Something happens. A series of reactions layered upon reactions. Someone always shouting that they aren’t yelling. Sometimes crying when it’s done. Mostly, there’s a new contusion on an old scar and a cold draft blowing through my chest. Cold as a tomb.

I watched her in the mirror

Shave her head smooth like a polished river rock

Her pupils looked like the little pin- pricked dots at the bottom of a question mark

that I tattooed on the skin of my ribcage

Where it hurt the worst

I woke up scared

I woke up tangled and knotted

And snarled

I woke up scarred from where my dreams cut

I woke up wanting all I’ve lost

A heart muscle

Neatly bi-sected

Looks like a succulent fruit

Thinly segmented

A delicacy to artfully arrange

On a platter

With a sprig of rosemary

My heart

Is thinly blown glass

This lust is like a chemical burn.

It gets worse when you try to wash it off with water.

It peels back my layers.

I am helpless.

All I can do is dissolve in it.

When we pull the trigger,

Finally.

When we face it, at last, eye to eye.

Will we dissolve like the salt

In my bathwater?

Will we collide and burn?

When we give in will it make a loud pop?

Or will we go out like a sigh,

In a whisper?

 

Funny. Funny, when I have a brain to tickle. When the joy in you awakens mine that hibernates like a bear in perpetual winter otherwise. Without you I am all work. Relentless. A machine that will go on until the grease dries up and my gears fuse.

Truthful. Truth is an affliction. It sets you free but not me. It gets me flogged and burnt at the stake. To reveal the rot is a crime against society. I am Eve in the garden with bruised fruit-flesh caught in my half-smile, half-grimace, as we all fall.

 

 

 

 

You ever sit on a patch of carpet or grass so long that when you get up you have little indentations of the fibers or blades riddling your butt and the backs of your thighs?

After a minute or two the indentations start to itch so you scratch at them.

Pretty soon the itch becomes a soreness and maybe the next day you have little bruises where your fingertips dug in too hard.

All of that dumb pain for nothing, for refusing to move in the first place.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These are the rungs of a ladder. Stones to catch your feet as they trip forward.

The light of your lamp casts shadows.

Always.

We try to read them like runes.

Trace the whorls in our palms as if they’re more than cave drawings. As if there’s refuge.

Ever.

 

 

 

When men dragged their fingertips  along me and whistled through their teeth like I was

a slick car

they wanted to drive

I cut off my hair

Jagged like a scarecrow

Starved off my curves

Perforated my skin with all the sad stories

In green ink that I would never tell

Balled all my wishes up in tight fists