#transcribed

Poem transcription:

You made it through, girl.

You made it through every single time the world scratched and skid to an end— You woke up.

Tomorrow shoved you out of bed.

Sure, some days the only productive thing you did was breathe. But even when survival feels like a performance, it is still an art form. Staying alive is a skill, And you are so talented, girl

You are worth so much more than sent emails and crossed off to-do lists. You should find victory in the small things: the folded laundry, the clean plate, the answered phone call, the brushed teeth. You used to say you were sorry every other sentence, girl.

And now people tell you that you make them feel powerful, and you always somehow forget the fact that you dragged yourself out of quicksand, girl. You took notes on the beauty and the lessons you gathered while you were sinking, you escaped the padlocked jaw of shame, and when those barbarian boys pushed you over the lip of the ship, you were all sucker punch and bitch. I keep a life raft in my smile. I keep switchblades in my mascara. The next time a motherfucker knocks at the door of my body without an invitation, I'm gonna slice off each of his fingers like baby carrots.

I'm gonna drown him in a boiling hot spring of Me Too's.

I'm gonna take over the world. In spite of everything that has been done to me and my body. In fact, I'm gonna take over the world because of everything that has been done to me and my body.

I am sharpening my voice into a sword. I am becoming a girl made of mace. I left hell so I could come back and tell you all about it. And you know what I learned?

Every time I thought my life was ending, turns out it was just opening. And, one day, the urge to write a poem, became greater than the urge to write a suicide note.

Poem transcription:

They fell upon us softly: leaves rustling around land mines, a blade buried in wet soil. Starving for the essence of our love, they enveloped us—first a few haunted homes on the outskirts of town, then into the proud city itself, then spreading, like a spilled can of burgundy paint across the map, swallowing.

Appetites attached to talons, blue-white fangs in children’s mouths. Wine always escapes its cup, one way or another. We should have seen it coming, but when they appeared, pale and shrieking on the horizon, the might of ten thousand years of cups and dishes and goblets shattered, and the spill drowned every dream ever dreamt.

But you.

I found you treading water regardless—as invincible as canned food and two-by-fours. I found you exploding, brimstone on yours lips, tattooed with a fury as warm as the sun used to be. I found you beautiful: shaved head, Kevlar, bare hands. You cut them down. You broke them. You found knives between your knuckles and war clubs inside your leg bones.

I still remember how the ghost of a smile flickered across your eyes when you leaned in close and whispered to me:

Take the shotgun. I want the fireman’s axe. I want to feel it. I want to feel them beneath it.

I knew then that I wanted to be with you for whatever forever we had left. Knew that we were to share an ancient love, a love bonded with flint and bone, that our skulls now carried within them a shining new darkness.

Our first date: fireballing through hordes of the undead: dull silver eyes, ragged hands reaching, screams bisected. Every gunshot a kiss, every swing of that axe a bedroom’s liquid whisper. In this blackness I smelled your humanity, and aimed in the opposite direction.

Love, warm and grasping, splashed against the walls; love splashed onto our bodies; love splashing inside of us defiantly. And I found you in this smoking chaos; our shoulder blades kissed.

There may come a day when the sun bursts from the spider’s belly to smile upon this world again. There may come a day when love can be represented by poetry, and romantic comedies, and candlelight dinners again; when it can be held, soft and round, in the palm of a child’s hand.

But it is not on us to build that world. It is not on us to survive this one. Ours is not a love song sprouted from redemption, hope or even longing.

But it is a love song.

Sing it under your breath.

Sharpen it every morning.

Poem transcription:

This is the art of drawing breath, of making visible what has been invisible. This is a pragmatist’s guide to faith. This is singing when you don’t know how to pray.

Welcome to this space; know that you are not welcome here. We are all trespassers; we are not welcome here. This universe would like nothing more than for you to not exist, and the proof is in the history you live; tell me this: what are the odds that this planet would appear in just the right place, with the right atmosphere and geology? What are the odds that life would suddenly spark in the darkness, from the carcass of this planet to a colony?

What are the odds that this anomaly would spread? What are the odds it would survive and stay ahead of volcanic eruptions, meteorites and earthquakes; that first drum, first beat, first rhythm, first break, first time the notes broke to form a system? You could hear the first melody, the first multi-celled organism. What are the odds this first environment to harbor life would meet another; maybe fight or maybe harmonize?

But either way it would evolve. So what are the odds it would evolve to walk and not crawl? To fly but not fall? To survive every single mass extinction? What are the odds of your existence? How many generations did it take to make you? How many plagues, wars and massacres conspired to uproot your family tree and salt the earth around it? How many ancestors carried your fire?

How many farmers made it through the famine? How many runaway slaves got away? How many soldiers conscripted deserted? How many times did that chain almost break? How did your great-great-grandparents meet? What was the song playing when you were conceived? Is it inconceivable: the happenstance inherent in this life you have inherited?

Some see the elegant complexity of bodies, or the natural beauty of the planet and they say it’s godly. There’s got to be divine intelligence behind it all because the odds that you would make it on your own are so small. But me? I see millennia trying to murder you. I see a thousand generations of pain and fear. I see struggle inscribed into your skeleton. And I see you still here.