I envied the cadavers haunting my nightmares,
watching those before me
spread upon a metal slab
bodies are hand-me-downs of regurgitated poetry,
with wretched closets in which I take their place.

This ventilator called "loved ones"
forcing breath into anguished lungs-
tragedies belonging to these poets meant something,
a desire to save the words written,
but never the one who becomes a eulogy.

Agony burrows inside of me,
conversations with my mother's ghost
still,
the living are possessed by
the dead's shortened tomorrows.

To die by suicide wouldn't give,
authenticity to hurt.

I am learning the autopsy of a soul:
extracting a heart from the chest,
as it's sense of belonging was never there.
An inability to weigh the words bleeding from valves,
aside lungs I'm unable to breathe through.

How ungrateful is it of sorrow to ask for hope?
placed in a pill divider to swallow,
muscles within my throat so tight.
Wondering,
How many times did I diminish my voice?

Inside the brain,
schematics of labyrinths with no end to betterment.
Surgeons reach for a soul,
an iridescence small enough
held in a gloved palm,
watching it writhe.
Placed upon a slide,
but even a microscope
cannot perceive the pain a soul hides.

Once more,
stitched with needle and thread.

Wilting of my own garden,
comes one day-
an incision is made opening me up.
My heart showed the same
blood-red ink, writing apologies
on the marble floor.

They opened my arm,
displaying a noose of veins.
In this moment,
they removed my soul
only to gift it to another
birthed from torment
ripped out of the arm's of their mother
& into the embrace of woe.

—V.H.