#arckhaic

my piece A FIELD GUIDE ON LIVING THROUGH THE END TIMES* was published on kudeta magazine for their immediate worlds issue! (i also was hired as a managing editor hehe v honored)

an except:

5. ARE YOU ARMED? ARE YOU SELF-SUFFICIENT? WILL YOU SURVIVE WHEN THE WORLD COLLAPSES ON ITSELF? let me tell you a secret: these questions don't matter if you have money. you pay for other people to be armed, to suffice your needs, to survive for you. you pay for your mbak and supir to die first. you pay for the mbak-mbak kasir and ojek drivers to die first.

national poetry month recs day 22: youthberry by @arckhaic

but nothing has come of all those prayers I whispered to the rain or wrote on fallen maple leaves; no matter how positively obvious it was that they’d been heard, they weren’t answered.

Some say the universe is much too large for us to comprehend, but I believe I know the purpose of distance. I’ve lived in the quiet for so very long and my Gods are made of servitude.

This is another lesson in empowerment for the child of two people and a house made out of difference and unnameable issues. I should make my own signs. I have some prayers only I can answer. 

all the people i love are morningstar beautiful- bright & shining & ruinous for wanting attention & so achingly blinding gorgeous (i wish to sin, i wish to sin, i wish to sin. don’t we all?)- i can’t ever look at them. i’m afraid if i look i will see flaming wheels & a thousand eyes & wings that stretch into the heavens. then they will have no choice but to fall to kneel beside me, i shall weep myself into a sea of salt then-for they are touchable now. it goes:

hey, whoever is up there, can you please come down and lay beside me? this place is so lonely & you took away my last rib to make something wonderful that i couldn’t hold onto. so maybe... could you please come out of hiding? it goes:

4:13 a.m, her (unsent): but i’m never holy, so many things but never that

4:15 a.m, her (unsent): i’m just a shape of letters strung together, a ruination that can’t exist. a girl without a name or a name without a girl

4:15 a.m, her (unsent): i can’t be holy

4:16 a.m, her (unsent): or maybe it’s this: you—a god, and me—yours

4:17 a.m, her (unsent): so you keep kneeling down in front of me like i’m a divinity and like this isn’t a lie. you keep mouthing my words like godliness, like this isn’t just for voyeurs digging greedy fingers into flesh-tragedy, like this isn’t you running from truths dragging at your steps

4:18 a.m, her (unsent): you keep trying to extinguish your truths, and your matchstick hands are drenched in gasoline, even when you try to make water from your blood.

4:18 a.m, her (unsent): i’m just the phantom of, the afterimage of— grand curtains, glaring lights, gleaming rosewood. or no, no, i’m not a ghost, i’m just a stage. you know what i am

4:18 a.m, her (unsent): you just want your throat split on an altar, you just want everyone to see it. you just want it to matter, somehow

4:21 a.m, you: i think you’re holy, i do

4:21 a.m, you (unsent): i want to make myself into a surrender, i want to make myself into everything other than what i am.

4:21 a.m, you (unsent): stop looking at me like i’m a war.