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Dec 2022 · 1.6k
Putrescence
fray narte Dec 2022
My love is the shape of canine teeth and claw marks
I leave around your neck,
the way I leave poems decaying in an unforgiving landfill —
the gods have turned away in disgust
as I sit and lick, like a rabid dog,
the maggots chipping away from the inside —
the entrails of my grief, all pulled out without mercy,
without a deathbed confession,
without a god to listen.
I long for something else to unfold;
something sacred and beautiful
when you turn my body inside out, but lo.
This is as deep and far as we go.
Tell me, I beseech, does my filth look better inside out,
uncovered, on display,
penetrating your very skin?
Take what you need, love, they are all yours —
my sins, my wounds, my impiety
in exchange for your darkened heart — I’ll spit it out
and swallow it back
down to my underbelly where no one can ever take it —
not you, not the gods, not their fallen, forsaken angels.

Forgive me — forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.
Forgive my unforgiving hands, forgive my unforgiving poems
if our sick, twisted, defilement is all they ever know.
written December 14, 2022, 9:31 a.m.
Dec 2022 · 1.5k
Galatea
fray narte Dec 2022
Such a classic mortal blunder to lay
my spine as it erodes, graceless, inelegant
on Galatea’s cold, ivory arms;
such delicate carvings can never be human, look human,
feel human under my lonesome bones.

I long to see you flinch and break
into fine, liquid, rain of dust blinding me,
covering the walls of this room
in a blameless shade of white: a new asylum ward
for my kind of insanity,
you say.
It envelopes like light around my awe
and my forlorn limbs,
tangled with Galatea’s unmoving ones.
I look for comfort within brittle carcasses
scraped of everything they could ever give.

The quiet persists eerily.
But here, Pygmalion’s gifts remain untainted:
the apex of auger shells, the beak of a songbird
the blunted ceriths, the rusty chisels
all impaling my spinal bones.
Yet the sculptor’s kisses, long erased,
the careful carvings, long defaced,
long reduced into a Grecian ruin.
I bury my body on your arms yet they find no rest
against the ghostly pleas of mammalian tusks.

How many for your fingers?
How many for your hair?


Tell me, Galatea, were you carved to bear the weight of
all the sea salt I swallowed as I drowned?
Soften under my meandering thoughts; I long
to see you flinch and break — like all the dead elephants —
any reminder that you yield pliantly to the voice
of the love goddess, that you were once turned human.
Break now, your solid arms, under my own collapse
over the sea foam caught on fire.

I am no longer bending and weeping to pick myself up.
Here it all goes down and ends:
my bones,
and yours,
burning,
snapping.
Nothing —
nothing less glorious will last after us.

— Fray Narte
written October 18, 2022, 1:35 pm
Nov 2022 · 3.7k
November
fray narte Nov 2022
Find me tearing violets, my love,
in a manic daze; I am running out of softness and daylight,
like winter’s cruel hours


“but I will crown your hair with these torn violet tiaras
and your soft throat, twine with woven garlands”


and I will dig into my tongue for the remaining metaphors
beneath the bourbon, until odes drench my lips,
I will stitch my wounds shut and ready for your apricot kisses —
I ache to be kissed away,
to waste away before your sun-speckled eyes
like a tiny fae in your flower basket, I ache to settle
in your dainty hands,
in lithe fingers lost in my wind-blown hair.


My November, my gentlest love,
how I breathe you in like my grandmother’s letters —
how you consume me
in curious ways
and for the first time, I am not afraid of the softness
buried and warm inside my bone marrows.


