* 𝘯𝘰 𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘦 ...

“i laughed today. / for a second i was unhaunted. i was the sun, not light / from some dead star.”

““You think you know death, but you don’t. Not until you’ve seen it, ’til you’ve really seen it. It gets under your skin and lives inside you. There’s nothing you can do. Nothing.””

“She herself is a haunted house. […] She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man’s land between life and death, sleeping and waking…”

“she… longs to run herself aground in a sad secret death. Is it a god inside you, girl?”

i am dismissed & can breathe again. sometimes i see a scarf as a snake, writhing down from the scalp, twisted round the neck, tight. i / remember the first time i did that, waiting for my own venom to take me down. to spit through this body, to make me holy again, i was / perseus, new-aged & the first to be slain / this time. i was a child turned to stone from the inside. i taste / the blood & out comes the coral / of the red sea, hissing through the gullet.