How do you measure the once-was? The invisible? The void?
*The ache in my heart is not physiological,
although it may feel like it sometimes is.*
I can measure the words I write,
the words that get stuck in my throat.
The boxes of belongings left over. (You can narrow down a person’s
physical life by how many trips it
takes to Goodwill.)
How many songs can I now not stand?
How many scents are now trigger trapdoors?
Shall I count the number of times I’ve thought of you today?
No ******* thank you.
Measuring is for the birds.
The doctors and
the scientists.
I keep reaching inside and pulling out my still beating,
but rotting and decaying heart
only to be told it’s perfectly fine.
I refuse to be gaslit on my grief anymore.
Feb 23, 2022
Feb 23, 2022 at 10:00 PM UTC
We all know that life can thrive in the most inhospitable of places.
Plants grow from volcanic soil.
Bioluminescence crawls beneath
immense pressure on the ocean floor.
Microbes most likely thrive below the icy,
radioactive surface of Europa.
We all know that life—love—perseveres.
It’s nothing new.
But we don’t talk about
how ******* hard that actually is.
That’s what the strengths perspective is for.
What resilience gives name to.
But what if I don't want to? What if,
for today,
I’d rather the **** not?
Is that okay? Is that allowed?
That today I'm the vinca vine dying on the ledge?
Withered up and not drinking any more water.
Today, I am every succulent that I’ve ever accidentally killed.
Today, I am excess formaldehyde. I am a brain floating in a bell jar,
undulating in an existence that is an ethical quagmire.
Today, I am in limbo. Purgatory. Stasis and static.
Suspended upside down in a frozen wasteland, Dante style.
Tomorrow, I will thaw.
Rise from the soil fist first.
Feb 23, 2022
Feb 23, 2022 at 9:48 PM UTC
I remember so much that I wish I could forget.
This is a poem about Psalm 23 choked out through tears.
This is a poem about astro vans and
tractor lawn mowers and
driveway car washes and
small garden spaces and
digger wasps and
three wolves and a moon.
This is about the Backstreet Boys and
Def Leppard and
Kenny Chesney.
“Dreams” by The Cranberries.
About waterparks and
swim lessons and
the smell of chlorine.
Fresh cut grass. Bonfire smoke permeating through the house.
Grey diamond tiles on white linoleum.
Hands clenched down on washcloths.
Muddled. It’s all so muddled. Stuck beneath
brain matter and cerebrospinal fluid and
down, down, down beneath the lake.
How can I dig it out while also digging it down deeper?
I want to forget it all. No memory, no pain, no ******* problem.
Goldfish life: a pipedream.
Oct 23, 2021
Oct 23, 2021 at 12:35 PM UTC
It’s a large cavern. A gaping hole—
A black hole.
Slow and fast. Pain and numb. Yin and yang.
The blackened lung. The bust vessel. The mutated cells.
It’s everything and nothing at once.
What is the condition of my heart?
I couldn't begin to tell you.
It’s hope and
it’s anger and
it’s frustration and
it’s a corked bottle on high heat.
Lush leaves. Turquoise lagoon. Iron sky.
Everything looks like it's
filmed through a blue filter, Twilight style—
this is what my heart looks like.
Grey like brain. Serosanguineous like cerebrospinal fluid
collecting from a shunt to a bag from a cracked open skull.
Purple and green and yellow like bruises on
hands that don't have enough platelets to heal.
Teal like an N95 mask. Lilac like a casket spray.
Soft pink like the padding of a wood overcoat.
Grey. Grey. Grey.
This is what you will find if you crack my chest,
spread my diaphragm,
my sternum,
shuffle my lungs.
Sounds like asystole on the monitors, but still
somehow producing electrical currents.
The condition of my heart is cavernous.
A sunset on the east coast; a sunrise on the west.
Bittersweet.
Aug 30, 2021
Aug 30, 2021 at 4:36 PM UTC
The fog here is thick, until you step into it.
The storm rages until you get to its eye.
I wish this same principle could be said of me, too.
But like a gas giant, you could slip right through me with
the smallest amount of pressure.
There is no calming sense of self at the core.
Gravity does not apply to me.
There’s a boat on the lake cutting through the fog. And then nothing.
More waves.
More birds.
The fog covers it all up again.
The sun slinks and the tide comes in, or is it out? Does it matter?
The moon controls it in some way—the push, the pull of the waves.
At least the lake looks blue today,
looks green today.
The geese are in the water now. The families are packing up.
The ice cream shop is closing.
And I do not remember if I was ever here with you.
This, of course, is a collective you.
Could mean you, my reader,
could mean one specific person,
or two
or three
or four;
could be whoever I'm thinking of when I reread this to myself.
That’s the funny thing about the litany of loss.
It all starts to congeal.
Waves crash against the rock. Starts to chip away, create something new.
That’s what memory does.
It’s not permanent. It’s malleable.
Flexible. Bendable. Moldable.
It smells like lakewater. Like
fish and sand and mud and
gulls and rocks and shells and
algae and fog—thick, thick fog.
Smell is supposed to be one of the biggest memory triggers, and yet
I cannot place a single memory of you here.
And that’s mildly crushing.
So I would take you here:
to where I wish the air was
saliter and less earthy.
to where I come sometimes to think.
where the clouds are so thick and puffy and
the setting sun makes them look like cotton candy on the Fourth of July.
where the sun’s reflection on the water
turns the green lake pink.
where the geese are back out of the water and
onto the shore.
I would take you here with me.
Into a new memory.
Homemade. Handmade. DIY.