Tell me, darling, will you stay?
Will we stay
this time
for more than a kiss?
Will we linger longer
than silhouettes in a dream?
— written September 2021 | first published in Love, Girls 1st zine issue, SAGISAG | part of the poetry suite, Saudade

Link:  https://tinyurl.com/ReadSagisag
Oct 2022 · 2.6k
October
fray narte Oct 2022
Her eyes are sinkholes in a quiet, sleeping state
and I was a girl, lost and misplaced at twenty-one,
looking for love in infinitesimal spaces:

on her palm creases and chipped, ruby nails,
and in the blown-out ends of her lotus tattoo
I find myself tracing a secret,
at the spiked tips of her hair tamed by fairy lights
and on the slits of her skin — a rabbit hole of wonders,
I always fall like Alice in sworn careful tiptoes
and crash headfirst; a broken wishbone, a tainted wish
some habits you just can't quit.
like —
October and her obsidian eyes, and the sunless ways we kissed —
being lost and misplaced made sense for a while in the detached comfort
of her cold bed, colder hands,
warmth has become an oppression.

But this dalliance has always been a disaster waiting to happen
and I am a paramour, a memory, a face in the crowd
swallowed in a seismic fall —

and losing October has always been a disaster waiting to happen —
this bed, always a site of a losing battle
and I find myself in a soiled, torn dress,
lying helpless on the other side of her war.

Tonight, I light myself a candle;
maybe one day, I'll finally learn to run away from a girl made of disasters

and not towards her.
— written September 2021 | first published in Love, Girls 1st zine issue, SAGISAG | part of the poetry suite, Saudade

Link:  https://tinyurl.com/ReadSagisag
Sep 2022 · 3.1k
Dearest, Sweet September
fray narte Sep 2022
You still eat away at my chest
like a mole finding its way out of my body.


God, it’s been ten years now since you last wrote me a letter
sealed with a pressed, dead daisy
and a ghostly kiss mark,
yet they’re still dying under my thumb.


These days slip by and I can no longer write you poems,
my dearest, sweet September —
but still, I hope that you have in your chest
all my papercuts from unbridled letters,
all my quiet midnights,
and all of my unwritten words;
they are yours for missing.


Must you leave a girl then, darling,
whose only fault was being one?
— written September 6, 2021 | part of the poetry suite 'Saudade' | First published in Love, Girls’ 1st zine issue, SAGISAG

Read here: https://tinyurl.com/ReadSagisag
Sep 2022 · 1.9k
September
fray narte Sep 2022
My throat is heavy with August’s sorrows
I sit by the shore and wait for the weakest waves
to drown my little feet — I  stagger over them like a clumsy giant.
But it’s seaborne sadness wraps, a constant, unrelenting embrace
like a mother’s grief,
a gentle creature’s death,
a rabid dog feasting on a poor, meatless bone.
I am alive — so cruelly alive for it all
as it falls

down my throat, down my chest like a child’s pained whisper.
My body is heavy with August’s weight as I retire to my filthy bed
and hold myself.

Cold are the nights in their quiet,
lackadaisical, taunting hours.

Come now, September. Come, kindly, if you please;
sweep me away into a million, invisible dust particles
suspended

under clueless, flickering lights.
Aug 2022 · 3.8k
August
fray narte Aug 2022
I name all of my lovers after months now
and all roads lead to August and
the Roman cities we’ve burned —
how she walked on crumbling streets as I held the matches —
this poem is a page for burning at its tip:
a lone match, scalding — a firelit kiss
but the flames have always been a hypnotic sight
like a woman perched in your sunlit bed —
her hair, red as flames licking my neck,
red as love that bleeds on itself;
it leaves a stain on pretty things.

Now her skin has silk sheets burning away
like banners in a Roman cathedral,
her half-breath kisses, dying — now embers,
tainting my dress black where her lips had staked a claim.
Now her touch is wildfire crawling on my skin
and I am a wounded doe — waiting. waiting.
waiting.


The only world I know burns to the ground
before my very eyes
and we are no phoenixes, darling; all we do is burn.
Written September 6, 2021
First published in Love, Girls' 1st zine issue, SAGISAG
Link: https://tinyurl.com/ReadSagisag
Jul 2022 · 2.3k
The Point in Pointlessness
fray narte Jul 2022
I stick my fingers in my throat
and throw up a basket of swallowed suns;
under it, my tongue is parched and pinned in place
like a dried house moth on an entomologist’s hand
that nurses it back to life

and demands devotion in return,
a poem in return.

