#powtry

It feels like my guts have been sliced open

and put on display,

like you wanted an audience

even if no one chose to watch.

They spill onto the floor in front of me,

thick and red,

and my tears turn into evidence

for a crime that will never be named.

I’m on my knees in it

blood pooling beneath me,

soaking into the cracks of the floor

trying to hold myself together

while my insides lie scattered

where everyone can see them.

People walk by.

They step around me.

They look anywhere but at this ghastly sight.

No one asks what happened.

No one notices that something inside me

has been ripped out with intent.

They act like this is normal,

like bodies don’t end up opened this way

unless they deserve it.

You cut me carefully.

Not wild.

Not emotional.

Like a hunter finishing a kill

in front of a crowd

that won’t admit they’re watching.

You knew exactly when to stop

right before I died

so I’d have to live with it.

There is blood everywhere

except on you.

You stand clean at the edge of it,

hands empty,

face calm,

while I’m choking on what you left behind.

You don’t look back.

You don’t have to.

This wasn’t heartbreak.

This was an execution.

Public and quiet at the same time.

A tragedy laid out in the open

that no one will testify to.

I stay on my knees,

still breathing for reasons I don’t understand,

hands red and shaking, useless in my lap.

My body is opened like a warning sign,

evidence laid out in plain sight

that no one bothers to document.

You don’t turn back.

You don’t have to.

You disappear into the crowd untouched,

clean enough to be believed.

I don’t collapse.

I don’t die.

That was the point.

You leave me alive so I have to remember,

so I have to live inside what you did

while the world helps you pretend

you never touched me at all.

They step around the blood.

They avoid my eyes.

They call the silence normal.

And the silence covers you completely,

leaving me kneeling in what you did

with nothing but the malice that took place that day.

Told you, you were the only thing I cared about. Now im wonderin if i lied. If I never really cared at all. Cause I sure as hell don’t know.

Ricochet in my ear.

Dance to my cardigans.

In the way of your spell.

In the eyes of hiss.

In the war, so suddenly ours, we lie to pure faiths.

The white of ochre ensemble in man.

The dance of barking eye.

In he.

Whose love is smelting lure.

I.

Dance again

Powtry

Made entirely from snow, Powtrys avoid warm climates if at all possible.

Feepit

So named for the sound they make as they call to each other over the snowy landscape.