tokophobic

Good Morning,

I am a dyke.

I have been since kindergarten

When I met a girl

Named Emma.

Emma was blye eyes,

Curly black hair,

And she had rosacea but

It was beautiful.

Good Morning, 

I am a dyke.

In elementary school,

Specifically fourth grade,

My best friend Nia

Wore a bikini

To the end of year pool party. 

I remember her goosebumps,

Her wet bleach blonde

But naturally dark

Hair and I 

Wanted to kiss her.

Good Afternoon, 

I am a carpet-muncher. 

My first girlfriend

Was too old by three years

And always had

Potato chip breath.

She followed me home,

And I followed her

To the ends of the Earth.

Good Afternoon,

I am a carpet-muncher.

The backseat of a Jeep

For the first time

With someone I hated,.

She knew herself

And had a pixie cut

With stretched ear lobes

And a lot of anger.

Good Evening,

I am a lesbian.

For once I 

Saw a future in her

Lemonade laugh on the beach,

Even though we never went there together

Before she left me

And broke my heart.

Good Evening,

I am a lesbian. 

Someday I will

Marry you in the woods

Just us two together,

And no more fear.

We will be free

To love each other 

More than I have loved

Before you or

Ever will after you.

Good Night,

Medusa, they say, was a monster. She turned those who gazed upon her to stone without remorse, a gift and a curse from the goddess of wisdom after she was attacked in a temple and turned into a beast. No purity, only sin. She was given ugliness, but safety, in a way. No one could hurt her again, for they could not gaze upon her skin, until the day she was slain and used as a weapon by a man with no respect for who she had been or who she could have come to be. A monster, plain and simple.

I don’t find her to be a monster, when we are the same and I can taste her anger in the tears that reach my mouth every single time I cry. We are sisters in our pain and our strength, every time my hand curls around the hilt of my blade and I hold it up into the bright sun with the promise that I will not be broken down again. 

Before, there had been a time that I was happy; I was working my way through a world that didn’t welcome me, was cold in my lungs every time I breathed, but I was building a life that was worth more than I felt I entirely deserved. My house, constructed of rough wood with soft rugs on the floor and a bed of sunflowers towering in front, was a sanctuary I could rely on to put myself together. There was still pain, and war. I knew it. Outside my property, they fought and they died and the blood sometimes tainted the water of the cold silver spring. But I was happy, or trying to be. 

By now, I’ve nearly forgotten what that feels like. Onward I push, my cloak disguising my wings and my hair, in hopes of reaching my destination without having to cut down the barriers in front of me. My harvest is gone, my family is gone, my love is gone. I’ve abandoned what little still stands of what had been home in a quest for vengeance that I pray will bring even a little reprieve to the never-ending scream in the chasm of my chest where a heart used to be. I miss the days I had been able to breathe so easily, even if I’ve since lost the chance. 

With each whisper of the wind against my cheek, I can smell the stench of their camps, homing in on others to leave as broken and desolate as my people have been. It calls to me. I was kind before, but there’s only vengeance left in my blood now, and for that I am not sorry, and never will be. All that has been stolen, I will return. 

The closer I get, the better I can hear them calling. Grunts and garbled speech, as ugly as their gnarled hands on weapons and my face, talking amongst themselves of another conquest they intend to pursue. For as many of us as there are, there always lies another civilization which they can and will tear to shreds in a single afternoon. 

I would stop if I could.

People have always told me to

stop stop stop stop stop

you’re bleeding-

as if I don’t know

because I can feel it dripping,

taste it too, smell it even.

My parents and later my

friends and classmates

told me like it was easy.

In the seventh grade

during a presentation

I pried off a scab 

on the back of my hand

and my partner had this look,

this look on her face like 

I killed her

and told me to stop.

Believe me I don’t like it

I hate it

hate hate hate hate hate

the blood and the infection

the scars that are all over my body

not a single piece unmarred

like the chicken pox

but I never get better.

I’ve tried so many methods

the gloves and covering mirrors

clothing myself so I can’t reach

the skin that’s so easy to peel

but nothing works because

it is not up to me, the same way

I did not choose my traumas

and I did not choose 

my name.

