;fear

We felt it, with our hands pressed tightly against our child-chests.
Boom
Boom
Boom.

It sounded nothing like a heartbeat,
But explosions being let off in the distance.
And it smelt nothing like fear,
It smelt like sweat and dried ***** caked onto torn pajama pants.

We grew to know the insides of our mouths,
with our soft gums clutched between our teeth -
We learned that our voices were safer kept stowed away there.

We picked at their hands like we picked at our scabs,
Because pulling off healing skin,
felt like pulling off a rooted burn,
And prying off desperate fingers from off our bones,
Meant prying off something that terrified us.

This was our strength;
This was our paralysis.

We felt it, with our ears pushed against the door,
Please
Please
Please

It sounded nothing like a pleading mother
But warm air, creeping through vents with a sudden force.
And it smelt nothing like fear,
It smelt of fresh blood, kissing the lips of a weeping woman.

We worshipped knives like they worshiped our baby-soft skin,
Because cutting open ourselves meant cutting out what they left inside,
And watching the filth flee
down our wrists, down our knees,
Felt like draining water
Out of a clogged tub.


It felt nothing life fear
It smelt nothing like decay
It was a continual clutch of the knife against their throats

This one's for you, daddy

My mind could not conjure up the notion that the word, the name, meant something. A-n-n-a. I looked. I looked: she stared back the same. Unknowing, unfamiliar. I wanted to remember, I wanted to.



7 a.m, in the crawlspace underneath the house, flashlight grasped in my hand, sweat from my forehead plastering my hair against it. It smelled like dust. I inched forward on my stomach, writhing as a worm. My body seizing against dirt and webs. I yelled out her name. Just to see. Just to test if my mouth still knew how to speak.



Anna.



Anna.



There. In the corner. I flicked my light against a box with tape on the side and her name written on over it in marker. I whispered it to make sure. Anna. One more time. Anna. I sunk my face into the ground. My breath, soft from my lips but coarse in form, disrupt the filth, made me cough. I crawled over to her with ease, as if the bones in my body were pushing me, the muscles guiding me; these pulsing veins, telling me.



When I opened the box, the first thing I saw was her, smiling back at me in the form of a memory. July 1996, our wedding framed around sanded wood, with splinters etching at the sides, aching for a hold on them. And I cradled her, despite this. Despite my skin giving in.



Anna.



I almost forgot.



My head was hurting again. I blamed it on the suffocating of the casket underground enveloping me, not the staples buried into the skin of my skull, not the remembrance that underneath piles of dirt, her body was just a stack of old bones with only a stone to tag her as proof she was once living.



Anna. My Anna. I cradled the picture against my chest. I clung to her.



My light began to flicker, a spider crawled across my finger. Anna was diminishing, like a ghost, like a gentle sweep of navigating headlights turning a corner, creeping away, and suddenly gone.



Anna. A-n-n-a. I shut my eyes. I could finally remember.

you probably didn't think it was a disaster
with the feeding tube stuffed down your nose,
but it's wednesday, december 27th
and i can't stop thinking about how you are choking on it.
I wanted to believe somehow, that you and your worsening body
would somehow sprout back to life
like the wilted rosemary plant in my kitchen i never stop watering
like maybe this disease you engineered from glass and food and measuring tapes
would remember what you were like before.

when you were a svelte image of a red sun,
tiptoeing through the hairs of broken tree branches
and i wanted to look through them to see you burning
because it made sense to me every time i had to close my eyes
that you were something of warmth and serenity and you were always there
and i was cold and hopeless, lying underneath you
begging for you, or something else to save me

and i still haven't apologized
about how i left you and your pile of dead skin
and how i didn’t even say goodbye
just wandered off, praying and expecting i’d get lost,
but i’ve either forgotten how
or i'm terrified my stutters won't form into words you could forgive.

I don't know which one is worse

I don't know if that's even the worst of it.

its wednesday, december 27th
and i'm thinking about how far you are from me.

and i’m still searching for you in the sky
but i can’t see anything past all the rain.

Sometimes i think i am incapable of caring about anyone. Like, all that i am, is constructed of guilt and emotions i never wished to be mine in the first place.

