Lydia Nin 🕯️

I dreamt a dream in a fever

That whispered into night

A spell of my time—

Burned at the edges, the book

Curled lines

The wind speaks in tongues

In the language I can never know

Blackest steeple of wrought iron

Where do you find me-

Beneath the wires and traincars

Buried in feathers and rotten snow?

Slurred vision through a moonlit bottle

A cautious kiss, futile

Not enough to say it all—

Not enough to shake the walls

Break down all the canyons of concrete

One dark room

Of the past

Is disintegrating

And the womb

Of ash

Has been wilting and waiting

WHEN HE DIDN’T CALL I BOUGHT A PACK. SMOKING MORE THAN I EVER HAVE IN MY LIFE, AS IF EVERYTHING WRONG WITH ME LIVES IN MY LUNGS AND I MUST

KILL

THE TENDERNESS THAT PLAGUES ME IN THIS WORLD OF FUCKED REALITIES.

I CAN TELL THE CITY KNOWS I LIE WITH MY WHITE UNDERBELLY EXPOSED.

THE DISCOMFORT OF AN ASSAULT ON THE EGO: I MUST REMEMBER WHO I AM.

EMBARRASSED ACHE

THE LITTLE THORN

THE ROLLING FEELING INSIDE MY WOMB, THE CLATTERING OF FALLING ICICLES

MY ONE AND ONLY PAST LOVER

YOUR MARK ON MY BODY IS SOON TO BE WASHED OUT AND AWAY BY ANOTHER

PERHAPS LESS DESERVING.

I IMAGINE HE WILL TAKE AND NOT GIVE IN THE SHAPE OF GENEROSITY, I IMAGINE THERE WILL BE RADIO SILENCE THAT FOLLOWS,

RADIO SILENCE WHILE HIS SEMEN SOAKS INTO MY FLESH.

I HAVE ALREADY ARRANGED THE FUNERAL

I HAVE BEEN SITTING LIKE PIGEON ON A SAD PROMISE, WAITING LIKE A HOUND FOR THE MASTER WHO SHUNS ME. I AM REMEMBERING THE WAY HE SHOVED MY FACE AFTER THE KISSES, AS IF HE COULDN’T WAIT TO GET AWAY. I WONDER IF HE WILL BE THE EVIL ONE IN MY LIFE, THE DARKEST KIND OF LOVER. THERE IS A SHADOWY CLEFT IN MY HEART THAT DESIRES THIS, AGAINST MY AND THE WORLD’S BETTER JUDGEMENT.

WILL HE BE THE EVIL ONE? I DON’T NEED THAT NOW, IT COULD BE A FATAL BLOW. I HAVE TO TRUST THAT I WON’T DO THAT, WON’T BE A FOOL. BUT I FEEL THE CRAWLING SENSATION OF DESIRE, AND DESIRE IS A THING I WILL ALWAYS FOLLOW, NEARLY ALWAYS WITHOUT DELIBERATION.

IS HE AWKWARD, NERVOUS, UNDECIDED, OR STUNTED? OR IS HE A CALCULATED KILLER, WAITING TO DINE UPON MY BEING AFTER SUCKING ME DRY. WILL HE WRING EVERY LAST SONG FROM BETWEEN MY TEETH AND BURY ME— SHOVE MY BODY INTO A MANHOLE ON NINTH STREET?

I AM ONLY FOOLISH IF THE GATES ARE PEARLY ENOUGH. THESE GATES GLEAMED LIKE A BEACON, LIKE THE OCHRE LIGHT OF AN OIL RIG UPON THE BLACK VOID OF OCEAN NIGHT HORIZON, WHERE SKY AND SEA ARE INDISCERNABLE.

IF I DO NOT HOLD ONTO MYSELF I WILL FALL INTO AN UNMARKED GRAVE, ALL OF MY BLOOD SOLD BEHIND DIFFERENT NAMES. MEN LOVE TO BE ME.