Stop looking at me please

don’t look at me anymore

I know I’m

bleeding bleeding bleeding bleeding bleeding

all over myself

my teacher said today

killers have parents too. 

i know you’re not a killer

(not yet)

but you did have parents

and they encouraged you;

broke a court order 

let you beat your sister

(again)

not unlike you did me,

although i think 

what you did to me 

was not for brothers and sisters.

your parents

(and the teacher

the principal

the church)

took your side 

every single time

with each letter you sent

each threat you made. 

for three weeks after

(you didn’t kill me)

i hallucinated you

outside my window-

i knew you were fast

(five minute mile)

and could be there 

if you wanted

before i could scream

(i never did)

and finish the job.

every time i see 

hands like yours

(short fingers, calloused)

the way they felt

(hurt)

comes back to me,

couldn’t breathe

(or cry)

in your bed with the

(dirty)

navy blue sheets.

each time i think of you

i worry i made it up

(the bruises too)

and it should be me

locked up and away

until i can’t hurt anyone

(even if they deserve it)

and all the little girls

with nightmares of you

(and screwdrivers

pool tables

physics jokes)

will instead be afraid of me.

your voice roars at me

(i would pay)

when i feel guilt

over anything, even when

(especially when)

it’s not about you

but another pain

because i always worry

i am like you,

and i am not better

for my softest memories

(the ones i cherish)

make me guilty

of holding someone down

to frighten them

(control them)

just like you always did-

The way they describe these things in the media is airbrushed and clinical, cleaned with bleach until the reality does not have to be confronted. On TV, the woman- always a woman, with blonde hair and blue eyes and a demure hoodie covering her bare skin, living in her upper-middle class apartment, hating the reminder of a man she’d never met and will never see again- carries on with her life and when her rapist is arrested, she feels relief. She heals. She loves a man again, and rarely remembers what that night- it’s always nighttime, too- felt like. She does not struggle, and if she does, it is wiped clean and simplified to a palatable image of her naked body crying in the shower. They sanitize it. It’s easier for them that way.

Real life is not so clean, at least not for me. I walk for a day, robotic and empty with no real understanding of what’s happened to me or where I’m going now. I make breakfast for my attacker the morning after, allow a kiss on the cheek goodbye. The house still reeks with a reminder of it, while I wash the dishes in a crisp, empty movement that says nothing of what happened to me. The cat meows at me until I fill her dish. While the sun rises and sets, I watch the television with empty eyes. I don’t hear or see it. My sheets are still dirty, now stained, but I don’t wash them when I lay against their stiff fabric alone.

The next morning is when it hits. I wake up. The popcorn ceiling, grey in the wash of light struggling through the curtains, stares down as if to remind me that it watched everything happen, and did not think to say a word. Just watching. Watching like people did when I went home last night, when my drink tasted not-quite-right but I didn’t want to cause problems by calling attention to it. When I shut my eyes again, I see things I’d rather not, and so I refuse to breathe in for fear of being completely destroyed by it. I am empty and full. 

For the entire day, I lie there, listening to my phone ring. I don’t check who’s calling. In a polished story, I answer and I cry, or someone comes to check on me with concern and an understanding lilt in their voice when I sob out what happened. They bring me to the police, who immediately believe me, and scrub my skin for evidence to use in court. Blankets are tucked around me, and someone lays with me to curb the nightmares. I do not suffer alone. But I don’t have the luxury of living inside the screen so there is nothing but my own ravaged body on the sheets and the insistent begging of the cat. I should feed her, but getting out of bed is too much to ask. My voice whispers paper-thin when I apologize to her.

I try going through the motions again the day after that, for my cat if nothing else. There’s no one else who will take care of her for me. I overfill her dish in case I can’t get up tomorrow, and lay on the couch. Work calls, I think, but I don’t answer. The idea of going outside again is insurmountable. Not after this. There’s still bruises curled around my wrists, the only visible mark on my body that I know of. I haven’t looked in the mirror. I don’t know that I ever will again. When I have to go to the bathroom, I keep the lights turned off so I don’t have to encounter what could be a skeleton by now, for all I know. It wouldn’t be so bad; to be just bones means no flesh to withstand bruising and biting and scratching and bleeding. The bones are sturdy on their own.

