There is a man from my city that spent his nights killing and ******* men for the hell of it. Sometimes I worry that his blood might be in the water like 160 year old cholera or 30 year old cryptosporidium. Sometimes I worry that I breathed in the stardust from which he was made, that I swallowed the ashes from which he burned. I do not think that I will ever be American ****** enough to fit the bill, and this might be my one true happy thought: at least I am not a serial killer.
I closed my eyes in August and saw the dried up teeth of my estranged grandmother floating in a pool of blood and thought about how the phone works both ways. I opened my eyes in October and thought about spitting up the chicken bones I had been choking on since second grade, when my father helped prepare dinner for the last time. (I think I might have sacrificed a couple people to the devil without actually meaning to.)
I find the numbers 13, 16, and 18 to be unlucky and I am beginning to fear that the pattern will continue, that 19 will be the year I finally get bitten by poisonous snakes outside of my dreams. God whispered in my ear and told me that a different Helter Skelter was coming. He told me to keep breathing easy, to trust in his light, but when I asked my Magic 8 Ball if I should quake like the Earth in 1960, the day after Satan released Dahmer from Hell, all I got was a bright blue, “Better not tell you now.”
The séance I conducted last year in a blackened, decaying cemetery did nothing but rattle ghosts, and the four-year-long pity party I held prior did nothing but chain those ghosts to the floorboards. I have never been good at abandoning my thoughts and feelings.
Some mornings I wake up face down in the Green River or with my head severed and on display in a refrigerator of a house that is not mine. Other times I awake buck-naked in Death Valley— sand coating my tongue, my tonsils, my esophagus; burning and scratching into my flesh—and I know that I will never be able to forgive my father for destroying everything he ever made or his mother for turning into everything that’s just out of reach. There has never been a time when I have been good at letting go of grudges. I am far too aware of my own existence.
At least I am not a serial killer.
identity poem I wrote for my poetry class portfolio.