There will never be a part of me i would offer up to be handled, because every limb, every *****, every slab of flesh worth holding, has been grabbed too hard and forced into positions that paralyzed me.

When i think of hands, i think of HIS hands and how they took, seized my fatless chest; like if he pulled hard enough and if he pinched to the point of blood, it would resemble the gutting of a fish and I would be pliant in his hold.

Hands don’t feel the same anymore, they don’t look the same. ‘Cause when I think of hands, i think of the print that was left behind and how it dyed parts of me a shade pink i had never before seen. I think of how i couldn’t breathe because of it, too scared to leave my room for days, and when I finally did, i tiptoed around him like i was on thin ice and he was the cold water underneath it.

I slept two hours last night, i’m okay with it. I was too scared to close my eyes, convinced that time would pass by without me in it. Woke up, didn’t brush my hair, just tied it back; ratted up knot things clinging to over-stretched hair ties.

And I can’t tell anymore, if these words are just emotions i’m trying to toss out so i wouldn’t have to feel them anymore, or if they are perhaps freed things - open to the page to understand myself better.
How will I ever know?

breakfast felt like sin, it burned on the way down, burned like how his hands used to burn, as they took a journey on a body i never gave permission for him to inhabit.

I had that dream again, where i am on the floor and he is smothering me, all of me, with his hands and his mouth and his ****, and I can feel the way his body is a persistent pressure and weight above mine. I have my mouth open wide but no sound will leave it & there are people right outside the door that would hear if i just open it and yell something but i can't and i am completely paralyzed by the fact.

sometimes i wish i could wake up screaming, just so i could have an excuse to scream, but i don't know how that would feel, i don’t even remember how to feel anymore. I still cry, but i think it's more so instinctive than it is, self defense, because after each 10 minutes to 2 hours, i don't feel any different. I just feel dull and detached. A floating lost thing in space, waiting for someone to discover it and see him,

see me.

feeling trapped is worse than feeling alive, and for so long i dreaded that simple, factual feeling, but now, this cornered, helpless feeling that is living on me, in me, like mold, feels worse than how i imagined death, how i imagined life, if it meant something..

I just want to feel like i could crawl out of this cave with the confidence i wouldn't fall into another one.

Jim died last night, slipped away like the slimmest embers of light that, from time to time, would reach their arms through the clouds to show themselves. I wonder where he is glowing, if he kindled his spirit to the stars, the gray moon, the forever burning sun.

I stared into his empty room last night, the air a silent breath synced with mine, and it felt so unexpected, it felt wrong and cruel and hostile. I didn’t get to say goodbye.

When I walked home the next morning, I felt like my lips had meant to mutter some form of plea into that void space that were all cradled together by a wrinkled blanket we had not yet washed.

I left the newspaper out for him.

8 a.m shrieking birds and gravel crunching underneath my worn shoes. The morning tan wasted down to the fragmented hairs of fog that settled their bodies over the ******* of earth and I kept my eyes shut to refuse to let loose something I felt I had no control over.

At 9:30, I crawled into bed, thinking of where the sun was at his placing now, thinking of the hiding stars, the seemed to be gone, moon, and I prayed that Jim had made it to the other side.

flown over myself, the shedding feathers from black birds that follow me;
my own fingers, pluck the ends from out of my skin,
as the sky shifts,
as the bristling of dead trees offer no shelter,
no warmth from their bony arms.


it's easy to follow silence
i keep her nestled in the hollow of my throat & while it swims into my lungs
all i can do is float
on the squeaking mattress,
against his cold, huge hands
holding me there,
cornered around vibrational gasps.

my body is corroding
my limbs are severed
the insides are flowing out of me
like rushing water.

like, the tub,
filling with pink.
Its shaking stomach rocking me against rusting porcelain.


