isa 🪶

Like some big, dark secret, or a crust of bread

I used to make you say it back

Like a baby, wailing, ‘love me, love me!’

I wonder what I was so afraid of

Your answer, probably, or the lack thereof

Hold me in your mind

Make me in your image

Reflect my love back so I know that it’s real

(Pain demands witness, but so does love)

I cannot know myself if you do not either

I am naked, I am lost, I am unwhole

Take my hand, wipe my tears, piece me back together

I am only myself insofar as I am yours

Love me, love me

Please

So that there might be some mark, some blooming evidence

Of the fear and hurt and fury inside me

Sometimes I imagined all that rage spilling up and out my mouth

Staining my teeth black, one by one, with misbegotten hate

You did, once

I stared at myself in the mirror for hours

Lightly probing the skin

A bruised pear, dragged up the stairs by its throat

I looked and looked until the purple started to spread

Down my neck, my chest, into my heart

Slowly turning it black, rotting me from the inside out

I felt your hands on me for weeks after

The bruise only lasted a few days.

Pinned up this pretty, painted, porcelain girlie

Look, ma, we have all the same stitches

In all the same places

I have tried to be you for as long as I can remember

Playing dress up with your handbags and your heels and your habits

A papier-mâché daughter

I wanted to fix you so much

I am beginning to think I undid myself in the process

Please ignore the ash

Spilling from my seams

Please ignore the dirt under my fingernails

From clawing at the roof of a coffin

Not even in the ground

Did I do it?

Satis sum?

I cannot protect you

The ice is already fracturing beneath our feet

Do you not know I would give you anything

(everything)

And the blood from a stone and the soul

From the root of the world if you would let me?

Do you not know I am you more than I am myself?

I see you watch me through the warps of steam

That curl from the glass after a shower

Your smile in the cracked skin of my lips

Your eyes reflected back across two or three or thirty years

If I screamed I think you would too