THE TAPPING OF MY FINGER TO FREE THE USED ASHES IS NOW THOUGHTLESS, FLUID. THE FOODHUNGER IS SECONDARY NOW, AND I CAN’T SAY I’M NOT A LITTLE GLAD. STILL, GUILT LINES BLACK LAYERS UPON MY FRAGILE LUNGS. WHAT WOULD MOTHER SAY? I CAN’T THINK ABOUT THIS.

GUILT, CHAINS OF DELIRIUM, BURNS MY WRISTS AND ANKLES. WHAT WOULD I FEEL IF I WERE NOT GUILTY- WOULD MY FACE SHIFT TO SYMMETRY AT LAST? WOULD MY SHOULDERS UNBUCKLE?

I WOULD FLOAT TO THE SURFACE, OPEN MY MOUTH AND SPEAK LIKE A WINDCHIME.

HE’S PROBABLY FUCKING ANOTHER GIRL, AND I’M WRITING.

I can’t remember the cold from childhood-

The feeling has been erased by fire, after fire, after fire…

After fire I walked with a wasted soulmate-

The loosely fitting definition hangs like a stained blouse, turning to mothfood in my closet

I’m far away now, where

My ankles twist over ice, fingers grow confused and slow. Where I smoke alone at the bus stop, slouch drunk in my seat on the train.

Morning is blue as an untapped vein

There’s nowhere to go that won’t cause me pain

After the ether of trust has vanished, the stark bones of the most uncomfortable reality lie exposed—

That nothing can truly be possessed. This truth rings out like an evensong

Boiling through the tubes of the heart, jolting the system back into place

If the heart were to skip a beat, what would change in the brain? What would be missed? Surely the void would leave a gap, a hole of grief unnameable. An insidious clot that would inevitably alter the self, like a dropped stitch from a knit sweater.

I imagine the numbered worms waiting beneath winter’s world, dreading the approaching season of birds

Surely, unable to move in the frozen clay, they’ve had to dig deeper.

In their estivation they must dream of the starved snapping of beaks, the birdsongs- their funeral processions…

or perhaps the mucous cocoons erase memory, and rising in spring will be rising from amnesia.

I wait for them, congested and half-alive, but still without trembling. My lungs ache with borrowed solace and the freezing air. My lips, raw from a kiss, burn with pinprick snowflakes that are thrown against my face by the gust of the oncoming train.

I had to backtrack on my route— I missed the stop staring into the black pool of melted ice on the floor.

2/25/26

new pen name is now Lydia Nin, however my old work will keep the old pen name mostly because I’m too lazy to change it,

But the work remains mine,

Thank you to everyone who has ever stopped to read, like, or reblog any of my writings, it means more than you can ever know

If I could remove my physicality from the equation of love

Would there be a second coming of all the men to me?

If I were to spit out all allegations of betrayal

Would wings open up of beauty?

For a birdsong I would love you

Bird wing heartbeats chime like the city cathedral’s hollow bells

Fiberglass Christ is there as well, moving in circles on the floor

Having fallen from his nailed-up pose

If I could invade your dreams

I’d sit like a bird clinging to your cracking wall

I’d feed on the small movements you make

Drink from the leaking window pane

If I could burn desire into your veins

I’d be like Frankenstein hoisting you to the sky in chains

I’d calm the shuddering bandages, singed

I’d recreate your brain, wire it to love the tender ways you reject

For a birdsong I would write about you

Bringing dimes and copper bells- small gifts- to your windowsill

Maybe you’d leave some cornmeal to rot in the winter salt in return

Loving as much as it’s possible for you to do

How can you spend so many days in silence?

While I arraign your face in my head to stop the wanting

I find only flowers beneath your skin, healthy worms beneath your bones

For a birdsong I would taste them all

Moving very slow, like a junkie meandering in a train tunnel hall

Like a surgeon in the first hour of work, not yet dreaming of the spouse that waits on silk covers

I would release you only if I was sure you could never be mine

When truth grows simple as flattery, sparrows fly

Between the hands that have yet to touch

All is old and quiet here—

When the mind fog cradles me as I make my passage

The room is an illusion, the room burns around me

And then sets me free, the walls turn to wide birdcage bars

The place between your eyes in flame

A shaking specimen of a late night

You approach me in the hallway, littered with words

Electric filth and epitaphs, confessions of existence

Bodies in the room writhe in synchronous, heartbeat movements

But the past assaults every breath of now—

The clock cannot compete with that more tangible once

Still we drink here, and laugh on the cold streets in the dark

Playing beneath the scrubbed new plastic awnings

Stirring shadows of legends from their beds, but never tempting them down

From where they sit, higher than we can know

Something is calling from beyond the wall

Ringing over stucco Protestant steeples

Pushed through the needle of dying vanity,

Like possession— a senseless wish invades the body.

