⛩

jane doe.

[byunghunnie]

𝚎𝚟𝚊𝚗𝚎𝚜𝚌𝚎: (𝚟.) 𝚙𝚊𝚜𝚜 𝚘𝚞𝚝 𝚘𝚏 𝚜𝚒𝚐𝚑𝚝, 𝚖𝚎𝚖𝚘𝚛𝚢, 𝚘𝚛 𝚎𝚡𝚒𝚜𝚝𝚎𝚗𝚌𝚎.

[doebrain]

i keep pressing the world into myself until it squeals i keep stitching shadow to shadow with thread pulled from my hair i press my palms flat against iron gates & they do not open they bloom instead into something sharp into something laughing into something i almost recognise as mine & i am trembling in the way paper trembles when fire looks at it i am thinking of [copper for blood / porcelain for bone / thunder for thought] & i am thinking of how i cannot stop inventing myself in wrong rooms under wrong eyes with wrong laughter i drag my own silhouette up the stairs & it does not complain it only swells, ungainly, an animal learning a new gait / i taste salt when no sea is present i smell iron where no forge exists i say this is how a person can be haunted without being dead i say this is how a girl can learn to worship her own venom

i want frenzy i want a room full of wasps & the authority to open every jar i want to split my body into multiple chambers & let them scream at each other until the air thickens with exhaustion i want to be dangerous enough to carry my own weight across the threshold of a house that does not know my name i am finished waiting for permission finished waiting for a softer chronology i strike matches against the inside of my wrist

the ground beneath me convulses i convulse with it i hold myself in parentheses (a girl as disorder) (a girl as plague) (a girl sharpening herself against stone until she glitters, until she wounds, until she wins) i drag my teeth across an unnamed fruit & it bleeds black i press it to my chest until it stains through cotton, the stain is the only crown i have ever wanted i will keep it & wear it & demand every room acknowledge its gravity because i am not small enough to vanish i am not pliant enough to dissolve i am here & i am brutal & i am wearing the sky like a necklace of broken bells

[doebrain]

i was already contaminated by the gravity of what he intended and i knew softness attracts harm because softness cannot run fast enough or cut deep enough and softness is the trait predators collect between their teeth and i had been soft since birth // a girl shaped for disaster and i swear the moon recoiled from the entire spectacle and the stars dimmed under the weight of his intent and god never shifted once never flinched never stepped forward to intervene and that stillness was worse than anything done to me because the universe is not supposed to be indifferent to a child in collapse but the moon twisted her bright face away, a pivot so quick i barely registered the shift but i felt the absence, the abandonment, the refusal to illuminate the moment i needed witness and i thought maybe that is how the sky chooses which children matter and which children can be pressed into the earth without attracting cosmic attention

and i have spent countless nights dissecting the uselessness of faith when silence becomes the rope that binds you to a memory you cannot outrun // the lamb-girl construct was born that night, the version of me he created without asking, the version that kept returning in dreams, in half-thoughts, in those long walks home when i tried to imagine a world where the moon watched instead of turning away and where god fractured the sky to intervene and where childhood wasn't a stage for violations but passivity carves deeper than anything because divine inaction feels heavier than human harm and i thought if the moon won't help and god won't step down then maybe the earth will open for me but soil behaves with patience and patience is not a form of rescue

i crafted a mythology around survival that does not require forgiveness or healing, only momentum, a forward collapse that lets me outrun the yard but not the memory, never the memory because memory embeds like gravel under thin skin and sometimes i scrape at it with thought alone, trying to remove the imprint he left on the space between who i was and who i couldn't become

[doebrain]

i think i wanted to be studied. that's the honest part. i wanted to be a diagram. something with arrows pointing inward. here is where the pain loops. here is where she stopped. here is what she tried to replace god with.

[doebrain]

OF MARROW AND MARABOU

i press bluebell seeds to my tongue (waiting for the blossom or blister, whichever comes first) / (i am not afraid of paralysis, but the slow suffocation of it, the stilled swarm behind my eyelids) / was it august or an invented month when my lungs first split, [pomegranate and sinew, a rough handling, a careful violence—] / (i was raised in a garden of closed throats, women speaking in bruises and biscuit crumbs, sewing needles hidden in their cuffs) / i learnt how to knot the ligatures of my own fear / my hands are birds, folding, unfolding, always in negotiation with the sky, [too little, too much, never just enough] / i am all threshold, window as dare, a dare to touch something wilder than mercy, to taste the night-blooming cereus and wake up (alive, or at least rearranged) / on the days i dissolve, it is not elegant—it is brackish, edges leaking through the seams / the chemise of my childhood is stuffed in a cedar drawer, but its ghosts scratch through the grain, splinters under the skin / is this what it means to endure, to become an archive of brambles and bitten lips, to survive the afternoon by spelling out your own anatomy in phosphorus and doubt? /

i have loved like a feral animal, gentle only when cornered, breaking only what will not shatter / still, i wake, spitting features and folklore, (offering the sky my half-broken lullaby, all marrow, all marabou, all bruise)

[doebrain]

i was always the thing that begged for the logic of your wrath, trying to decipher the theology of your punishments—was i bad, or just incomplete?

i think you died before i got the answer. and god help me, that's what made me love you more. (i still touch my face when i remember. not to soothe, but to confirm: the impact happened.)