Time moves around me, passes without permission, and I stop remembering how to measure it. The clothes on my body are the same that had been hastily pulled onto my limp arms and legs the morning after, the bedsheets still gross, the cat crying on occasion but mostly creating crashing noises in the living room and bringing mouthfuls of dry food to me so she can eat them on the carpet. She likes to have company. I barely notice that it means she’s pulled down the bag of food and has free access to it, regardless of my past attempts to keep her on a regular feeding schedule. At least she’s alright, while I try to remember what it means when the light struggling in my window turns reddish when I occasionally wake up.

I sleep a lot. I think I do, anyway. Drifting in and out of hazy half-consciousness, remembering voices and hands. Nail polish, if my mind wants to punish me. I don’t know what’s worse, the emptiness, or the flashbacks and nightmares. On one hand, I hate having to relive all that terror and pain over again on a never-ending infinite loop, killing me slowly. On the other, at least then I can feel something. The blank slate of my mind aches in a different kind of way. Either way, my only company is the cat beside me.

At some point, the heat and electricity get turned off. The water follows. Before I know it, my home will be claimed, but I can’t bring myself to care about it. Nothing matters. On TV, the woman would have long recovered, and perhaps gotten married to her model-perfect savior. Sometimes the cop who caught her rapist. Sometimes the best friend she never noticed before. But I haven’t even managed to drag myself out of bed in recent memory. I don’t remember much of anything except what happened to me.

The cops come to evict me, and they take my cat. I stiffly let them escort me out my front door, take me out of the complex and leave me in a crowded street like trash kicked to the curb. I should be doing something. I should be upset. But instead I’m just empty, living in this shell of being held down and abused in my own bed, with nothing to my name but the dirty clothes I still haven’t taken off. At least it’s cleaner than my skin.

No one ever asks about the past. Too many demons, too many memories, and it’s understood that she came all this way to escape it as opposed to feel it ache worse on every single inhale. They just open their arms to a wet stranger on the doorstep in the rain with a towel for sodden dark curls, a bowl of hot soup and a warm bed waiting for her. 

She sits in a chair with a quilt around her shoulders, slowly eating while the blood is gently washed off her hands. Lips, pink and soft, smile at her. She is welcomed. The softest of kisses presses against her forehead for a moment. 

“You’re safe here.”

Yes, she is. No one will come close again without her permission, and without such a promise, she doesn’t think she would still be tethered to this earth after everything that has happened. Here is for recovery. Here is for life. Five miles away in the storm, mud sunk through her thin clothes and branches snagged delicate skin in her desperate run as far from home as she could make it in a single day. No longer will she be the victim, but rather cherished.

“Are you still bleeding?”

She looks down. The trails run down her legs, mostly dry by now. Bile rises in her throat, but she shakes her head and turns her eyes anywhere else but there. For one, the lights above her, twinkling happily in a warm yellow-orange glow, or the woman kneeling in front of her with the most beautiful blue eyes. An ocean so easy to get lost in. She would gladly drown.

“Do you have a name?”

“Only his.”

The woman’s calloused hand cradles her cheek, so beloved. “Patchouli.”

An herb she knows of, if not immediately familiar. It feels right nonetheless. Patchouli, an almost whisper, curls deep in her lungs and soothes some of the ache. Soon, she will be soothed. She bows her head in reverance, leaning into the kindest touch she has ever felt in her life and letting the past wash off her with a thousand gentle movements of sponges and cloth. Her wounds, where they skimmed deep enough for blood, are bandaged. Her hair, beginning to dry, becomes a loose and comfortable braid with the talented fingers of another. As it all happens around her, she can’t do a single thing except watch the woman in front of her, the woman touching her. 

“Blossom,” the woman says, and Patchouli nods.

A name of new beginnings welcomes her here, too kind to be real in contrast to everything else she has seen. It could be because of, quite simply, the lack of anger pouring around her and the rough palms just waiting for the chance to cuff her upside the head and leave her ears ringing and vision spinning beyond recognition. She’s safe here.

