After a while the past will come knocking on your door until you answer
It’ll be yelling that it’s been ignored
It’s been yelling that it wants to be recognized
It’s crying for you,
It’s crying with you.
The fear of remembrance is stronger than hiding it in your suppressed subconscious thoughts.

You’re angry
Why
You feel like crying sometimes

I know.

But eventually,
It’s going to make you jump into the fire so that all of yourself can be at peace.

It wants to be treated & you’re the doctor

It’s tired of no one holding its hand

It’s tired of being unheard;

& so am I.

i always find
myself
explaining

why am i always
explaining
explaining
explaining

as if i have to justify
each little thought
any brief phrase
the slightest movement

in anticipation of being
questioned
i answer what they were
never even going to ask

am i really so used
to everyone not believing
me? that explanation
has become an impulse
that is impossible to deny


the terror of who-knows-what
creeps up my left arm until it's
weighed down by lead

it seeps into my blood and my brain
poisoning me now
communication doesn't work and then
communication doesn't work

it soaks into my bones
never letting me forget these habits i've learned
years later remembering to leech out just enough
of the remaining toxin
to keep me stuck in my old ways

stuck
explaining
explaining
explaining

If there's anything that serves as a guide
If there's an instruction manual out there
Titled "How to get through what you're feeling"
Or "For Dummies- Life's a *****, it's not fair"
I'd read it, I'd absorb every word, every phrase
I'd apply it to myself, I'd help others facing the same
I won't be frozen, I won't be struck speechless
I hope I'm not playing an impossible game
Tell me the lessons, I'll get through the tests
Lend me blueprints, cryptographs, codes, a sign
Don't leave me in the dust, paralyzed, numb
Don't make me pretend like everything's fine.

I’m in the dream again:                not the one I had while awake in
the catacombs of St. Callixtus in Rome.  Where the darkness was
so impenetrable that it began to echo.  To look like the mixture of colors
that burst when you rub your eyes too hard for too long.  Like the
neuron rupture before death.  To shape and morph and become liquid.
Where the darkness cobbled itself into a physical form.

Not the dream where                    I kept seeing
flits of my mother out of the corner of my eye.  Behind
                                                                ­                               every street corner.
                                                                ­                   Every turn.  Every tunnel.  
      Reflected in the casts of the bodies in Pompeii.
Mirrored in the waves of the Trevi Fountain.

I’m in the dream where          the soil churned from the bottom to the top.  
                               where          the hand outstretched from the grave.  
                               where          my grandfather clawed his way out and returned to my grandmother﹘sopping wet, covered in thick mud, socks torn, skin sallow and jaundiced, spitting out the wire the embalmers put in his mouth, melting makeup, and ravenously hungry.  And it’s been so
                                                                ­                   long since he was hungry.  

“He came back to me, Taylor,” my grandmother tells me. 
“He came back to me.”
                                        I don’t have the heart to tell her that he’s undead.  
                                        I’m physically unable to spit out those words.
And it’s a dream and it’s a dream and it’s a dream,                   but
it just fits so perfectly.  That he would come back to her.  
That death would not be a barrier.  I can’t explain it.                It just is.  
My grandmother is a shell without him.  
The body that’s missing the limb.  
The body that keeps score.

“You look like my daughter”
The man says to me,
As he’s ordering me a drink
Looking my body up and down.

I laugh,
Look away,
Try to pretend he didn’t say that

Oh but don’t worry
He made it a point
to mention
T H R E E
              M O R E
                           T I M E S
how my body
Resembled his daughters,
“Tight, perfect, the right kind”

Oof.
Idk y’all
Idk that I can do this.
I walk away
I dont make that money.
Even though I know **** well,
I fit his ****** up fantasies.

Not to mention I’m triggered,
Thanks to my childhood trauma,
By all of this conversation,
But it doesn’t really matter
Anyways.
Just a product of my environment
Just an object to fill
The desires
Of hungry eyes.

**** it
Let me be
An empty *** doll.
Just take my intelligence with you please.
Flowers for Algernon ,
And I’m wilting.
I’m too aware of my place in society.

Why strive to peruse my education,
When I know no one will hire me
Because of my background?
Why stay sober,
When my ******* flashbacks
Only stop when I’m drunk?

I hate my life.
No I don’t like the job I have;
But this **** ain’t easy.

And none of it is my fault.
It isn’t.
None of my trauma is my fault.

