Corpus Delicti

in a year where everything smelled faintly of sage and brine, i learned: women die in small increments, like snowmelt under a fox's step—never seen, never sufficient

i am unbecoming, yes, but also unfurling, wrists slivered with salt / the butcher's daughter in me collects ivory combs, drinks rainwater from a clay saucer, slips beneath the linen where no one can see how fever fastens itself to my knuckles / my mind is an aviary, a collection of peonies left in an abandoned greenhouse, petals bruised with moonmilk //

yesterday i watched a foal learning to walk on mud / i think about tenderness as a violence, the way a peach bruises for no one's pleasure / if i open my mouth, it is only to swallow a wasp, to taste something honest / my nightmares grow roots in the orchard / i keep forgetting my own shape / the world speaks to me in static, the language of rooks and silverfish, of bluebottles & blooded knees

i practice erasure: remove the mirror, erase the braid, forget the velvet ribbon / [my spine is a string of bluebells strung for the crows] / i want to tell you about desire but it keeps collapsing, my hands are buttered with memory, my tongue is ruined for sweetness

keep writing!!!!

i cannot be coaxed.

the psyche has laid down and the body keeps marching. my legs carry me to the park. i remember to pack a muesli bar. i behave like someone who is fine. i move my mouth in socially acceptable movements. i giggle. i answer questions. i develop a stomach ulcer.

i stand in the bath and try not to remember the versions of myself that lay here before, fetal and failed. instead, i rinse. i pour rosewater over my thighs. i scrub until my skin looks like it belongs to someone else.

cut along the sternum / fold back the ribs / observe the lung: still damp with begging / note the stomach, full of dry pills and unsaid things / brain: cross-section reveals she thought about dying every thursday / sometimes tuesday / but never sunday / scalp: scar tissue where she tried to pull her thoughts out by the root / spine: bent in ways no vertebrae should bend / likely from carrying silence as a second skeleton / uterus: unused but over-mourned / hands: trembling but consistent / they still tried to write poems about hunger / even when the mouth forgot how to speak it / this was not the cry for help / this was the help / this was the only thing she could make with pain that didn't rot on arrival /

the rind split before your mouth could even open

as if some ancient orchard bloomed beneath your ribs in anticipation

of your teeth i'm talking about design i'm talking about the slow erosion of cause until want looks like nature you thought you chose the plum

but its sugar had already calcified along the coils of your intestines

before you were a thing with fingers

(before you were a thing with doubt)

& i wonder if desire ever existed outside the body

or if it's just another term for digestion

something tender turned instinct

each taste a record of what the tongue has already forgiven

i watched a girl fold her hunger into neat quadrants

like lab reports

creases apologising

for needing anything at all she swallowed apricots until

the pit counted her as kin she thought that made her holy or worth preserving

what i mean is: there's no such thing as choice just a sequence of ripenings arranged for your convenience

the flesh goes soft because it knew you'd come for it i mean—how dare you pretend you're a stranger to sweetness

when the world keeps splitting itself open just to be known by your mouth

you didn't earn the fruit you are the fruit designed to be softened harvested forgiven

submitted to no journal

conclusion inconclusive but replicable

some bodies are not broken

it was pluto, of course, the discarded thing. i swallowed an entire astronomy book trying to understand the punishment of reclassification. to be and then not be. to orbit but be unloved.

[if an object is too small to clear its path, it will be demoted.]

they say dissociation is not mystical, but i think it's planetary. things break their spin and keep rotating anyway. i left my body at the age of twelve and returned to it at twenty-two.

i don't tell many people this, but there was a day i looked at a tree and thought: that's a good place to vanish.

i mean this in the way volcanoes dream of eruption.

i mean this in the way dogs stare at static.

i wear a bracelet of hematite because it absorbs chaos. i read about lithium mining until i black out.

pluto was discovered by accident. so was my fear of mirrors.

is it the reflection or the idea that something could watch me back?

there are people who love me. i think. there are people who say you are not a planet, and i agree—but inside me, a thousand failed satellites are crying for reentry.

if i must be a thing that spins, let me do so with purpose.

i think you died before i got the answer. and god help me, that's what made me love you more. (i still touch my face when i remember. not to soothe, but to confirm: the impact happened.)

& now, older, eroded, i find myself defending you

in therapy, in poems, in trauma & affection. you were my first god. i forgave you before the bruise even bloomed. what does that say about me? about girls like me

who pray to the hands that taught them how to kneel?

i miss you more in violence than in memory. you were the only one who knew the correct dosage of cruelty to keep a child alive without letting her think she deserved to be.

i press bluebell seeds to my tongue (waiting for the blossom or blister, whichever comes first) / (i am not afraid of paralysis, but the slow suffocation of it, the stilled swarm behind my eyelids) / was it august or an invented month when my lungs first split, [pomegranate and sinew, a rough handling, a careful violence—] / (i was raised in a garden of closed throats, women speaking in bruises and biscuit crumbs, sewing needles hidden in their cuffs) / i learnt how to knot the ligatures of my own fear / my hands are birds, folding, unfolding, always in negotiation with the sky, [too little, too much, never just enough] / i am all threshold, window as dare, a dare to touch something wilder than mercy, to taste the night-blooming cereus and wake up (alive, or at least rearranged) / on the days i dissolve, it is not elegant—it is brackish, edges leaking through the seams / the chemise of my childhood is stuffed in a cedar drawer, but its ghosts scratch through the grain, splinters under the skin / is this what it means to endure, to become an archive of brambles and bitten lips, to survive the afternoon by spelling out your own anatomy in phosphorus and doubt? /