Aug 24, 2021
Aug 24, 2021 at 12:46 AM UTC
I am soft and mandible:
fresh clay, the inside of an oyster, the belly of an armadillo.
vulnerable. tender. the anti-sharp.
everything is blurred. dulled. hidden
behind a gossamer haze and ambient noise.
a photo out of focus. one eye closed and ten feet back.
dizzy. so dizzy. disoriented.
there is no logic here. no rules. no laws.
and that’s what makes it horrible and incomprehensible.
the transplant recipient still dies. the man in perfect health
suddenly has cancer.
the proned patient flipped back to supine for intubation
codes and dies immediately.
nonsense. it’s all nonsense.
it's easier to take a breath and
compartmentalize.
Aug 15, 2021
Aug 15, 2021 at 8:37 PM UTC
It's the pilot light in the stove,
the fireplace. It’s the
night light in the bathroom,
the living room. The
reflection in the mirror,
in the glass of my windshield. The
hum of electricity,
the sigh of the furnace.
What do you mean I’m supposed to go looking for something that is constant?
The conjoined twin does not go looking for its sibling.
The brain does not search for the heart.
The shadow always finds the body. Gravity invariably
pulls the moon into orbit.
The smoldering ache of loss
—hot like bubbling magma, bright like a solar flare—
is always there.
Lurking beneath the skin. The face behind the mask.
Gnarled roots beneath the forest.
What do you mean I’m supposed to look for something that is a part of me?
Assimilated to my sense of normalcy. Integrated into my DNA.
I can only do so much introspection before I go insane.
Jun 22, 2021
Jun 22, 2021 at 11:27 PM UTC
I’m in the dream again: not the one I had while awake in
the catacombs of St. Callixtus in Rome. Where the darkness was
so impenetrable that it began to echo. To look like the mixture of colors
that burst when you rub your eyes too hard for too long. Like the
neuron rupture before death. To shape and morph and become liquid.
Where the darkness cobbled itself into a physical form.
Not the dream where I kept seeing
flits of my mother out of the corner of my eye. Behind
every street corner.
Every turn. Every tunnel.
Reflected in the casts of the bodies in Pompeii.
Mirrored in the waves of the Trevi Fountain.
I’m in the dream where the soil churned from the bottom to the top.
where the hand outstretched from the grave.
where my grandfather clawed his way out and returned to my grandmother﹘sopping wet, covered in thick mud, socks torn, skin sallow and jaundiced, spitting out the wire the embalmers put in his mouth, melting makeup, and ravenously hungry. And it’s been so
long since he was hungry.
“He came back to me, Taylor,” my grandmother tells me.
“He came back to me.”
I don’t have the heart to tell her that he’s undead.
I’m physically unable to spit out those words.
And it’s a dream and it’s a dream and it’s a dream, but
it just fits so perfectly. That he would come back to her.
That death would not be a barrier. I can’t explain it. It just is.
My grandmother is a shell without him.
The body that’s missing the limb.
The body that keeps score.
Jun 13, 2021
Jun 13, 2021 at 11:36 PM UTC
The color of death is not black, is not white.
Not red, not gold.
Think: ashen skin.
Think: where did the blood go?
Think: pale, so ******* pale.
Bruise again. He’s going to bruise again.
Mottled red and purple and blue and green and yellow.
That’s what the body does after death. Blood runs down
to the lowest bend of the body and bruises the skin.
The rust of cerebrospinal fluid as it sloshes
back and forth
in the bag hanging above the bed.
My mother’s hands:
white knuckled and gripping down on washcloths
to prevent her from breaking the skin of her palms.
The constant hum of telemetry,
the soft whoosh of the ventilator.
The human body has roughly 7% of its weight in blood.
The human body has no ******* idea what to do when
there is too much or too little of really anything.
Think: blood vessel bursting.
Think: cells mutating.
Think: proned patient coding after intubation.
Bruised. His hands were bruised from all the needle-sticks,
from his lack of platelets. And a single transfusion only goes so long.
Goes three weeks long.
The hands on the belly, laid so gently, so carefully are
covered in makeup. The hair is parted wrong with a cowlick.
I know how they created that soft smile on his closed mouth.
I’ve read the books.
I’ve heard the talks from morticians.
They’ve made my grandfather tan, but
I know what’s underneath the foundation:
grey.
May 9, 2021
May 9, 2021 at 10:55 PM UTC
the asteroid hit the earth so long ago that
i do not remember a time before.
(the bones of dinosaurs do not remember a time before they were
petrified into brittle and fragile memories; the moon does not recall
who she was before she got stuck in the earth’s orbit; uranus knows
nothing of how he came to spin on his side.)
you could stick your hand through
any of the gas giants and find
your whole body
sliding through.
this same theory can be applied to my skin. i have very little gravity,
or at least it feels that way most days.
maybe it depends on how you look at it:
one way is perfect, and the other all wrong. the woman in the casket could either be sleeping or dead. she could either be a stranger or my mother. the head or the tail. the light or the dark. the two sides of the moon. the comet striking through the night sky. the interdimensional toll could refuse to let you through. the cult could accept or deny your entry request. there is one and there is the other. the upside down. the rightside up. the parallel universe. the evil twin. it’s fresh and then it’s rotten. this could either hurt a lot or a little. it depends on how much you let in: how willing you are to bend to the emotional blow.
science says that the human body tends to
forget physical pain as a survival tactic.
but science says jack **** about emotional pain.
so am i living? or am i just existing?
the difference is six feet deep.
May 7, 2021
May 7, 2021 at 12:14 AM UTC