& now, older, eroded, i find myself defending you

in therapy, in poems, in trauma & affection. you were my first god. i forgave you before the bruise even bloomed. what does that say about me? about girls like me

who pray to the hands that taught them how to kneel?

i miss you more in violence than in memory. you were the only one who knew the correct dosage of cruelty to keep a child alive without letting her think she deserved to be.

when the belt (or was it your palm?) found skin, i imagined you apologising afterward. but not with words, words are too unstable. i imagined you pressing gauze to my cortical shame, saying: forgive me, this is how men are made

[doebrain]

dissolution of the eighth planet

it was pluto, of course, the discarded thing. i swallowed an entire astronomy book trying to understand the punishment of reclassification. to be and then not be. to orbit but be unloved.

[if an object is too small to clear its path, it will be demoted.]

they say dissociation is not mystical, but i think it's planetary. things break their spin and keep rotating anyway. i left my body at the age of twelve and returned to it at twenty-two.

i don't tell many people this, but there was a day i looked at a tree and thought: that's a good place to vanish.

i mean this in the way volcanoes dream of eruption.

i mean this in the way dogs stare at static.

i wear a bracelet of hematite because it absorbs chaos. i read about lithium mining until i black out.

pluto was discovered by accident. so was my fear of mirrors.

is it the reflection or the idea that something could watch me back?

there are people who love me. i think. there are people who say you are not a planet, and i agree—but inside me, a thousand failed satellites are crying for reentry.

if i must be a thing that spins, let me do so with purpose.

if i must be small, let me at least have ice.

[doebrain]

they say the oldest rocks are in greenland, but i disagree, i think they're under my kneecaps, under my mothers hands, under the porch she sanded bare with guilt and citronella, because the thing is, i was excavated before i was born, someone pre-sliced my dreams into core samples, stacked me like shale, they measured my childhood in potassium-argon decay, carbon made me guilty, sulphur made me useful, i was a small mineralogical crisis, a tectonic inconvenience, a minor daughter with major consequences, i used to believe that soil was neutral until they told me about superfund sites, my body is a small EPA violation, hair clotted with lead, breastbone full of magnesium shame, and we haven't even touched the plutonium of wanting to be looked at, or worse, loved without contingency, i once swallowed a quartz chip thinking it would make me holy, it did not, but i learned that pain sharpens slower than regret, and every time i kiss someone new it feels like a geological survey, like drilling into precambrian pain hoping for a little oil of reciprocation, i walk around like a natural resource and wonder why extraction feels like romance, they keep sending men with pickaxes to interpret me, and i keep saying no, this isn't mine, this is a burial site, but they love the artefact, they name my trauma after themselves, im dating the anthropocene now and it's going terribly, he leaves my glaciers sobbing and my forests brittle with shame, he never calls unless he needs a metaphor, and i am so tired of being metaphor, of being the thing that happens to something else, of being the sediment not the quake, i want to become igneous again—lava-born, untranslatable, not sedimentary & broken but crystallised under pressure and private, if the psyche is a planet i am building fault lines in my sleep, muttering tectonic hymns under my breath, trying to shatter pretty, to shatter useful, to become the kind of rock no man could build over without consequence, i want to be dangerous to colonise, i want every touch to be a seismic risk assessment, i want to be geologically disobedient, unfit for ownership, and if you must extract something from me, at least label it correctly: not weakness. not loneliness. not a lesson. not a confession. call it uranium. call it unfit for human proximity. call it a threat.

[byunghunnie]

I. AUTOPSY REPORT: LOVE

SUBJECT: female, early teens, deceased in the mouth of affection.

CAUSE OF DEATH: prolonged exposure to tenderness. [self-inflicted.]

EXTERNAL EXAM:

Body soft from touch. The lips—chapped from repetition of the word please.

A faint scent of salt lingers under the ribs. There are bruises shaped like patience.

INTERNAL EXAM:

Heart enlarged. Evidence of overuse.

Lungs filled with apologies.

Stomach lined with letters never sent—ink diluted by bile and time.

NOTES:

She mistook devotion for safety.

She mistook hunger for god.

When opened, her chest made a sound not unlike prayer.

CONCLUSION:

Love is not a crime, but it leaves evidence.

[nixscriptum]

[poppiesandpromises]

It's uncertain now—

Perspective becomes so skewed

In these shifting sands

A friend becomes a stranger

& the sunlight goes to sleep

[beforeyearning]

[yakultstan]

[threewordusername]

i can't live without you now

d.b.a

[byunghunnie]

FATHER

/ˈfɑːðə/

𝘯𝘰𝘶𝘯

1. like all lambkin, your father is your first lover. the first time he takes you is with your throat carved open, your wrists bruised lilac with his mouth. there is no tenderness in this; he guts you open the same way the priest unspools his sacrificial lamb's wool: cold, sharp, and [for god.]

2. all pedophiles are philosophers. he tells you that his delusion is in the soft, muted gasp of your undoing. hands buried under whale-bone-brittle ribs, he cracks them open. one by one. you don't tell him that your breath tremors, don't tell him you suffocate under his weight. that you shiver against his callouses in a way unbecoming of the holy.

you only nod. eyes docile and dumb and animal, his lovely little lamb. let your creator squeeze the sugar-plum sweetness from porcelain cheeks and call you angel. let him rinse your spine raw in holy water, let him read scripture in every trembling vertebrae.

when the pink in your gums finally erodes, swallow the ache and kneel. kneel at his altar, kneel until your skin bruises with bible-soft devotion.

3. don't you know? god was once your father.

[threewordusername]

a monster with too many limbs

d.b.a

[byunghunnie]

i have this sudden urge to change everything.