Jun 2018
My mind is an open palm, raised to the trees
avowing and disavowing the love of sunlight,
and translating fractured thoughts caught on the breeze like cottonwood seeds,
snatched by a hand in the air;
like the way we used to catch mosquitoes, and ended up with one one another's mingled blood crushed into the lines on our palms
and to be honest,
I didn't mind it so much.
I guess I wanted to reclaim something
I guess I wanted to take back a little of the life that was siphoned from us
I am sick of lifeblood being stolen and replaced with poison, and the anticoagulant that keeps it flowing long enough that we never know we've been bitten until it's gone, and carried away in someone's belly, where it melts into so many others inside their stomachs
It's so easy to let your heart get to racing, long enough that you don't know what's being taken from you. Like the first time I let a man take off my shirt in the back of his car; he used his hands to show me where I could stand to be improved; carving another woman into the air,
and she would live there like a ghost for so many years.
Sometimes I still see her.
Sometimes I am afraid that I'll never know what it's like to feel safe in the eyes of a man.
But I always feel like that now; peeled clean, exposed, disrobed to the heels in front of everyone. And there are so many hands, creating ghosts for me to fear. I am afraid of being afraid to let anyone near me, especially since I welcome it so easily.
God help me.
God help us.
There is comfort in being crushed to one another;
our essences coalescing in our minds and open hands crashing together to catch the cottonwood memories, stinging before we know what’***** us.
There is comfort in being bled together, our grief being wed together, and being folded into one another in the bellies of sleepless nights.
God help us
There is nothing I can do except feel numb next to you.
God help us,
There is nothing I can do except feel alive in pain next to you.
My mind is an open palm, raised in a question,
Translating fractured thoughts,
Caught between us.
avowing and disavowing the love of sunlight,
and translating fractured thoughts caught on the breeze like cottonwood seeds,
snatched by a hand in the air;
like the way we used to catch mosquitoes, and ended up with one one another's mingled blood crushed into the lines on our palms
and to be honest,
I didn't mind it so much.
I guess I wanted to reclaim something
I guess I wanted to take back a little of the life that was siphoned from us
I am sick of lifeblood being stolen and replaced with poison, and the anticoagulant that keeps it flowing long enough that we never know we've been bitten until it's gone, and carried away in someone's belly, where it melts into so many others inside their stomachs
It's so easy to let your heart get to racing, long enough that you don't know what's being taken from you. Like the first time I let a man take off my shirt in the back of his car; he used his hands to show me where I could stand to be improved; carving another woman into the air,
and she would live there like a ghost for so many years.
Sometimes I still see her.
Sometimes I am afraid that I'll never know what it's like to feel safe in the eyes of a man.
But I always feel like that now; peeled clean, exposed, disrobed to the heels in front of everyone. And there are so many hands, creating ghosts for me to fear. I am afraid of being afraid to let anyone near me, especially since I welcome it so easily.
God help me.
God help us.
There is comfort in being crushed to one another;
our essences coalescing in our minds and open hands crashing together to catch the cottonwood memories, stinging before we know what’***** us.
There is comfort in being bled together, our grief being wed together, and being folded into one another in the bellies of sleepless nights.
God help us
There is nothing I can do except feel numb next to you.
God help us,
There is nothing I can do except feel alive in pain next to you.
My mind is an open palm, raised in a question,
Translating fractured thoughts,
Caught between us.