They sleep among the dead.
I sleep in their duggen-up graves.

anchorage alaska, 9:40 a.m
the mountains, 9:41
the dead trees, 9:42
the snow, 9:43
your face, woven into the scenery, 9:44

it is beginning to hollow,
the night, kindling it's daggers around the day,
and i tell you, so silent
as to not wake our voices yet,
"the train is coming."

you are on the boulders,
naked feet,
shoes lost in the shore
and you look at me and smile
and my eyes crease,
like thin wrinkles,
like wire, pulling them shut,
and i smile back.

i cannot think.
the train is approaching,
rumbling over the tracks
like a thunderstorm,
like an avalanche.
and you open your mouth to scream,
but it comes out a roar.

like accumulating rain
in the groove of a gutter,
you're there beside me
and we're both screaming.

and I can feel myself lurching
towards the rails
because at 9:55,
as the train passes us,
i look over
at the naked boulders
at the rising tide
at the burning tracks
and you're gone.

The night wrapped its skeletal arms
back around your ghostly form.
the rain had stopped,
the gutter was clean,
and everything
was a miserable empty

i can't recall ever feeling so afraid
deaf from silence that won't keep quiet
living in a bed of cold sheets from open windows and spilt coffee
caged in days old clothes
and skin that won't stop sweating.

i am tired.

i am so tired.

i can't recall ever feeling so dead
and i don't know if it’s my shallow breath afraid to stir,
or my tired bones filled with weight, held down by your continual expected self,

but i used to think
in the middle of empty streets
where cars only crept by every hour or so
that my life is just shadows of already told stories, fixed into cracked brick walls
and they don't move, they just stand still

so i stand still too

wondering how far my feet could take me if i let them.


but god, when does it stop hurting?
because my heart doesn't beat as it used to
it just pounds against a crystallized chest
like how your fists used to pound against your own skin
trying to shake yourself out of days old dreams that kept destroying you.

i should have spoken to you
but i was scared what I said might’ve shattered the both of us
but you really should have known that i thought you were wonderful

and important

and maybe i loved you

and maybe i still do

and maybe that's something worth being ruined over.

it was nice knowing you’d break your bones for me
but i’d already broken my own so you wouldn’t have to.

i wish i knew how to stop feeling so afraid
but losing you wasn’t like losing myself
because my skin still knows how to stretch itself around my spine-stuffed back
and it knows the grooves hidden behind each rib, each piercing wrist bone;
and it hasn’t reached its point of defeatedness
like how you reached yours with a knife.

“tell my mother i love her,”
2:34 a.m
the last words you ever spun into my ear,

I wish they sounded like music or something lyrically moving,
but they sounded like thunder, and storms that wouldn't let up.

2:34 a.m
the burning echoed sound of a dial tone branded in places i could never reach -
why didn't you say you loved me back?

“who birthed the seas?”

it was snowing,
but it fell upon us warm and scattered,
like ash,
like dust,

i turned my head,
and watched you speak.


“sometimes i wonder who cradled her when she was just a puddle,
who nourished her to grow this big.”

i felt as if seas could grow in me.

“stay”
i begged,
“this city is so empty,
even with all these waves at its back.

and,

and stay,
for me,
because these feet don't know the route back.”

you whispered back, eyes shut,

“i want to know this body's delicacy.
how light would it need to be to sink?”




“micka, please.”




“micka?”


“and when do we ever find the time,
that is what i truly wonder,
time to search the sea,
time to fill our empty stomachs with its insides?

everything is just so rapid,
i feel like i can't breathe.”

i krept closer, the tide rising and falling like a set of lungs.

“stay,”
i said again,
watching while your hands grazed gentle waters,
searching for depth.

you hummed,
looked over and pressed a wet palm against my face.

the sea was a silent wash of stillness beside us.
your breath was loud against my cheek,

be comfortable, darling
I’ll be here awhile.

the fragile morning seeps
her shadowing sunlight into my morning coffee cup, staining the walls of its home dark.
i sip on her effortlessly, her warmth a flowing melody against the chaotic prance of my pulse.
I close my eyes & let her wander.

outside the snow lurks
a cold dew kissing warm birk
and inside our house
the tealight candles will melt
a flame will flutter
against a fogged window pane.

oh how my breath stills
captured there in bright beauty

in depth,
the moon settles,
behind a quiet black,
stretching like a sea beneath her,
and though she sleeps,
she casts so much sound.

freckled there in the sky
they tremble,
bursting flashes of white;
and hopeless below,
fingers trace,
eyes shutter closed,
while the crickets hum,
the trees rustle,
and the being of time
erases itself momentarily

I woke up and the rain had stopped
but my clothes were still wet
from sitting in the wash overnight.
I krept to the coffee machine with my robotic legs,
uncharged from the night before
and my body was heavy
my body was a stack of red bricks,
harpened together by a broken back.