But I have purged the feeling being out of me
like a cold, cold man now averse to the ways of his younger lover
who is alive for all of it — the lust and the starving kisses
and the quiet deaths in the morning only to haunt at night.

I leave letters for my bitten nails without meaning a single word,
and go to lie with the superficiality, the hypocrisy nesting under my tongue.

I have started writing poems again — see where they take me this time
and find myself here, once more
where a fool unpacks her baggage and out I come rolling
like a dead body with a foaming mouth, a brown moth burning under the sun,
a leech that scurries under salt and needles,
slowly eroding like sanity.

She thinks, therefore, she is, they say,
but at what cost? She looks on and pens this poem
with a tiny smile on her lips.
written June 6, 2022, 10:53 am
Jul 2022 · 722
the angels aren't here
fray narte Jul 2022
my father pours his beer on my mother’s wounds.

i bet she rues the moment
god fashioned her out of his hollow ribs
and him, out of the twigs breaking
under her careless, tiny feet when she was fourteen.

hollow and broken, the walls fall
all over me like ancient, perishing twin cities
and lot’s wife never looks back; the angels never look back —
i crack like a lightless dawn that wants to disappear
but my brother has started to look like me —
wearing an all too familiar silence, an all too familiar sadness
wrapped around his neck like a cursed talisman.
my sister’s wrists are exposed; i check
for bitterness, and cigarettes, and boys —
maybe i hid them better and held them tighter away
until i was pale and white as a ghost i longed to be,

hollow and broken, the walls fall; the door flings open.

i no longer have to hide my wrists,
but i crouch to a cluttered corner of my room.
every sudden movement, every unchanging voice,
and i bow my head low for my father to pour his beer,
like a baptism of the heathen who accepts the words of god.

my mother’s wounds shine like biblical relics
kept in my body — too fragile and small
but i was not made for the word of god
who calls himself by my father’s name.
— written may 22, 2022, 6:40 pm
Jul 2022 · 778
salem
fray narte Jul 2022
i still wait for my bed to dip beneath your weight —
70 days, 70 taunting moons still come and go
without a trace

the shape of your tiny body.
i know you are weightless now,
and the bed doesn’t dip — my heart does
until it resembles a blood-red, pink flesh quicksand;
i wish we had fallen here instead, within my reach;
you can reach for a rib, a branch, a lifeline,
i would’ve given you the whole cage —
warm enough to keep you home, each bone will bar the door
and keep death outside and eye to eye with me.
the first one to blink loses.


maybe he would’ve lost his patience
and taken my heart instead —
every dip, every beat, every pump that lasts,
no more now,
and all my angels will keep you safe,
and the bed will dip under your little pink paws,
and orange feet


as i watch from the other side:
you are all the living colors and the world is pale like a ghost.
— written may 16, 2022, 11:28 pm
Jul 2022 · 822
Six of Cups
fray narte Jul 2022
“i set my deadfall hands on fire —
swallow the ashes,” i wrote and laughed
as these words turned black with rot

in two months,

i am no longer inside the skin
burning away vividly at the feet of the sun god.
i am not a body at the crematorium
with matchstick-fingers and gasoline;
my bones are whole, pure, pearly, quiet white.

i have been holding my breath, waiting
for the smoke to clear without choking.
i no longer want to write about the flames and the embers and live-coal hearts;
i put my poems down, my cigarettes and pitchfork
and step into a gentler flare,
and stick my tongue out to lick the sunbeams —
they’re warm against my taste buds,
like honeyed milk and hibiscus stews.



