Silver Stirrups
“The doctor tells you, “Just relax.” For a moment, you wonder if she’s joking. The skin on the back of your legs sticks to the thin paper lining on the table, every slight movement announced by a loud crinkle. The fluorescent lights scrutinize you from the white grid ceiling. You can hear a doctor on the other side of the door talking loudly about the weather, how hot it’s been this summer. There’s a medical student in the room, shadowing. You’re afraid you’ll do something crazy, like faint and pass out. What if your body scares them away from medical school forever? You should have shaved beforehand. Did you wash well enough last night? Did you use soap? You bend your knees inwards towards one another, feet still in the silver stirrups.”
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The Last Meal
“Now my part is done, and I’ll cease from troubling their memories. I pass back down the nave, theoretically carrying within me his lifetime of sins, myself among them. But I’ve carried one of them for a long time, so even if I believed in the thing, it’d hardly add to the load.”
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Three Erasures
“I plan to rid myself of the inner terror declaring war.”
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I want to know what it is like to hear the word “Childhood” and not feel terror
“I hated myself for opening the door and learning to hunger for the places I used to run from.”
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Life In Child's Pose
“As a girl, you tore bark from trees like a bear
already too late to know who hurt you…”
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A Time Glowing + Volary
“When a wave moved out of me, as massive and weightless as a sigh—the light faded into ordinary pain, uneven over the skin. It didn't sing now; I didn't notice the quiet at last. I was quiet myself,
set down with my last softness…”
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The Waiting Room
“We spend so much time dreaming about leaving these spaces we inhabit; these sterile rooms and weary bodies. We wonder what it will be like when our lives can finally begin.”
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when they told me it could be cancer + blåtimen
“I had trouble breathing and thought of the water…and the sea…and all of the grief i have stored there…”
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5 Mile Loop Around Memory Lake
“I remember how my fear rose unbridled down the hill and over the bridge where the bullfrogs slept beneath, and past the muddy pond that swallowed paddles in daylight. It swelled up the other side to Josh’s house on the crest and crashed like a wave as he slammed the door and left us alone.”
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On Dirt and Deities
“I like to look at the dirt on the soles of my feet and think about where I’ve walked. I like to lie in bed alone and concentrate on the smell of my own sweat. Last night there was a full moon and I swear that I bled more than usual, so much more, in fact, that I wondered if it was my womanhood waking with the sky.”
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Bloom Point
“There’s a boy waving a picture
of an umbilical cord wound
like a noose. He must be fourteen.
He looks at me through my car window
and bellows something about motherhood…”
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Forgive
“The scars started as blisters, then sores that cratered deep
into her calves and shinbone, both legs trying to shed the fever,
and the medicine needed to save a life,
and once the fever left, the holes that could not be stitched…”
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Missed
“Your tongue is a thick, braided rope. You’ve been instructed that you must drink, eat, and pee in that order, so you take a sip of water from the paper cup, your first in six hours. The coldness rattles your teeth…”
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Holy The Begotten
“Holy the stirrups
holy the raised knees
holy the cervix
holy the spread
holy that hole
according to need…”
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Eponym
“(tell me how they made her)
shark-mouthed, gap-toothed
free-wheeling, obstinate
little girl of too many
rolls and teeth…”
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End Up Like This
“We watched a woman tear off a rose petal and let it fall to the auditorium floor. ‘Every time you have sex, that piece of yourself can never be recovered. And if you continue to have sex,’ she attacked the rose. Petal pluck. Petal fall. Petal pluck. Petal fall. Torn petals. Floating petals. Blood red speckled floor. ‘You’ll end up like this.’”
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Roasting Ear
“For breakfast, Granny eats a pack
of cigs between sips of coffee.
By suppertime, she’s coughed them back up,
transformed them into the garden tools
she uses to dig a circle of holes around us…”
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Basilisk
“After he broke my little finger, snapping the bone
to make me leg go of my phone, it swelled by half
& the ligament pulled tight, leaving the finger curved
inward like a claw…”
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Aniara: 2021
“Preface: Earth has become a wasteland. Humanity is fleeing, on lavish cruise ships, to struggling settlements on Mars. The Aniara is one such cruise ship. It carries 8,000 passengers…”
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Built
“she’s built
she’s stacked
she’s a brick
house…”
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