A kiss is stealing time

The kiss I regret still stings upon your lips

You savor the feeling. I stir in sour dreams

At the satisfaction you never should have known.

Words are useless as carcasses

I see them now,

Strewn upon the surface of a brilliant sun-

The sun that assaults me, and ages my face.

Love confessions are only fever whispers

Spoken in that ether of delirium.

Loneliness curls in the liquid of a swayed bottle,

Is littered through the organs like cleaned bones from a great feast.

Where I stand I hear only the heartbeat of a friend

I.

As yesterday’s kohl drips through my nose,

Polluted

Rising after-rain mingles with the pane of glass

Separating

My bare skin from the cold Earth

II.

I am not long for here, six days will pass and I will sit

Staring

Through another clouded window upon a cluttered expanse

Heartbeating

Words of safety to myself, clasping my own hand

III.

Prayers of blood will stream from eye to tooth

Coagulating

Small mounds of purged childhood,

Like yesterday,

Falling like littered paper shreds to the old marked floor

IV.

From the debris, wet and aching, a new body.

Regeneration

Of shorn hopes, of bled dreams, of wasted love

Repurposed

A linen washed clean- still bearing the stains- now wearable

The new year begs the last light through the window

That coils upon the static whirring head

A serpent of fire, to be trampled beneath the hoof

And flayed wide through the pale grasses

Between two hearts, unsatisfied and deluded

I swim like a fool, making laps with a weightless body violent

My own heart stuffed with gauze

The puss of waiting beginning to stain, drip

My tongue blisters with words unsaid

Cruel admissions of flammable truths

I will wait in the room for the sleeper to wake

I will wait for the body, prepared

To administer last this wound

And tend it with the dying snake’s poison

I am the sword in his body

Stinging, dripping with meaning

Bleeding life,

Evening

I’ve been a dolly bird

I’ve been a dandy

I have been born into a silver machine

I have seen, read

Touched so little

Yet overwhelmed I am by too much knowing

Memories are fractals

Eggshells half-summoned

That come scattering across the floor—

The taste of alcohol rising

From the back of the esophagus

Calls more, and more forgetting starts

Many bodies have crossed before my eyes

Positioned, affixed like crosses on walls

They have waited to enter—

Few have been allowed

And fewer still have crossed the membranous threshold

The flickering fruit waits ignorant still

I’ve been a bard

I’ve been an actor

I’ve sung out and been ignored

Creeping to the edges of illusions

I come to the dark place, the empty old house

I find my face too familiar and strange in the mirror there

I go on walking through the lost scriptures of night terrors

The bile of past lives and inundated senses putrid with age

Spilled across the unfinished cement slab floor of the basement room

Always this body trailing behind by a few measures

Nearly getting lost and left there—

In the whispering abyss that gyrates below the staircase

The salt of the womb has crystallized:

