Atlas and the daughter of unknown origins*

My world revolves around you,
father,
you held the sky when I was born,
small goddess, I lay,
at your feet.
You cried and it was raining in my atmosphere,
I think you said I was lovely,
though my small ears could only hear
so far beyond the clouds.

I don't know what you've done,
some dreadful deed unrealised,
until I asked for you to kiss my cheeks
and you couldn't reach
so low.

I thought of you,
Atlas, Atlas,
protecting a face you'd never seen.
Stretching space into itself
so that I could breathe.
I thought of you,
Atlas,
when you didn't think of me.

I found Odysseus floating in the sea.

He looked like you,
he looked like Zeus and all his long-haired wives
and all their children too.
Odysseus the bravest,
the true.

(I loved him far too much,
before I knew what love could be,
a thing of claws and teeth).

Father, that man stole away
with all the bitter-sweetness of my name,

"I cannot do this anymore,"
Calypso, hide,
"I will tell them all you lied,"
Calypso, hide,
"you are a thing of shame."

Odysseus broke my heart,
Atlas missed the beat.

I'm not lazy, I'm depressed.
My hands are swollen,
my mouth is empty,
I am a void with shredded skin.

Don't tell me to pray,
I'm drowning, I need air, not words.
Not these words.

I used to tell myself that I could put you out of my brain without a second thought, to make room for things more “important”, as though you can be compared to last week’s AP history test answers.

Now, I can’t sleep without 10 mg of Melatonin coursing through my veins, following the same path that your touch once took. I wash dishes once, twice, three times, scrubbing harder and harder every time your name passes through my head. All it takes is to hear one syllable of your name; “Did you lock the car?”, “Pay the meter fee!”, and I am gripping the nearest surface with white knuckles.

When I sit in the library, I sometimes allow myself to watch your boney hands through a crack in the office. They are long and thin, with a slight purple tint. They wring with stress that you are now so used too, I bet you don’t even notice it anymore. They move swiftly, as though they have minds of their own. Sometimes, they will hover over an object, a slight uncertainty visible to those who take time to notice. Then they are back to the wringing. How do I know they are yours? Good god, how I wish I could forget.



-I couldn’t go any longer without writing about you

I hope this reaches you,
somewhat crumpled and embittered,
but soft on the inside and still smelling of my fingertips and hair.

Girl in pretty pretty colours with her hair all wild and bleach yellow like sunflowers, dress to her knees and a sunday school smile, she knew all the right ways to be young. Easier at 8 for a little girl to kiss her daddy's cheek and talk like a happy hurricane, easier to be weak and cry at all the right times, to grit her teeth at the gravel in her palms. Then boys became glasses of lemonade and she always poured too fast in her haste to be told she was pretty pretty in grey no matter that she didn't smile. She wanted them to love her anyway. When colouring pages became subjective and the colours she chose dejected, she gave up on that solidity and dove from the ledge that was innocence. Little girl became a vanilla queen of lies and solitude, loving the boyfriend with the razor blades for hands who only persisted to cut her open and ingest her youth. Girl is older now and sees memories like black and white photographs except the ones that are scored in red crosses and 'take your shame like pills, slide your fingers like a gun against your forehead.' She doesn't want to be alive but she doesn't want to be dead, for the sake of that father she used to kiss goodnight and the mother she remembers in a blue t-shirt with oven cleaner smeared on her left cheek. It's almost enough to make her smile again, thinking of the time the moon had come down from the sky to hold her heavy head to his chest, almost enough to be one more reason to stay. But not quite.

Yell into my mouth the instructions for caramel,
please mishka,
my insides don't feel sweet, they're bottles of painkillers eaten with a raw hunger swelling and grazing all my skin. I feel pretty with you
and entirely worthwhile
but here
and here and here
I still hurt.

Your loveliness was never warm ginger in my stomach, it was the lily scent
to cover my decay.