Flood Journal

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[artificialmonsters]

There is a boy looking at you, holding your face with his artist’s hands, and you want so badly to take your own and crush his heart between them because the way he just leaves it out in the open makes you more angry than it should. 

You’re angry because he has the audacity to wear his hurt without shame, when you carry the stink of it on your skin. When anyone else who smells it on you looks at you like you’re damaged. Like whatever is left is evidence of ruin. 

You want to tell him that you’re hollow and that you ran out of the words he fell in love with a long time ago. You stand in front of this beautiful boy and can hardly breathe through your envy because he has the words needed to leave his pain outside, and all you have is your rage. 

When he calls you beautiful, it feels like a joke. 

And maybe you want to destroy any traces of hope because why should this boy, who holds his pain in his eyes like he isn’t afraid of how you might use it against him, have any? Why should he not learn the lesson they forced down your throat? 

But he’s reaching out for you with those gentle hands and you find yourself holding them, anchoring him, and he says, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”, and your anger goes cold and you feel absolutely nothing, all iced out and empty.

That’s what you tell yourself anyway, but some part of you wonders what it must feel like, 

to reach out and be offered kindness.

[artificialmonsters]

today, you shimmy on the train while people shoot you looks from behind their magazines / you sway from side to side in your old shoes / accept that maybe you’re not okay but you will be soon / realize that you are not ashamed to feel so much / that you’re ready to let emotions flow out your cupped hands and paint the floor / leave a dripping, surreal mess / you want to lie down and make angels in it / you want to color this town with all the shades you have / spill outside the lines / forget about picture-perfect / everybody lives like they’re being watched anyway / and you’re tired of rehearsing for the show / you want to let yourself feel everything / with intensity that leaves you unsteady / but still laughing through it all

[thiswinterheart]

you worry that there is something twisted deep inside of you, the process of congealement. your heart becoming an other, teething, undivined. somehow you missed the memo. transmogrification. water to ice, mineral to rock, heart to a different kind of beast altogether.

were you missing her? (the girl you were) is that why you ate your heart? (to redress the balance) did it taste like victory? (sweet sheened sour)

you are drawn inwards, something alien in the thrum of your chest. an inhuman change. your own labyrinth. there’s a demon somewhere in this sacrarium, there’s a goddess somewhere. the same, clutching a trident and a conch shell, the promise of a war to come.

[artificialmonsters]

When they ask why you stayed, you think about all the other women who did.

The ones who keep smiling with split lips. The ones who grew up thinking that if they just loved the beast hard enough, he’d become a prince.

And god, wasn’t there something in him that struck you as worth saving.

Like when you slammed the door shut between the two of you, and he knocked on it and asked you to come out and see the sun set. Held your hand when you gave it to him. Kissed the knuckles you’d bit down on hoping to stifle sobs.

Or when you told him you never wanted to talk to him again, and he showed up with flowers outside your window.

And hadn’t you grown up thinking this was what love was? Being chased by somebody who was convinced you were perfect for each other? That all you had to do was brush the ugliness under the carpet to have a happy ending.

He tells you that there is nobody else in the world who would believe in him, and you believe this too. Just because it means he needs you. Even if he doesn’t tell you. You’re the girl whose arms he comes running back to at the end of it all, and that’s what they said romance was all about. Somebody whose arms feel like home. Where you stay, even if the house starts burning and he’s the one who lit the match.

He holds you in his arms as you sway amongst the flames, stroking your hair and telling you it will all be alright. You rest your head on his shoulder, listen to his voice like it is your favorite lullaby. It’s what calmed you down when you were a child. You’d like to think he’s here to rescue you from the monsters but somewhere along the way, you realized that maybe his arms are more cage than means of escape.

The narrative isn’t perfect that way, so you try your best to play your part. Play the right song, wear the right dress, laugh the right way. Keep your hands around him and your eyes on the window.

You waited for the story to change.

