you are my favorite poet ever. every single thing you write is stunning and i always read your works when i want to get inspired
keep writing!!!!
Thank u <3 I’ve been feeling discouraged lately & needed to hear this
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@doebrain
you are my favorite poet ever. every single thing you write is stunning and i always read your works when i want to get inspired
keep writing!!!!
Thank u <3 I’ve been feeling discouraged lately & needed to hear this
and when I go, I want to be buried without embalming. No chemicals. No interruption of the body’s return to mineral. Let my sadness feed a tree. Let the roots touch my jaw and carry whatever I could not say into the blossoms. Let a child pick the fruit and taste salt and not know why.
Let that be enough.
i have been thinking about the way horses will sometimes lie down when they’ve been overworked. you can beat them or starve them and they won’t get up. they understand something final. there is a term for it in old veterinary texts: recumbency without response. they cannot be coaxed.
i cannot be coaxed.
the psyche has laid down and the body keeps marching. my legs carry me to the park. i remember to pack a muesli bar. i behave like someone who is fine. i move my mouth in socially acceptable movements. i giggle. i answer questions. i develop a stomach ulcer.
i stand in the bath and try not to remember the versions of myself that lay here before, fetal and failed. instead, i rinse. i pour rosewater over my thighs. i scrub until my skin looks like it belongs to someone else.
some women cope by praying. others by working. others by setting things on fire. i write until my fingers ache. until i am empty enough to pass through a room unnoticed. until the rage climbs back into its little drawer. i tuck it in with a cotton cloth. i give it a kiss. i promise it tomorrow. you can only bleed out in so many places before they become sacred. i can no longer afford to be found in pieces.
lamb-theorem: performed innocence as experiment
girlhood as spectacle, wrists pinned to docility / innocence is recited, a script to be memorised, enforced through smiles that split, eyes widened for their comfort / compliance learned by repetition, elbows close, knees together, voice softened to velvet / they examine the specimen: is she sweet, is she safe, does she acquiesce / i barter innocence for peace, trade softness for safety / i am dissected by intention, rendered harmless for public consumption / fragility is currency, spent by twelve, body rehearsed for the gaze / i disappear in increments, become hypothesis: how much sweetness before something vital dissolves //
autopsy notes for when they finally ask what happened
cut along the sternum / fold back the ribs / observe the lung: still damp with begging / note the stomach, full of dry pills and unsaid things / brain: cross-section reveals she thought about dying every thursday / sometimes tuesday / but never sunday / scalp: scar tissue where she tried to pull her thoughts out by the root / spine: bent in ways no vertebrae should bend / likely from carrying silence as a second skeleton / uterus: unused but over-mourned / hands: trembling but consistent / they still tried to write poems about hunger / even when the mouth forgot how to speak it / this was not the cry for help / this was the help / this was the only thing she could make with pain that didn't rot on arrival /
you can call it what you like / either way / she bled for it
the fruit fell because it knew you
the rind split before your mouth could even open
as if some ancient orchard bloomed beneath your ribs in anticipation
of your teeth i'm talking about design i'm talking about the slow erosion of cause until want looks like nature you thought you chose the plum
but its sugar had already calcified along the coils of your intestines
before you were a thing with fingers
(before you were a thing with doubt)
& i wonder if desire ever existed outside the body
or if it's just another term for digestion
something tender turned instinct
each taste a record of what the tongue has already forgiven
i watched a girl fold her hunger into neat quadrants
like lab reports
creases apologising
for needing anything at all she swallowed apricots until
the pit counted her as kin she thought that made her holy or worth preserving
what i mean is: there's no such thing as choice just a sequence of ripenings arranged for your convenience
the flesh goes soft because it knew you'd come for it i mean—how dare you pretend you're a stranger to sweetness
when the world keeps splitting itself open just to be known by your mouth
you didn't earn the fruit you are the fruit designed to be softened harvested forgiven
& still you wonder why it tastes so much like guilt
no // i haven't bled in the typical way / but i have been changing colours lately / and everything that tastes sweet makes me sick / and the animals keep following me
let this stand as a small paper
submitted to no journal
conclusion inconclusive but replicable
some bodies are not broken
they are simply unchosen
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.
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.
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
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)
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.
oracle was wrong & so i lit the house
i didn't want to arrive here either // but the bone-laced cupboard wouldn't close itself // so i fed it hours // fed it my brothers tin-foil teeth // fed it the silence between my mother's hands when she snapped // a bag of walnuts & nothing spilled but air // nothing split but her // then came the glass dust in the mattress // the way a body folds to survive its own attic // then came the angel // i asked (without asking) for it to take away my father's face // not the memory, the shape // not the shape, the wanting // because wanting makes it real // because wanting is the last muscle you lose // because wanting is something they put in my milk when i was nine // i've been gagging on futures ever since
you don't see the sky when you burn the ceiling // you don't leave when the door doesn't close // i was told love was warm once // but so is a stovetop // so is a lamb before it learns what sharpness can do // the angel (still present) measured my pulse in seconds // not beats // it said: survive this & you're still wrong // survive this & you still owe // and i did // and i do
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
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
[astrocyte canticle with counterfeit sugar]
i turn the jaw a degree toward midnight. i am trying to measure the fluorescence that sprints through cranial tunnels like contraband light // my pulse goes staccato in the wrists and the tongue tastes of antiseptic fennel // i am orderly-disordered // a lab note written on living tissue // the cortex purrs // sweetness arrives disguised as gauze and exits as iron filings across the palate // i keep saying it's nothing and the zygomatic muscles disagree // they twitch like minnows i cannot name because sea life here is theoretical and brackish and very pink // the innocence i borrowed from childhood cartoons ferments into something bristled and pearlescent // a toy with pins tucked beneath its velvet smile // look // i divide desire into organ systems // pituitary glitter // thymus recanting // bile with opinions // syrinx of breath whistling through a throat built for yes/no binaries // and then the cuter thought arrives–a little lamb made of frosting and formaldehyde // docile on the tray // i'm embarrassed by how quickly my gaze becomes a scalpel // how i trace from manubrium to sternum tip (polite & clinical) while a sugary fog slithers behind the teeth // innocence // not clean // i am obedient only when it serves me // i do not need hard narratives // i need phosphorescence draped over cartilage // i need a minor quale in the temporal lobe to put glitter on embarrassment // darling cleverness // darling rotunda of thought // keep sprinting along the myelin // the body says proceed and i proceed // gleeful // clinical // a little wicked with the frosting knife
and then a correction // i invent a detour under the scapula where heat gathers // i open nothing // i observe everything // i chart without charts using finesse and low light // the innocence-creature smirks // thorn-lipped // honey-voiced // something saccharine with razors // i keep my mouth neutral // i taste peroxide grapes // i annotate in slashes instead of that other thing you're expecting // [note] when the parietal region flares // the world gains a border // not a mirror // not glass // just a gloved like between urge and act // i stand on the safe side and lick my teeth // tachycardia against ribs-that-are-not-ribs // cartilage drums a private meter // soft percussion // clean // sterile // then a little laugh hatched in the epiglottis // poor bird // just sound wearing feathers // i let it fly into the ceiling of my skull // where everything sheds glitter and nothing breaks
lastly // to reconcile the dangerous darling who tastes like spun sugar and antiseptic // i dose myself with quiet thunder // an internal weather // in that climate i am doctor and specimen // velvet and wire // i lick the beaker clean // i refuse remedy // i preserve observation // and if sweetness knocks.. // i pocket the scalpel shaped thought for later