#abstractedfocus

My leg is pressed to the car door

My arm is hitched against the window

My back is hard pressed to a fuzzed seat

What I'm trying to say is that my body is inside of this car and my thoughts are inside of this body

But her voice drones on and the more she drags up herself into her voice

The more my brain is pressing against my head and I can't tell if I'm receding or escaping off onto the road my legs stumbling off the car and onto the road

And the double yellow lines mark the divide between safety and falling

And if I could run, I would run

And if I could not, I would crawl until I reached the river and baptized myself into a holiness all my own

A holiness that would be enough

But there is only the desert of this car hurtling through the dark and all she wants to do is kick me when I’m already down

(Better to leave with pain than leave with nothing at all)

There is no soft cleanse of holy water to scrub myself raw even if she strips me back to the beginning

There's something dirty instead that's on this skin something almost soft as it surrounds me

Is the car that hurdles running me over or taking her away the way she always wanted and for whose sake is it moving is it running

Little white lights litter the road and the streaks they leave behind catch my eye I want to crain my head and ask them what they want from me what they're screaming at me but the next one is already coming to warn me and I wonder what the red plastics on the other side might mean

When my heart is the five alarm fire and my hands are the arsonist and somewhere the sirens are wailing and the lights are flashing red red red

I will go as far as I can

My hands will be on the steering wheel for once and her voice will be an echo on the horizon in the rearview mirror

I will build a newness out of radio static and headlights and the curious emptiness of gas stations at two in the morning and I will find the place between here and nowhere

I will find the place where she cannot find me

I know neither is happening tonight so I spare a thought of her driving this car off the road or her stopping somewhere we've passed that hides in the rearview mirror but between one radio station and silence I doubt either are going to spin on this road

I grip the side of the door in between my knuckles that bite a harder white than my teeth and I wish it was because we took a corner too fast and my head knocked onto buzzing glass

And when I drive into that inevitable night on that inevitable road I hope her words find somewhere to go besides the trapped windows and the one way radio show between us

- Complications

Inkflownet Collab, Cowritten by: 

member announcement!

sappho’s angels is pleased to announce our members! your admins (ash @gloryformore & violet @saintofbees / @tubishvat) are very happy to have read all the applicants’ poetry. and if you weren’t accepted, we just couldn’t find a space for you in the net at this point in time.

members:

adaeze @quietada 

aimi @aavillainess

aya @avolitorial

charlie @partlycharlie

charlotte @broompeople

chelsea @babymoonpoet

ellanora @rainewrights

kat @wordtamer

sabine @icelandlesbian

quinn @abstractedfocus

we’re going to be doing interactive projects in the future, so don’t worry if you weren’t chosen; you can still participate. we’ll also have weekly prompts. 

6. tag any writers that you want to collab with!

ehhhhhhhhh, there are so many though and i hate to be a bother, hm. I want to collab with everyone from @inkflowsnetwork??? everyone’s so talented and kind, i’m incredibly happy to just be talking to all of you guys. there’s @ibuzoo whose writing I adore, @svcredstars writes incredibly well??, @pushkins makes me feel too much sometimes, oops, i guess this was meant to end up as a rec list!!

11. describe yourself when writing in ten sentences or less.

she spins circles around herself, her heart to her mouth to her hands, never quite reaching the tree, she’s on the very edge of the waterfall, admiring, pining, never quite falling, gravity’s her biggest enemy. 

24. name one fact about yourself that you want your readers to know about you.

a fact. i wrote a deeply personal chapbook about finding myself because i wanted to celebrate the fact that i am still alive. i was 13-14 when i thought for sure that it would be the end, and i’m still here, ten years later, proud of that fact. no matter how much i regret the scars, they’re here because i am still here. life got good somewhere along the way, without my realizing and it can happen to anyone out there ❤︎

godly ichor. your own mortal essence traded for something better, something more divine than yourself.  ( DON’T YOU WANT TO BECOME A GOD ? )

three: breathe. divinity can be achieved once you inhale your kingdom. it can be achieved once you realize

you are something more than mortal. you are something bigger than those below your feet.

(forgetting why it mattered / the passage of time as it varies by season / sunlight on rumpled sheets and the smell of pine) 

summer outside quiet high thrumming airasphalt and concrete lying theregiving up the ghost the hot streets died -the last breath a punctured sigh run gladly out of them in a screech of tyresa blistered eye of metal. and the town expiresone last hot breath, and back to the singing of the flies.