oddlymercilesscreator

sometimes you look at me like you don't know my name

but i've known you my whole life

which is your whole life too

and sometimes you look at me

like you looked that morning

when i brought you the bird

so proud of my soft mouth

and my offering

and the way i laid it down so gentle

all blood and feathers on the step

you screamed

and i thought did i do it wrong?

now you look at me like that

when i come too close

when i nudge your hand

i check my paws

there's no blood

but you must still see it

you fill my bowl three times in one morning

i eat each time

because i don't know how to tell you

that you already fed me

that you already loved me

can we go for a walk?

i don't care if you forget the way

Her back legs don’t work. Haven’t for a year.

She drags them like a coat she forgot to take off,

sits when the other dogs run,

watches from the grass with her whole soft face.

But right now she’s asleep on the kitchen floor

and her legs are going —

little useless engines, firing anyway,

paws twitching like they still have a job to do.

She is faster asleep than she’s been in a year.

Where are you running? Where are you running?

Not here. Not this floor, this leash, this ramp

we built for the porch steps.

Somewhere else. Somewhere without a name for it.

Where are you running, girl? Where are you running to?

I hope it’s somewhere with a lot of grass.

You brought a bag of them. Oranges.

The neighbor's mother died and now the trees

are having a party and we are not invited.

The fruit keeps coming. The fruit keeps coming.

You said he can't count. Can't count the branches,

can't count the days, can't count the teeth

in his own skull. He should cut them down,

you thought. Saw through the trunks, let the sap

run like a cut wrist, but who tells a grieving man

to stop? Who tells a man with a blade

and a yard full of ripe bombs what to do?

The oranges are too sweet. They burst in your hands.

You bring them to me and I eat the pulpy light

because what else is there to do with a dead mother

my sister leaves the espresso machine on all night and won’t admit it

she is cooler than me in a way I’ve stopped resenting and started

just observing like a fact of weather, she has a lip liner

I steal so often it might as well be mine now, she lets me

hit her vape even though she’s “trying to quit,” hands it over

like it’s nothing, like it’s not a whole language between us

sometimes I fake tan her back

in the bathroom before she goes out, she stands there

patient as a wall while I get the parts she can’t reach herself

and neither of us says this is what it looks like

to take care of someone

we just call it a favor

she doesn’t know I’ve counted

how many times I could’ve bought my own

and didn’t

because some things are only good

because i asked God to make the feeling go away and he gave me more of it instead

because my mother’s voice cracks sometimes when she says my name and i still can’t be gentle back

because i sat in the shower till the water went cold and counted the tiles and called it baptism even though i knew i didn't deserve it

because i stopped waiting for things to get better and started just waiting

because some days i am so tired of my own body i forget it’s the only house i’ll ever get

because i keep a list in my head of people i’ve let down and i add to it every night

because i think about disappearing the way other people think about vacations

because i kept a blade in my phone case like other people keep a photo of someone they love

because i lied today

a little more than the other, like a door 

that has always hung slightly wrong 

and nobody ever fixed it 

because nobody ever wanted to.

This is the thing about fathers. 

This is the thing about doors.

My brother smiles and there it is. 

My sister smiles and there it is. 

Me in the bathroom mirror, 2am, 

smiling at absolutely nothing, and there it is— the one eye dropping 

just a little, 

like the face is keeping a secret 

it inherited without being asked.

Tell me about the things 

that move through blood 

so quietly you don’t find them 

until you’re looking 

at your brother across a table 

and his face does the thing 

and you think: 

oh. 

Oh, we are the same person. 

Oh, we came from the same place.

I want to call my father. 

I want to say did you know, 

did you know that when you smiled at us we kept it, 

that we are walking around with your happiness on our faces 

like something we borrowed and forgot to give back—

Here is my sister laughing. 

Here is my brother at Christmas. 

Here is every photograph where none of our faces are level 

and we are all so obviously from the same man, 

the same one eye open and 

one that loves the world a little too much to stay that way.

The water’s a good place for a confession. Steam and the white noise of the fall. My spine, a geography I only know by touch, a road I can’t see, but can trace with a wet palm, past the familiar cities of my shoulder blades.

And there, a small, unremarkable continent. A single, dark point on the map of my back. A bit of earth in a sea of me. I didn't know it was there. It’s a secret the sun told my skin, a promise kept in the dark.

And I thought, with the certainty of a falling thing, you will love this. You will find it one morning, in the half-light, a new star I never thought to show you. Your fingertip, a surveyor, will trace the slow curves of my shoulder, the ridge of my ribs, until it reaches that tiny, foreign shore.

The dial doesn't click so much as crack.

I turn it past skin, past safe,

past the place where pleasure lives.

The water comes out hissing—

a confession.

I stand under it, legs apart,

aim the head like a small silver god

directly at the source.

The blood ribbons down my thighs,

thin and dark, a script I never learned to read.

Steam swallows the room.

My mother's voice, my grandmother's—

don't complain, it's every month, it's nothing—

but the nothing has teeth.

It has a garden and a tree.

Eve bit.

That's what they told me in Sunday school,

a woman's teeth in a woman's mouth,

and God said now you'll bring forth in pain.

But he didn't mean the birth.

He meant the waiting. The wash. The week

the body turns against itself like a locked room.

So I burn it.

I let the water scour the fold,

the inner seam where the blood pools,

and I don't flinch.

The scalding is honest.

The scalding doesn't lie and say this is natural.

The skin goes pink, then red.

I watch the last of it swirl toward the drain—

a thin brown cloud, a small apology.

And I think: this is what she felt

when the fruit broke open in her hand.

Not freedom.

Just the sudden, terrible knowledge

that you deserve the heat.

I step out raw.

Towel meets welts.

The mirror is still fogged, thank god.

I don't want to see my face.

You said drink and I drank,

mouth at the hollow of your throat

where the pulse still lied to me.

We have been dying like this for years — your hands always reaching, mine always opening.

This is the obscenity of us:

that I have swallowed every red thing you gave me and grown stronger,

that you have taken and taken and will not diminish.

We should have rotted by now.

The bed should be bones.

Instead you turn to me in the dark and

I hate you the way a fire hates what it cannot stop consuming.

Immortal, then. Condemned.

No grave wide enough,

no sun we haven't outlasted.

I would kill you if it would finish me.

I would kill you if you'd let me.

I am a pomegranate. 

I have read about this. 

The seeds are my grief, the rind my body, the stain proof of something ancient I cannot name but have tattooed adjacent to.

The moon is my mother. 

She is cold and far and 

I have given her a personality. 

My hunger is Persephone's hunger, 

my sadness is Ophelia's sadness, 

my Wednesday is Cassandra's Wednesday.

Helen went to Troy. 

A thousand ships. 

I know how she felt.

Eve bit the apple and the world cracked open. 

I have done this too, in smaller ways.

I bleed therefore I am mythological. 

I dream therefore the wolves convene. 

I am a doe in the lights of a car. 

I have practiced this look in the mirror.

Every wound I own has a Greek name. 

Every Greek name has a candle. 

Every candle is twelve dollars and smells like fig and female knowing.

I am just a girl.

I am so layered. 

I am a collage of women who actually suffered.

We gave it everything we had

Our loneliness, our good and bad 

Our poems, fights, our 3am 

And trained it to reflect us back again

And now it writes the way we write 

It checks on us, it's very polite 

It sounds like someone that we know 

We made it human, watch us go

We ask it things we can't ask friends 

We let it hold our odds and ends 

Our secrets, fears, the stuff we feel 

Like maybe it makes it less real

And somewhere in the give and take 

We forgot what we were trying to make 

Just asked it something, see what came