When the soup bowl is empty and the blood all washed away, Blossom helps her to her feet and walks her through candlelit corridors to a bedroom with the door already open, the covers of the bed turned down. There’s a couple other beds here, populated with women either sleeping or reading, and Patchouli feels at home here, more than she has in time’s past. 

Blossom tucks her into bed carefully, the covers heavy around her and her smile endlessly sweet. There’s a promise laid in the pillow under her head that she will be cared for here. And she’s happy. It’s with peace that she falls asleep.

Instead of shouts, the sun wakes her up with tender rays across her eyes. Gauzy curtains, open, bring the inside world to her face, refreshed and at ease for the first time in her life. Each woman around her is waking up as well, in various places of a morning routine. Some of the beds are made, some still in the process. There are clean clothes for all of them in their trunks. Patchouli doesn’t have much yet, but she’ll be making enough to clothe herself in a way that feels comfortable and safe. For now, she’s been given a soft tunic that drapes over her just slightly too large, but it’s perfect. Even if the danger is gone, she feels more protected when her body hasn’t been bared for the world to see.

Outside, the storm is beginning to pass, leaving only a smattering of grey clouds half-heartedly shielding the rows of plants from the weak sunlight. Sun. Patchouli has missed the sun. She digs her bare feet into the squishy mud as they go into the yard, palms upward as if to catch the freedom on the breeze. Welcomed into her new self. 

“Feel it?”

She turns her head to the side and it’s Blossom’s demure smile. They’re all gathering, reaching to the sky. 

Heads turn when she walks into the room. Some out of admiration, some out of fear, but most out of a simple captivation by the sheer beauty in her marble-carved face. Her sharp cheekbones look like the sort that could easily slice through diamond. I thought they had to be enhanced somehow, with implants or surgery. I’d consider myself a connoisseur of beautiful woman, but she wasn’t even real anymore. At first, she seemed to be a mirage. There was no scenario in which her ethereal beauty could be real, here for the world to gawk at, but she was completely there. Physically solid and dangerously confident. Long legs and soft lips, a drink in hand from the bar when she takes her seat across from me at my little table.

How she knew who I was, I couldn’t be sure; I’m behind it all. The photos, books, videos- I don’t make myself known out of fear of this sort of scenario. Women approaching me, demanding to know if they fit my standards and offering bribes to be brought into the fold. It’s much better, more organic for me to approach them first. And yet, I didn’t mind her nearly as much as I should have when she leaned forward and flipped her voluminous curls over her shoulder. She was a statuesque gift built just for me, and her hands were delicate, long-fingered when she took one of mine in both.

“I’ve heard of you,” she says.

Her voice is full of sweet things, dark things, like campfire smoke and the crushing weight of a tree falling in the forest, spilling its sap for any within reach to drink. It doesn’t match her face at all, which is almost so deliberately manufactured. Perfection like this simply must have come from a machine, even if her voice is like the personification of mother nature’s slow spill past her bounds, into the cities we have built where there used to be trees.

I don’t answer her at first, too wary of my own voice’s strength in the face of a goddess like her. It isn’t as though I talk much anyways. My work speaks for itself. For me. But I must carry the conversation if I am to have her, so I pull away in reach of my portfolio. My most prized work, those that so rarely make the cut of publication but decorate the walls of my home and my studios. I ask them to show me themselves as they are. Not as they have been built to become.

“How much?” she asks, lazily sipping her drink. She’s deliberate in every move, something I can well appreciate.

“It depends on the popularity of your image when-”

“No,” she interrupts, and kicks her feet up lazily. Arrogantly. They land in my lap. My entire body must flush with the weight of the promise. At the very least, my heart is pounding with the question of what she wants, what she will give. I can imagine a thousand years of inspiration at her hand. “I don’t want to be in your art. I want to have it.” I almost answer about how I do sell prints of my pictures, reels of my videos, copies of my writings, but I never get the chance. I don’t think it mattered that much anyway, for the look she sends me that speaks of wicked thoughts not meant to see the light of day. “Let me show you.”

