nothin'

on your horse master hands, the ones that could
Pygmalion      In some distant land there lived a king and his mind.  In a time of steam and balloons and the defiance of Gods and Nature alike by Man, his people thrived in unbroken peace, and the king and his mind lived alone in his hall.  No sentries guarded its doors, for the king felt safe in his home; no queen sat by him as he ate.  Instead, the emptiness was filled with the treasures of the modern day: precious metals and glass moulded into technical tools and toys for his pleasure, and forces driven by sheer physics for that of his mind; a mechanical menagerie of metal lapdogs that barked when calle
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November 30, 2011
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Got my finals result on 28 November 2011.

Say hello to Dr. Asmara A. Malik :)
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Daily Deviation

Given 2011-12-09
The suggester writes: The Mundane Magic of Med School by ~Elmara is is a fantastic piece of work about a journey, given a very powerful framing. ( Suggested by ^neurotype and Featured by `Halatia )
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:iconsecondhand-wings:
~secondhand-wings Jun 24, 2012  Hobbyist Writer
this is the kind of writing that is simply a pleasure to read; the subject reminds me of the book Bloodletting and Other Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam.
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:iconsbaudtler:
~SBaudtler Jun 24, 2012   General Artist
This is beautiful. Utterly beautiful. You use a great many powerful metaphors and your examples are very moving; especially one of the last, with the sobbing woman. Or the child with the tumor. If all doctors are equally devoted and moved by their work, the world can only be a good place to stay in.
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:iconmariposasabrosa:
!mariposasabrosa Jun 24, 2012
wow, nice. i'll fight the fight for a piece like this, especially since I think most literary works on deviantart are terrible... one like this is worth the sifting. congrats on your degree, btw!
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:iconspiica:
~Spiica May 23, 2012  Hobbyist Writer
"Where had I gone wrong, O Lord? Why did Thou see fit to have me spend the next five years of my life just down the road from the school I'd studied in since 7th Grade? Would I never know a life of adventure or intrigue? Of mystery and pathos? Why, Allah, why?!"

This made my morning. Thank you.
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:iconthelightswentoutin99:
~TheLightsWentOutIn99 May 2, 2012  Student Writer
I enjoyed that very much. Thank you. I particularly liked the sentence "you've been granted an all access pass into the workings of His greatest creation-- humanity."
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:iconchantari:
~Chantari Feb 5, 2012
I'm in first year and I can relate with this completely!
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:iconelmara:
~Elmara Apr 6, 2012  Student Writer
:hug:
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:iconangie-pictures:
*Angie-Pictures Jan 2, 2012
Congratulations on the DD! :iconflowerheartplz:
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:iconelmara:
Mood: Love ~Elmara Jan 3, 2012  Student Writer
Thank you kindly! :hug:
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:iconangie-pictures:
*Angie-Pictures Jan 3, 2012
It’s my pleasure! :hug:
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