I congealed there
on the damp grass, pressing warm blades into my skin
leaking wet into me
and it felt like blood,
it felt like misery hospital beds
a torn out needle
seeping out fragile red.

the coffee was stale,
bitter settled there in the back of my throat,
clinging on to starved muscle
I couldn't swallow
I wouldn't swallow
Your taste was still there somewhere,
nestled in my gums to relish in later.

come down from that burgundy tree
those branches won't hold you for much longer
the maple is dying,
heart rot and wounded.
your home is here,
your home is here.

I gather myself in two parts:
1 part body
1 part will
And you gather yourself from the other side:
1 part will
1 part hope.

I prayed for rain in the morning
but I only got the afterthought
I prayed for your flesh in my hands by night
but I only got your urn, cold and heavy.

there is something so tragic about a blank face and a ***** mirror. about 3 a.m eyes and our own fingers, mapping the parts of us we hate. there is something so damaging about resurfacing old ideas while juggling target practice with the wooden box kept bundled under piles of wrinkled clothes, stowed away in our dressers like safes, holding sharp things we would never touch on other days.

how can one relearn the idea of sleep?

because melatonin only worked once and benzodiazepines only kept us asleep long enough to dream about the bad things we avoided falling asleep for.

3 a.m feels like dry eyes and grown-out nails, bitten down until brittle. 3 a.m feels like a bed we are too afraid to crawl into and our own eyes we are too afraid to stare at. 3 a.m feels like a cold, creaking tiled floor, muffled from our fragile steps we took over it.

3 a.m feels like fear and sounds like the repeated notion of grinding teeth instead destroyed skin.

i keep studying the stain on the ceiling as though it were a separate universe. I keep willing it to take me away. outside, it's raining, without leaving a sound or smell behind, just flooded window wells and a distant ringing in my ears.

& praying used to be words i sung inside my head as though they could sing me towards some kind of promised refuge, but they never offered me anything except more of what i was already left with -

fear, constant fear, that things don't change, they just reshape themselves into shadows, into 3 a.m night lights and closed mouths that never stopped trembling.

delicacy
your blooming self
smeared with
golden sun
accessorized with
dried dandies
wrapped around your wrist

i saw you
milk skin
back sinking into open earth
eyes open
searching
hoping
longing

and i turned then
face tucked inside my arm
and i spoke
mouth muttering whispers

and you,
you didn't speak,
not at all
you just laid there
like a ghost

Each binding catastrophe, enveloping us, like burning wood, like his hands,
Grooves filled with rock, with dirt, with my blood. The smell was dead.

And crescent, the imprints in my skin, like half moons. His nails dug into me like fire trying to die.

There was no meaning in the sky, it held no purpose, no barter to our senses. It was a pure blue. Untainted.

I felt so silently. He felt so eagerly; loud. I wondered if it was his mother or the dark that taught him to speak. Like sparks, reaching as arms into your body, and burning with electricity - his tone carried boulders, rumbling down your lungs to settle in the fear.

He scared me.

Yet.

I felt.

I felt.

The same as when i lay like unfinished art beneath him, or a ruined canvas; spilled paint, soaked edges. He looked at me like he did not know me. Or he did not know himself around me.

And when I said his name, it was a foreign word, an unknown language. I spoke in tongue. He spoke with his fist.

Sascha. Sascha.

I started to fall in love with the mix of black and blue, and how it shaded itself into purple galaxies, streaming down my arm like poured milk over fresh ink. These bruises were more than pain, they were his name, tattooed in cursive on my flesh.

Travesty knelt in the form of an opened grave. His eyes were closed. His skin was white.  I placed my open palm onto the cold casket surface and I did not feel him, not at all.

shore born

black sand

bleeding colors of

a shaking sun, cascading in ripples against a

falling shadow of grey

like

her flapping hair in the wind

stained with age

and her

milk washed skin,

and her bare feet

bare self

uncowering to the rising tides.