subtle body

Some bodies are born with a desire to find an ever-higher precipice. The truest version of myself is teetering on the edge of a cliff: I am a flightless bird, ill at ease in my body, tethered by gravity to the earth.

Consider the body, its demands. I wish to dispose of my body, but it is too painful. This is my most reprehensible quality: I am a terrible martyr. I am afraid of pain. I hide from it, although I know I cannot run from it. Like Jesus, I have sacrificed myself to selfish gods. I have lived many lives in twenty-two years, and in some of them, I was good.

revisionist histories, @7cigars

do not remove credit

on that seasonal depression grind

someone send me questions / prompts / etc ? I'm bored & avoiding chemistry lol

the bittersweet ache of survival

@katiadotcom I've thought about it, but I honestly don't know where I would begin... I'm not as familiar w/ the market or the publication process for poetry as I am w/ fiction or nonfiction... I'm also not sure if there'd be enough interest? idk I'm definitely open to the idea tho & flattered that you would even suggest it! :-))

Winter creeps up like a starving dog begging for scraps from my open empty palms. Winter creeps up, and for a moment I am sixteen again, for a moment we never met, for a moment I feel the echo of something long-forgotten whispering in my ear.

When Death comes I will greet him as an old friend. When Death comes I will ask him your name, ask him if he knows you, ask him if you found what you were looking for.

I still have not found what I am looking for. I still have not found a reason for all this pain, a reason for the crimes we committed against each other, a reason for why the lemon tree in the backyard of my childhood home never bore fruit. Perhaps I was always destined for suffering.

And yet winter still comes and with it come the dogs, whining and looking at me with eyes that remind me of yours. Lover, I am sorry I could not give you what you were looking for.

Lover, I am sorry but this tree is barren. It will never bear fruit.

I ask only this: When Death comes for you, tell him you remember my name.

elegy

Bitterness is a snake that eats itself. Bitterness is Sisyphus pushing his stone up the mountain over and over again, only to watch it tumble down the second he reaches the top. Bitterness is how you don’t think about me anymore but I still lay awake at night, feeling nauseous at the thought of your hands.

Bitterness is a snake and resentment is the apple that Eve chokes upon, and somewhere far away there is a nameless faceless God who is laughing at our struggle. I drove 88 miles today and listened to the same song the whole time, because it reminded me of you and my suffering is like a record stuck on repeat. A home movie of a toddler chipping her tooth on the stairs that gets stuck on pause every time her mother appears to save her.

I offer you poisoned wine and you ask me to taste it first myself. I watch myself from above as an echo, a ghost, an image trapped in a mirror, as hands that do not feel like my own raise a glass to my lips.

In another life you never touched me. In another life, I did not spend three years setting myself on fire because of it. The scene with the bathroom and the blood never happened. I am still an innocent child playing in a grove of oak trees.

The woman who is me and yet is not me falls to the floor. The glass shatters. From a distance I see you standing over me with a smile, your cold blue eyes the only still point in a spinning world.

In another life, I am alive.

(Nobody ever says what they mean these days, anyway.)