Twenty two years, twenty two holiday feasts

Twenty two piles of shed skin, twenty two heads

I have died and been buried

Brought back to life

And will die many times again before it’s done

Morning fades the sound of voices

That go sleepless in the night

That made love where I now sleep alone

Their souls, on a much different bed

You are strung to me, poisonous as lead

A small dose of death each day

And arsenic lace draped

Over the beloved machine

Begins to rot the fingertips, working

The swirling hardwood box

That holds the heart of one lover makes no sound

It has already begun to decay

We will visit the empty hole in your chest

When we find your stone, marked

With the sky-bound flower

Born in darkness, nursed on beauty

The leper prayers leaked by night

Spill beyond the edge, quickly

Swept back by trembling hands

This is the sap of bastardized desire

Staining bedsheets dark blue

Deeper than ink, the sap of the womb

The plasma fluid of the oneiric self,

The one who alludes reality

The hands are shame, permanently stained

Hidden by sleeves pulled forever down

The hands are affixed in fear, the hesitation

Of a nearly-struck deer: The muzzle sears with speed

Blistering at the close call

Born in beauty, nursed on darkness

Outcast possessions’ dialogue

Is drowned out by TV static, indistinct

It matches the murmured pitch perfectly

These are the loving words not spoken

The hesitated confessions that hang in the heart

Coagulate to cancer

Drown cells with fear’s fat

The microscopic flesh of desire’s words, made toxic

The hands are heavy with it,

Already they slow despite the age

The joints stiffen, veins narrow

And youth becomes a hospice

Palliations for a self-begotten grief

The hands lie down at last

In the pale hours of early light

Stinging with the rash of sleepless weeks

The creaking mattress soaked with blue,

The bed, acts as a miserable cocoon

Imbued with hopeless dream’s seasons

Where the hands can starve and cry

Where hands remember

I feel my face turning

Swelling with blood

Capillary pulsing of the

Overwhelmed pores

Stereocilia wilting in the sound

As eyes yellowed by liquor scrutinize the triangle

The negative space between my knees

I stand beneath the light

A mothlike spirit, still somehow walking

Drunk, and tilting like a flower.

Dawn is pulsing like a drum, it rings in the stem of my brain

We kiss desperately

We kiss like bastards

Our tongues rotting with the same misery

Searching for the blue

Deathlike hue from the glass

With these words I seal a coffin

A kiss

A torch

The Christ

A spiral ladder

Now defies

Gravity and carpentry

The flower

Too close

Succumbed

Vulvar

A chain of meaning

Ringing in the brain

A cold

Tower

Frozen at the edges

A volcano

Asleep

Wrecked ruins of a cindercone

A mountain

Like a sword

A needle of God

Filthy as the talon of a hawk

A coyote

Birthing

Bringing soft things to the world

With villain’s teeth

And hunger

They’re eloping

Through the colored valleys

Roads contorting

The mesas flooding

Water seeping

Through the claws of the gods

Long ago, where they marked

And all at once

A hungover gauze

Melts away

In November’s sun

And peace comes

Like a soiled dove

The hope once septic in the boil

Now heals and recovers

With a shrug of feathers

And we come together

Drugless, loveless, without tears

The holy blankness of a cleansed soul

Scrubbed, but scarred

Always scarred, like the canyons

When they flood

I hear the beating of my holy one’s heart

And I trust

I trust the outline

The rocks and dust

Sculpted by wind,

And this is all

Where it begins

The candle wanes, spilling onto the small desk

The moon peaks and, like a drug,

Heightens the world to fever

I shift my wrist in the socket, twisting

The green veins

Folding over, swimming between bones

I decorate myself with death’s rotted flowers

A musk, putrid-sweet

Merges with the faded cigarette scent of old fabric

Beneath the skin, my bones are orange as

Ripe carrots, waiting be pulled

As if from dark soil

Night curls around my emptiness

My footsteps scatter like shards of glass

Each step is a realization of the awful

I envision vines dropping from the trees

Striking me like rough whips, wrapping around you—

And you, unaware in sleep, tangled into the night

I drape my head over the living plane,

See the past, eclipsed by shadow

In my bedroom I sing to

Cut roses, petals already turning to paper at the edges

I’m weeping secrets

I’m getting stoned

I can’t help my laughter

When the feeling cuts to the bone

I put my things in a bag,

Toss them over the edge of the world

I cry goodbye to my childhood bed

Sing in my head on the way to the end

I’m like a bird crashing

But waking up anew

I am a burning scythe

Slicing through the womb

A gentle, ravenous mouth searches

Across the stones, taking sparse weeds

Reaching for the ivy, growing high over the wall

A small scavenger, late to the harvest

Collecting the last green kisses of life

Stripping bare the white carvings

In draping marble shawls

Clearing bindweed from their eyes

And on the headstones,

Cold beneath the feet

Departing words are read again

Into the silence, into the pale orange cold