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.