i am four years old once more,
sleeping soundly on my mother’s lap.
Written last May 16, 2022, 9:10 pm
Mar 2022 · 1.1k
my mind is an escape room
fray narte Mar 2022
dearest stranger,

i am too abstract now for my own good. i feel and hold myself, in place, in my hands and i slip right through like sunlight, like tiny moth scales, like the delusions of a sauntering ghost, like all things unreal and untouchable, like a madwoman, laughing away in her free fall to an unsteady ground.

and all the flowers are cheering in their surreal, psychedelic scarlets, and all the rocks are breaking, and all the words are failing to capture what i truly feel.

am i still despairingly corporeal, like paper napkins and panes of glass? am i still in actual flesh, now that god doesn't exist? am i still as tangible as this last, frantic breath of a letter?

am i still actually here?

bidding my farewell now,
ginia
Mar 2022 · 811
𝑺𝒐𝒍𝒊𝒅
fray narte Mar 2022
𝐼𝑓 𝐼 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑤𝑟𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑛 𝑖𝑡 𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑜𝑢𝑡,
𝑎𝑛𝑑
𝑒𝑚𝑝𝑡𝑖𝑒𝑑 𝑚𝑦𝑠𝑒𝑙𝑓  —
𝑒𝑚𝑝𝑡𝑖𝑒𝑑 𝑚𝑦 𝑙𝑢𝑛𝑔𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝑑𝑒𝑎𝑑 𝑟𝑜𝑠𝑒𝑠,
𝑒𝑚𝑝𝑡𝑖𝑒𝑑 𝑚𝑦 𝑡ℎ𝑟𝑜𝑎𝑡 𝑜𝑓 𝑒𝑙𝑒𝑔𝑖𝑎𝑐 𝑏𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡ℎ𝑠,
𝑒𝑚𝑝𝑡𝑖𝑒𝑑 𝑚𝑦 𝑚𝑎𝑟𝑟𝑜𝑤𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑦𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔
𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑖𝑠 𝑡𝑜 𝑑𝑟𝑎𝑖𝑛 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑓𝑎𝑙𝑙,
𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑛
𝑤ℎ𝑦 𝑑𝑜𝑒𝑠 𝑖𝑡 𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝑓𝑒𝑒𝑙 𝑠𝑜 ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑣𝑦?


𝑊ℎ𝑦 𝑑𝑜 𝐼 𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝑓𝑒𝑒𝑙
𝑠𝑜 𝑒𝑥𝑐𝑟𝑢𝑐𝑖𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑙𝑦

𝒔𝒐𝒍𝒊𝒅?
fray narte Mar 2022
when will the world quiet down into a throbbing, feeble ***** that i can so easily crush?
fray narte Mar 2022
i spend my days sighing away, digging away at each layer of disillusionment. when will i get to the bottom of this? when do i get to see my bones, all bleached out to a lifeless tan? when do i get to poke them around like live coals, desperately reviving a dying fire? when do i get to see myself, in my highest, truest, most foolish form, and have the closure — both underwhelmed and overwhelmed?

i've lived longer than my younger self would've allowed; tell me, did she know me much better? did she live just long enough for me to inherit her despair? have i gone dancing too much with illusive lights, only to get home heavy, burning, and blinded? did she know it all along? did i know it all along?

tell me, was it all for this? tell me, in the name of all my splendid highs and in the drawn-out silence thereafter  — is this it?
fray narte Feb 2022
oh, to self-soothe like a wounded fawn. the hours are unmoving. the lights disorient. the city collapses on top of my head.

this world is too impatient with bewildered hearts like mine.
fray narte Feb 2022
𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑑𝑎𝑦𝑠 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑑𝑢𝑙𝑙𝑒𝑑 𝑚𝑦 𝑝𝑎𝑖𝑛 𝑡𝑜 𝑠𝑜𝑓𝑡𝑛𝑒𝑠𝑠. 𝑚𝑎𝑦𝑏𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑖𝑠 ℎ𝑜𝑤 𝑖𝑡 𝑠ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑’𝑣𝑒 𝑎𝑙𝑤𝑎𝑦𝑠 𝑏𝑒𝑒𝑛.
Feb 2022 · 716
the wednesday i languished
fray narte Feb 2022
i tire myself out. i bite on my heart and spit it out — press my fingers on the dents, the teeth marks, the parts that are supposed to hurt. and i watch as it breaks into a thousand glasses. dreams. futile daylights. i watch, ever so quietly. i watch, unfeeling.
Feb 2022 · 762
tatiana
fray narte Feb 2022
in bed, shrinking to the smallest space my skin and bones will allow. in bed, with my sorrows growing, sprawling out in every direction, all for the world to see.