At least At the end of the day
I have the comfort
Of knowing,
That I matter just as little as the next person.
My life,
In all of its glory,
matters just as little as john f Kennedy’s
I am nothing
And we are nothing

Our suffering is eternal

Who am I to believe
That you won't leave me
With my heart still tearing
Fraying at the seams.

Who am I to believe
That you would follow me
All I can do is scream
At nothing, at only what I wish I could say.

You remind me of everything
All the regrets
And all the things I should have said
Stuck and lodged at the back of my throat.

If I begged you to stay
If you told me the truth
How will I know.
How pathetic I am.

I wish I was angrier
But all I feel are the tears
That ripple under my feet
Echoing all the doubt that I feel.

When will you leave.
When will I leave?
But I know if we did
I would stay waiting for nothing.

And I am in the dark again
Trying to forgive what you've done
But it only keeps hurting
It only keeps aching.

We promise we'd begin again
But who am I?
Who am I to believe you?
All I can hear from you now is lies.

The feelings I no longer wish to have
Come crashing down on me
Like my guilty conscience
At a confession booth.

Everything hurts, that's all I can really tell you now.

-Kore

The first time it happened I was 5
I was lured by candy as children are
All I can remember is hands and pain
And being told to not remember
And I when I speak on it
All I can hear is familial silence
And stares that tell me to not speak up at all
When CPS came knocking on the door
I covered for him.
My mom asked me why
Why I didn’t tell her all these years
My response was simple:
I did the first time it happened
It continued still, you were drunk after all
I wasn’t the first he did it to
And I’m sure I wasn’t the last
It’s weird to tell people to not joke about ******
It’s weird to tell people my first experience was when I was five
It’s weird to tell people I remember
It’s weird to pretend I don’t

The second time it happened I was 15
With my first ever boyfriend
I was out cold, and he did as he did
I don’t remember much, but this
He’s checked my pulse and he bragged
For months I didn’t realize what happened
I could not register what it was
I told my mom, I could see she blamed me
I could see trust wane in her rise
I could tell she didn’t see it how it hurt me
I was 15 and asleep
He was 16 and awake
And somehow I blame myself
It’s weird to tell people I still love him
It’s weird to tell people I forgave
It’s weird having to tell people it wasn’t my fault
And it’s weird losing friends over it

Third time it was with my boyfriend again
I wasn’t asleep I wasn’t a child
I was scared
He held me still
I said no but he didn’t know I was serious
Tears slipped out of my eyes
I froze in terror
I cried for hours afterwards
I knew what it was, he knew what it was
I blame myself.
I told him no.
No. No. No.
Now I flinch when someone touches the back of my head
I am wounded
It’s weird to tell people it happened again
It’s weird I still love him after all of it
It’s weird to forgive again
It’s weird

They were hundreds of times between
Of men touching what they weren’t supposed to
Of I’m making comments about me
Coercing me
Making me a part of their perversions
Of believing flirting is ticket for their ****** harassment
Of making me instinctively hate men.
Victim blaming
Degrading
Sexualizing
I am yet a woman
It’s weird to not be a woman
It’s weird to be a talking point
It’s weird to be silenced
It’s weird.

God did not mean to give me a mouth.
He meant to give me hands, eyes, a heart
but not a mouth.
When I speak something in me bleeds. When I-
I speak, and my eyes fog over like glass.  
I can't see you standing there, I'm so sorry. Show me again, where did you put the bread?  

I feel like a thing that needs to be forgiven.

I feel so fragile sometimes.
I am trying to understand the
weight of the evil inflicted upon me.
It is heavy. I never understood that 'till now.

I wasn't meant to carry this weight, but I do.
I wasn't meant to speak the way I
so often will, but I do.

What can I say anymore?
I can't write without bleeding. I can't speak without knowing it is a wound. How can I communicate without tearing something open? I'm afraid of shutting up and looking for my language. If I decide to leave behind every word that hurts me, would I have any words left? Will it **** the little bit of connection with people I have left?

Listen.
I hope you forgive me for the little sadness I'll inspire in you.
I am afraid, but don't pity me. I am blossoming and becoming something else.
This, apotheosis, this becoming closer and closer to my own light.
It is a process that requires allowing death.
What must die must die. Allow grief.

I'll leave you with this:
If you slept next to me, it would be
much like sleeping with a letter under your pillow.
Every night, every night...

*"Here I write to you a list of cruelties I am capable of.
May you never forget:
I have made the flower so that it may blossom, and I have made the lamb so that it may eat it.
Blessed be the one willing to become.
Here, the flower. Here, the lamb."

- God