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Annelise Camille Jul 2017
I feel as if my head is sliding off my neck like ice cream melting down the cone. I am a witch melting, shrinking smaller as my spine stacks horizontally like shiplap. My body has been refurbished into a pinball machine. Something so tiny as a silver ball destroys so much. It bullets through my body, shooting off like Cuban missiles. I feel the turmoil and chaos seeping through the gutters of this old home of bones. It's like spilled oil sludging through my blood vessels or rats scattering through a sewer, nibbling and feasting away on these muscles of mine until they are frayed like gnawed-on cable wires. At odd hours of the night when time is propelled by the safe travels of breath (that weave in and out like Victorians at a ball) from sleepy children who have yet been touched by monsters or nymphs, whereas each of my breaths steer Odysseus's weather-beaten boat through ten years of treachery. My heavy, melting head slowly sloping like clay off a bust makes its home on my dingy pillow as I lay on a prison bed with cold shackles around my ankles that make my bones shatter into a mosaic as if that could shrink my ankles so I can slip out. I feel like a chained hawk at these hours of the night when I just want to fly until I screech to a halt and flail over the cliff that waterfalls into the ends of the universe. I'd be reluctant at first, perhaps, but what other escape does one have other than to make an autopsist's Y-incision on one's body, then slip out like a hermit crab freeing himself from his heavy shell? Embarking onto a new dimension where there's hope for a radical swap of atoms that don't shape a crippled, deteriorating human is the only choice when you want to live a life other than what you were cursed with. May we then find peace and live as naked souls bearing no heavy shells.
Alissa Grinch Mar 2013
He said “you’re beautiful inside”
What it supposed to mean?
I think I just can’t see those things
that he is tend to see.

Of course I cannot see them.
My eyes are tightly closed,
my eyes are covered with my forehead
that’s tensioned on my nose.

“You’re beautiful inside,
I’m gonna prove.
But you should calmly lie
and please don’t make a move.”

He doesn’t care about my voice,
the language that I spoke,
about my dress,
about my face
and feeling they evoke.

He said “you’re beautiful inside”,
and made three deepest cuts.
Now he can see what’s inside me:
my lungs, my spleen, my guts.

He put his hand beneath my heart,
his fingers slowly shrunk.
With other hand, so calmly,
he dug into my flank.

He does not care that I'm too heavy,
My vessels he likes more.
He said they’re cleaner than they could be.
The inner beauty of the sore.

My mind does not seem spoiled to him,
or crazy, weird or strange.
he said that nothing wrong with me
He wouldn’t let it change.

I told him I am dull.
There’s something he can find
cutting out my nerves.
I’d rather he was blind.

He doesn’t know what I
was doing all night long,
that I was drawing kidneys
with arteries beyond.

The only thing he does
is wash away my blood
from table and his shoes
to give another cut.

I’m paralyzed and sliced,
my skin is livor mortis.
Spread out on the table
small pieces of my cordis.

He does not think I stink.
For him I’m full of stories.
He’s making notes with knifes
He cuts away my worries.

He cuts hearts on my knees
Love letters made by stings.
With quiet me he’s playing
tic tac toe on my hips.

He has got to the heart of me,
studied my every cell.
disassembled and gathered back,
sewed neatly. He did that well.

He said “beautiful inside”
But nothing about the rest.
Thank you autopsist
You have seen in me only the best.

— The End —