a stage set for catastrophe

“It is not God who makes light on the first day. I strike my body like it is a match. I burn to give you fire.”

“I stand in the heavy fields like a still life. A misinterpreted dream. I try remembering: What is it that makes the sky look carnivorous? What is it like to be innocent, unapologetic, and my own again?”

“I think biology has stopped forgiving me. And each year the moon slips 1.5 inches farther from Earth, I’m one step farther from loving myself and two steps closer to finding my own ghost. Five years ago, the left hemisphere of my brain lit itself on fire, and now it doesn’t remember how to use “love” and “myself” in the same context anymore. Years from now, even the paleontologist who tries to assemble my fossils will give up when they find that even my backbone has given into being more liquid than bone. I know I am all bruises and thunder from beating myself at night in my sleep, pinching my hips and thighs until my blood has stopped running and started howling instead. But today is different; today I am learning. Learning how to rearrange the bones of the words “my”, “love”, “I”, and “body” until it sounds less like broken English and more like a sentence – an apology. And maybe then, just maybe, biology will begin to forgive me.”

“It isn’t yours until it is in your hands, so you take yourself back. With hunger. You rise out of ruin like Seine River. Drink your blood like torched wine. Reverse the deboning. Devour a name.”

I call it resurrection, forgiveness, peace — climbing out of my old body like it is the emergency exit of a flipped vehicle, limping away from it & not once turning back for the echo.

“What if growing is not dousing the flames inside the house to save who you used to be? What if it means letting yourself burn & not grieving?”

“A moon of yarn for the way back. A Minotaur’s head. A promise cut on sword. Ariadne knows this tragedy well: how we give love its teeth. How we let it loose like daisy weed out on our lawns and then find our hands and knees lost deep crawling through the labyrinth of another body. In its tangled turns and dead ends, these rib-walls shake like ship new to sea. Our veins come undone like old knots, like butterflies pouring out of shell. And our heartbeats parade through fog like bullets instead of light rain. When the deed is done, we are all white sails returning to wounds. Open and nothing like the love letters returned to sender in thousands. The blood wells the way love builds us from the sky up and then leaves us to burn in pyres made from sun. For so long, they have called it glory when girl is abandoned. When girl is capsized in her own sorrow. But in another myth, Ariadne keeps the yarn. In another myth, she is praised.”

“I butterfly it like trout. Slide my knife through the mountain ridge of little bones. Lay it flat. Turn it over and over. And yes, I cried cleaning what we had. Found that exhaustion is looking hard for the hesitation in your voice like it is biological specimen. Or evidence. Like you becoming another thing not loving me back is part of some terrible crime scene.”

“It happens once. You strike your heart in a dream and wake up alive though you’re sure you should be dead. Your hand shakes like it fired a shot but you’ve barely even held a gun before. That’s why you don’t know what to believe. Except that the sun shouldn’t rip like silk. The sky insists it hears the echo & the river says it tastes the metal. How could they lie? So you roll up your sleeves and send the bloodhounds after it. Except they don’t even move.”