how can i go and fade quietly when my hurting is a loud, lurid spectacle under flashy, purple lights?
Feb 2022 · 608
oh, miagao
fray narte Feb 2022
life update: still falling through the cracks of light, and my feet are starting to fail. some roads must lead somewhere away from this town.

right?
Feb 2022 · 1.3k
february
fray narte Feb 2022
february is inside me like a cursed fetus. it eats away at my ribs, making a gap big enough for me to sink into a quicksand of motionless hours and crumbling bones. i hate myself for having written these words, but february beckons with ghostly arms and i shrink to myself like a well-trained beast — step into my hollow chest and crawl farther and farther than before never to be seen again.
Feb 2022 · 1.1k
icarus sinks
fray narte Feb 2022
someplace else, icarus has taken one look at the sun and recoils like a banished angel. lo, the cheerless shadows befogging. lo, the waxen wings he clipped — swallowed by solid ground. lo, the skies melt above the sea, in horror, as he falls in place over his bones and sinks into his sunless chest.
Feb 2022 · 1.1k
this week
fray narte Feb 2022
how can i constantly forget something as innate, as natural as breathing — how do i stop holding it intimately and finally see self-transgression?
fray narte Feb 2022
i disembody you in poetry:
thin scabs film over your bones,
i pick them until i find new skin to lay my kisses on —
a new land to baptize
with my own heathen hands,
i disembody you with them:
chest spread open like that of a dressed foul.
my body is too corrupted but it knows of intense longing,
piercing live-coal eyes, it burns
my neck like a crucifix,
like flames on a burning metal —
it heals, almost cleanses like holy fire
and with new bones,
i disembody you in poetry:
an attempt to see you, hold you, love you whole
without it consuming me:
a sight of pink lips, pink tongue,
pink columbines on your wrist;
i take apart your entirety,
press it, piece by piece on my fragile nail bed — hidden away
somewhere the world loses its sight.

and maybe now after all the cycles, it is the world's turn
to fumble far and wide, to despair in search for your hands —
your eyes
that unsettle and leave the cosmos
collapsing majestically
in its own harshest daylight

leaving us all disembodied
in blinding, vivid, solar colors.

forgive my compulsions to love you like this.
Feb 2022 · 2.5k
6th February
fray narte Feb 2022
i can never love you the way i claim — delicately and without violence. i remember hating flowers and broken seashells, and my grandmother, hand-sewing pastel dresses. deep down, my bones are raised on stories of ancient wars and biblical battles carried from memory to memory, a string of generational blunders — i am made of my father's bitterness and my mother's denial. so i will love you with corruptions and apologies, with bled-out  veins, giving in like an emptied river, with all the poems i have read and forgotten, and with everything that makes me finitely human.
Feb 2022 · 2.9k
sacrilege
fray narte Feb 2022
i am sorry but my bones will always love you like hell, like it was war, like the world needs to end in the process, like the hand of god, taking you out of my ribs and now he needs to return it back where it rightfully belong. i will always love you, in godless sacrilege. i am sorry if i don’t know any other way.
Jan 2022 · 731
28th January
fray narte Jan 2022
the quiet thinly films over these sheets;
i press my cheek on the pillow — soundless, it hears me.
i rest my dusk-dimmed mourning on quiescent tiles,
and the crickets cannot stand the
silence — it recognizes now the thoughts,
much better than poems can.

