little dark girl

“Your heart, fix it.   Your guilt, fix it.”

… we recognized immediately that we could so easily annihilate one another with the softest breath, the merest flicker. I could extinguish her, and she could burn me alive.

Make a list of everything that’s ever been on fire – Abandoned cars Trees The sea Your mother burned down to the skeleton so she could come back, born back from her bed, and walk around the house again, exhausted in slippers What else? Your brain Your eyes Your lungs * When you look down inside yourself what is there? You are a walking bag of surgical instruments shining from the inside out and that’s just today Tomorrow it could be different When I think of the childhood inside me I think of sunlight dying on a windowsill The voices of my friends in the sunlight All of us running around outside our deaths * Someone is here to see you again Someone has come a long way with their arms out in front of them like a child walking down a hallway at night Make room for them – they’re very tired I wish I could look down past the burning chandelier inside me where the language begins to end and down

I burn, I freeze; I am never warm. I am rigid; I forgot softness because it did not serve me.

She knew herself, how she had slowly over, over the years, become a cat, a wolf, a snake, anything but a girl. How she had wrung out her girlhood like death.

You think you are possessing me— But I’ve got my teeth in you.