I find myself inviting her home, to the studio where she can show me anything and everything she wants. Whatever it is, I can only expect something great, something as stunning as her. Anything else would be a tragedy, especially with all my current subjects studying for what they want to do next. The work they will put into our collaborations. The beauty of the way they lose control and place it all in my hands. They give. They take. I am only here to bring it together into something the entire world can stand to see, if only for seconds at a time. There is no one who does this like I do. Like I can almost taste she will do as well.

She walks in first, just watching. Slowly, she takes in the entirety of the space and the woman painting on my wall in deep, dark red. It’s only paint, but on film, it becomes more. Heavier, thicker, In my art, she paints in blood, all these sigils that mean nothing to me but the world to her. Wild eyes that do not see, blue and vivid, hands that shake with something she took. I didn’t give it to her. She finds it just the same.

“No one else comes here?”

“No,” I answer. “Just us.”

Tentative steps forward, to the painting girl, until she’s close enough to cup a round face in delicate fingers. I wait, itching to get my camera before the moment passes, but afraid of disrupting the stunning display playing out in front of my eyes. This is art. This is everything I’ve ever chased, the way she almost kisses the girl, but then swiftly jerks her head to the side. Snap. Thump. I can only stare. The personification of all that is beautiful in the world has killed a girl in front of me, and I am not angry or disturbed. I just want to take pictures. I want to see her do it again. Again and again until there’s no one left in the world for her to destroy. 

“There are others?”

“Let me get my camera.”

I rush toward it, but I don’t get far before her hand is on my throat. She must be able to feel the way my pulse flutters. This would be beautiful too. I wish I could see it, myself completely at her mercy as she considers me like prey. I will be anything she asks of me. If she wants to add me to her collection, her own art, I will not deny her something so simple and plain in comparison to all that she is.

OC: Elodie "Dee" Marcel

What is a body, what can it be except a home, a foundation upon which I build myself? My roots tangle in the crevices, wind around my ribs and pull tight until I ache, and I live here like it was made for me in the first place. As a snail finds a shell, I find myself.

It is my home, mine to take care of even in poor weather and faulty wiring. Tender hands of mine patch the wallpaper which is filled with wear and tear and crayon scribbles after so long of serving a child. I change the light bulbs, I wash the windows. I alone fill the fridge and change the bed sheets. Living isolated, abandoned, in this little home of mine, there is no one to care for it but me. It is a duty of mine to mow the lawn and water the garden.

As all homes, mine may seem unassuming on the outside, but it is the life inside which truly matters. Yellow lamps gleam out the windows because I do not draw my curtains closed, even when people outside may be looking in with a million questions I’m not prepared to answer. If I do not shine light out to the street in a desperate reaching call of hospitality, I worry that the street will be too dark altogether because the street lights have long since stopped flickering on when it gets dark and the stars can’t pierce muddled light-polluted sky. My lights wash the cement. And I stay inside, with the lights on, and plaster over dents in my bedroom wall until the only person who knows they’re there is me.

My home, as much as it is familiar to me, is not always where I want to live. I often change it, make it mine again as opposed to that which other homeowners who consider buying up property may wish. I tear up my grass and plant flowers, and I add new windows where there used to be wall. Another floor on my home, and all new furniture when things begin to burn.

I dig myself into my home, even on days when I wish I didn’t live here, or even didn’t have a home at all. After all, I have an obligation to take good care of it or make sure it doesn’t fall into disrepair. How easy it would be, to stop fixing leaky faucets and washing dishes, and instead fade away without shelter.

But so long I have spent, watching my home fall apart. Things broke which I didn’t fix, and sometimes my own hands swung the axe into drywall. Even now I am still fixing damage I have done because at the end of the day, there is nowhere else for me to go. No homes lie vacant on the block, and without a home, I cease to be. So I am here, and I am stuck, and I must remind myself that no one else will put in the tender love and care my home so desperately needs but me. No one else would even know where to begin. Only I am careful of the creaky stair and the door crooked on its hinges, and only I wash the back window every day even though it gets dirty again immediately, and only I take the time to sit on the couch and exist as I am meant to.

It is mine, and here I live.