i have taken this wordless fall,
hands tied behind my back,
feet tied, tongue-tied
down these sweet, senseless,
daffodil deliriums

i have taken this wordless fall
away, unseen, i land in grace —
this is the last noise i will ever make.
Jan 2022 · 771
alex
fray narte Jan 2022
the world ends: it looks like an empty bed,
sheets running under your body the night before,
a faux lace dress caught in aventurine nails —
it fits like a memory, clings like an emptiness worn well.

together, we turned our backs on the saints,
but i pray to them like i haven't
forgotten a word; surely,
a plea is bound to keep you here
just long enough for me to forget:

the world ends: it looks like the corner table
where i last saw you; i pocket
my dizzying daydreams from across the street
and walk past a wormhole.

the world ends: it looks like wounded lips — pink daffodils
drunk on the slight touch of our fingers;
nothing heals from this.
new lovers will zip my skin open so carefully, with their
untainted hands
and find you buried; i never loved you
is all i say.

the world ends: it looks like a forgotten year
and some souls are always the first ones to leave
but i empty my veins, dredge up relics of your presence —
it still leaves me
disconcerted, breathless;
i pour my love in a letter, in paper flowers
and my tainted hands still find you buried:
a secret i can never keep
so i let you go
is all i say.
Jan 2022 · 644
my disembodiments
fray narte Jan 2022
pour sunlight down my throat, it burns
like a whiskey secret taken to grave: my chest

is a bed of incarnadine moss
where i retire and lie, not knowing — waiting for
death or life, for
words to be purified by fire
the size of my live-coal heart;

what is there to write
out of it anyway? after all,
i am now incomprehensible to myself.

here, i confess my sins, absurd in their triviality,
but the sky hears, declares a sentence, unforgiving.
i cannot hear, for

i am now incomprehensible to myself
as i **** my nails clean of dirt, of meaning,
like a poem; emptiness is just a blank slate
not knowing where it's headed.

here, sunsets lick my bones clean — its tongue has long stopped burning
from inside the numbing walls
of a coffin: my skin is the pall draped over —
aventurescent-white under the fevered sun.
Jan 2022 · 2.2k
daffodil deliriums
fray narte Jan 2022
the stars weep over all the terrible ways i have loved you —
dress you in their light caught
in my aprium kisses and cigarette daydreams.
empty my ametrine veins,
disembodied to hold your bones together —
kiss you, break me, leave me
burning and trapped in a lantern room; watch me
sink ships to come back to your arms; you've always waited.
and they all still weep and fall
over all the terrible ways i'll still love you

long after they die.
Jan 2022 · 1.1k
pandora
fray narte Jan 2022
i have inherited pandora's careless melancholy, her tiny box of regrets, her white-washed, quiet horrors and terrible decisions — staining like a memory passed down from her reckless hands to my old, ***** claws, digging for something raw, something parasitic, something miserable, something always goes wrong beneath my ribs. it wants out, like a beast, a misplace fragment, an aphid. and these days turn their heads away — blur themselves blind before my many blunders.

before the wrath of a false god, will my bones ever learn the art of being unapologetic?
Jan 2022 · 1.8k
11th ♡
fray narte Jan 2022
to love all of you within the noiseless half of a sigh is a time-swept fever dream stirring in my fists — part firework smoke, part lavenders, part quiet, cautious limerence. how you enchant and unsettle me — i run high and aimless, and free fall in seconds. i am smitten. desperate. love-sick. wordless now, for all i care, darling — i'll leave all of my poems strewn in your bed, like a girl shedding her mortality before a goddess in her truest form.


to disrupt this is a human blunder. to bask in it, divine. ♡
Jan 2022 · 973
January
fray narte Jan 2022
will my hands ever forget the habit of clawing my own wounds for warmth? i lay my vulnerably human skin on sun-dried poems written to breathe, breathe, breathe in — breathe through january's oppressive cold.


i breathe out a mouthful of asphyxiated flowers
Jan 2022 · 764
29th December
fray narte Jan 2022
I wish to fold my skin and bones small enough
to fit my subtlest sigh
to be held,
in solace,
by all the breaths I've been holding.

