#kaafka

Your unwelcome intrusion in my sleep, you're a voyeur to the wound inflicted by your choices.

Loss evokes trauma, my feet tread on the memory of broken mirror and metal, abrasions — my walk a penitent prayer, the wounds like stigmata; I am devoted to the memory of us.

What I will not say: I think more of you now that you're gone than I did before. How is this trade of fair?

Your unwelcome martyrdom with our friends, you're jury and executioner and saint and martyr in our shared history. Have it, it's yours now.

Heartache evokes trauma, the only truth I recognise in you are the pieces of me you took — the distorted shadow I cast dragging the rewritten history, ink still wet.

What I will not say: The loss of you is deep enough to shake the foundations of my soul. I have woken up at dawn with your name as cheap comfort.

Your unwelcome haunting; the rattling of your bones in the places that were ours. The fragments of me you appropriated, and for that I cannot forgive.

(the anxiety that rides in at the sight of an open door; the sun-warmed welcome mat; the newfound silhouette at the window; they take your place on the couch; the cooling tea; the language built between until ours turns distant, then one day hopefully forgotten)

What I will not say: I've tasted the shame left by the echo of your absence.

if you could see him now - him, and his halo of black feathers him, and two bloody slashes where his wings once were, you too would wonder if he has sinned, or if he is sin itself so drown me in the blood of the mississippi river and call it holy water a god's tears, a devil's kiss golden ichor turns white wings black and rain to ashes it's always easier to burn because us humans are born to catch fire, born to run into the flames, born to set ourselves ablaze and know that we would burn. you fall, like persephone biting into the fruit of death, saying i know what i'm doing, mother but you don't, not really you fall, like icarus stretching for the scorching heat that looks a little too much like love you fall, like odysseus trying to drown himself in the deep blue for something he would never have you fall, like pandora reaching for whatever that shines because you just want to take a peek but darling, you know it's never that simple, you know nothing good ever comes out of beautiful things.

went to church, rooms glass-dark

with the splintered light filtering

into the cathedral. she was

kneeling in the spaces between

the pews, body alight in

withheld tempest temper. i

remember every knot of her

winged spine, every un-graceless

movement, because she looked

at me with magpie eyes, burned

me with memory. when she stood,

i counted every one of her ribs-

all our human ones, and then

more, splitting open her chest like

a pomegranate, lungs glistening

like seeds in the scattered light.

she was gone before i even asked

her name, and yes- it is better

this way, because we all know

what happens to humans that

consort with the divine.

abandoned sanctuaries // charle l.

crazy rich asians » nicholas young & rachel chu