Status: Dragged bones to New Year's Eve
Jan 2022 · 1.1k
With Alaska
fray narte Jan 2022
Without so much as a burst of white light, without so much as a beclouded face, lingering — I want to go quietly now, like sawdust in a country road — like seafoam under a gray sunset.

My mind insists on leaving.
fray narte Jan 2022
i am half of a sun-dried breath short of being sane. i sigh and my body bathes in a mouthful of bleeding, blue december — i can feel its colder, longer days stretching inside me.

i wish january comes here soon — in fresh, comforting, yellow warmth.
Jan 2022 · 302
Dia
fray narte Jan 2022
Dia
out there wafts jupiter's quiet grief as it loses its moons — does mine ever compare?

i toss my sighs into the thinnest air, like a brief lesson on how easy it is to vanish. how doable. how hard.
Dec 2021 · 329
two days before christmas
fray narte Dec 2021
i.
i carve the sadness out of my ribs like well-soaked marrows;
they fall off like a drunken secret —
a poem within a poem within a night-long quietude

that i disturb
like a child's stomping feet among the prairie dusk.

ii.
i carve a poem,
whole and out of my tightened throat
like a reverse magic trick,
but my hands break in casual irony.
i carve a word out of my tongue
but all it does is bleed.

iii.
i carve a feeling out of a callus but
my paper-skin is left too long under a lavender storm
to still write letters like these.

iv.
the sky cries to a drunken oblivion
as i unwrite this poem in indifference.
i let myself go, like that

dead houseplant drooping in corner of my room

and cheerless, quiescent sheets
watch to pass time.
fray narte Dec 2021
here take all of my poems conceived without sin —
my throat is thick and crowded
with restless ghosts
whose bodies i no longer recognize;
they carry all of my many sins
and this poem is an
immaculate conception, at best
a distant, futile reference; take it


it's the only part of me pure enough
not to hurt you
fray narte Dec 2021
like fallen flowers, i am
weary under the subtle noise of a rushing, babbling brook;
a death, quietly scenic
as i go back to dust.
i left my body rotting in a prairie paradise,
here it decays to gray
under the bruised indigo sky.

a ghost writes her poem in silence, in small, made-up synapses,
and the wind sweeps it away.
Dec 2021 · 2.2k
December
fray narte Dec 2021
Here we are as unclaimed lights fall into the room. Here we are with better names, old letters peeling after the other. Here we are, now made of changing lights and indigo dreams. In the very last month and for the first time, I claim the body of an Egyptian lad and you are the sun god, washing over me like a brand new day. For the first time, December doesn’t feel like choking on poppy blossoms. For the first time, December is freeing as scattered pastel lights.

For the first time, my love, December rests on my skin — and it doesn’t hurt.
Dec 2021 · 534
Apologies for Ivy
fray narte Dec 2021
Someone mourns and I am terrified: my skin, shrinking — closing in upon myself, for how can they break and not break at the same time?

— “I am sorry for watching you watch someone else die”
Nov 2021 · 832
thomasin
fray narte Nov 2021
i am bone-tired and befogged with melancholia; i cannot wait to fall and bounce cheerlessly in a field of forlorn, arenaria flowers, all over the sunless forest floor. leave me be — a strange girl in a sleepy, run-down town. leave me be — a hopeless case in my own quiet apocalypse.
Nov 2021 · 324
clarice
fray narte Nov 2021
i mount my heart on a wall,
still and discolored
where my taxidermist hands had pressed.

it breathes life into dead walls:
a hanging irony made of
soft cyclamens
and the closed, white fist of a tormented girl.

i mount my teeth on a wooden wall,
write my letters,
pour salt on spaces where i used to stand;
may i not stand here
once again.

i mount my hands on a wooden wall;
they do not knock. i do not answer.

silent as a lamb — down to a pit,
i watch the sheer cliff of my back
from where i have jumped
and the sundry sorrows shrink
into black, blinking dots
like a hidden villain
exposed.
i fall over myself
like in a slow-moving dream —
lead-like it flows like the acheron river.
and here comes the ferryman.
fray narte Nov 2021
i've always loved you one way or another. i break out of your ribs only to bury myself back in. i've always loved you one way after the other. everything else is a fleeting state — cruel, fluid transience leading me back to you.

some ghosts you just miss, darling — some ghosts, you'd die just to see again.
Nov 2021 · 1.5k
lalahon
fray narte Nov 2021
the weight of your breaths is burning its way inside my skin. this is a catastrophe we're in now, darling, and i resemble all of your crestfallen asters, dried and dusty in your altar — now caught in a forest fire. this is a catastrophe we're in now but heathens like me don't burn down, and i have loved you with such fatality i didn't once possess. i have loved you like stray dust in lilac vapors. i have loved you, like stray wind in a firestorm.

this is the calm we're in now darling — and i have loved you to the point of no return.
Nov 2021 · 1.2k
27th November
fray narte Nov 2021
these days, emptiness is beginning to look more like a poem that writes itself. the irony is it is everything i can't be and everything i am
Nov 2021 · 1.6k
heliolite
fray narte Nov 2021
my wasting bones are unsettled by kisses. how your lips graze my paper skin and i am an origami crane — catching fire in waking sunlight. watch me love you terribly. kindly. fatally. watch all of my shadows burn bright for you, my darling, into the sweetest, sun-soaked surrender.
Nov 2021 · 253
26th November
fray narte Nov 2021
the world has taken away all of my poems. i have nothing to do but regress — sit still as november peels itself away. lo, i crawl into myself; all traces of anything human are left to dissipate, like a ghost sliding gracefully in faint, flaxen light. mute and unheard, i ache to unsee patches of my unraveled skin, so painfully human. so painfully visible. inside, i twist in painful longing to fall into obscurity — to be locked away like a tiny bone in a closed fracture, to perish in a sleepy seaside town, to fade like a poetic conundrum in a motionless, lilac dream.

come tomorrow, someone else in my body awakes with the same exhausted eyes. same despondent breaths. and i'm left to cling inside my skin, to wander indefinitely — a deboned greek kore, a mouthful of abstract poems, a mystery moving backwards to unsolve itself.

lo, the echoes: i cling inside my skin — walk beneath my skin. i am safe. safe. i’m more bearable somewhere out of sight. i’m more myself somewhere out of reach.
Nov 2021 · 281
big bang
fray narte Nov 2021
1
i am the space expanding non-stop at the risk of losing history
and what remains of its stardust.
my sorrows expand with it; my vastness grows wider,
deeper by the day to accommodate
an uninvited houseguest.

2
i fear the act of going through my bones
like a bundle of endless, wistful letters;
some for burning.
some for throwing away.
some for breaking through
my ashen skin.

how can i be both limited and boundless —
it is no magic — just mundanely human.
the thought descends like poison eating at my backbone
until i am no more than a bygone, spineless caryatid.

3
yet again i take down the cosmos,
pick it apart
and in my hands, manage to turn it
into something distastefully prosaic —
turn it into a disassembled being.

all this wordless sadness has made me ancient. alien. unidentified.

4
i am the space expanding non-stop at the risk of losing history;
i have long stopped trying to make any sense to myself and
there is no greater joy
than to be a perplexity.

amid it all, i tiptoe back and forth
between the ice-thin parts of celestine silence
and the static ringing of incomprehensible poetry.

the ground where i stand on breaks;
i float with no direction.

5
i am the space expanding endlessly; i grow wider and deeper
to make room for vaster sorrows —
if only a sigh is enough to hold me
as i tear it all down. tear it all quietly. inward. once and for all.
if only a sigh is enough to hold me
as i implode in tragic,
breath-taking cosmic colors.
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