[humaintain]

bright descent /////// dark ascent

(excerpts from my wip chapbook, tentatively titled newbloom)

[emptyfingertips]

                                                    FADE IN

A TRIAD WALKING DOWNTOWN.

scene: a trio squeezes through the crowd, parting lines      like              Moses, waves of bodies           crashing along the concrete      curbs.         he holds her hand       and she holds        her hand and they          go to cafes talk      davis & hooks         & Morrison the only   big   fight is about who will buy          her coffee       first. there is no    triangle to break, no           i-saw-her-firsts        only the curl      of his hand         and her hand over her hand(s)        

         downtown.

 - J.S. script for a romcom without the shitty love triangle

[thiswinterheart]

[artificialmonsters]

“sometimes you have to hurt to get better,” my physiotherapist says, as she jabs her elbow into my shoulder, and i think of pressing wounds to heal.  

i try to think of all ways you disappointed me.

i think of your empty promises, the bitter taste in my mouth when you told me you had to cancel the date again but i could come over if i wanted. i think of how you told me you thought she was beautiful knowing that i would stand in front of the mirror and wonder if i wasn’t. i think of the way you looked away when i told you i knew you couldn’t hurt me. 

i press the wound until the tears come to my eyes and i’m stumbling around, vision hazy and teeth cutting into lips. 

i press down into the wine-soaked nights with all the boys whose names didn’t matter because i could only hear yours. i press down into the pictures of us that feel sharper than i’d expected. i press down until my hands feel too bruised to write this poem.

i keep going anyway. i make my way through the rose-bushes of my memories until i’m all scratched up and clinging to petals or stems or something that looks like love. 

i curl my nails into my palms to keep it in place, limp towards the light. they say it hurts until it doesn’t, and if this is the end, at least i’ll have flowers for the grave of what we buried. or just a handful of hurt. (did i mean dirt?) 

kiss me again, one last time. 

i think it might hurt just enough, to get a physiotherapist’s nod of approval.

[artificialmonsters]

the singer croons about being everything her lover dreads as you spin me around on the dance-floor. 

i want to laugh because i do know what it feels like to terrify. 

to be the phantom under your floor, to leave you with widened eyes and a sinking feeling in your chest.

to leave a messy heart on your doorstep, like the carcass of a small animal your cat dragged in. like some kind of disgusting gift you accept with a grimace and throw out with the trash, with the wilting flowers and painstakingly picked-picked out pretty words. 

come on, darling, let me slide off this mask.

this smile is chipping and i’m leaving behind paint flecks like breadcrumbs.

will you follow me into the woods? 

let me place my fingers on the side of your face, make you stare at what is awful. 

does this scare you?

do you love this?

does it scare you that you know you do?

it is so easy, to make a monster out of somebody who is ugly.

[emptyfingertips]

once upon a time, there was Red. lion-hearted girl, always armed with daggers by her chest. most think she got away because the Big Bad wasn’t quick enough. strong enough. some say she’s but bones on the forest floor. fewer still whisper maybe there’s nothing left of her to begin with, but Red wears Grey. the mouth of the Big Bad adorns her hair like a bleached crown, snout tilted towards the skies as if asking for dominion over all.

villagers nearby keep telling the tale. Big Bad is who steals our young. Big Bad is who we fear. none who know the truth - the swish of a pelt, the glint of steel - come back to tell.

J.S. ‘the danger of a single perspective’

[aesterismos]

soft girl eats nails to become iron soft girl swallows water & swallows & swallows soft girl rusts from the inside out soft girl wants to be stainless steal soft girl hopes to bleed less & kiss more

efb | soft girl is prone to corrosion. (via aesterismos)

[crowsummer]

What else can you call privilege? Being able to dream of fighting and martyrdom. I wanted fighting and martyrdom. Maybe not violence, maybe not violent death - but I wanted to fight for or against something. I wanted it so badly I thought I would die if I couldn’t have it. You felt nothing in the suburbs though. The streets, the houses. Even the sky was the same, day in day out, an overwhelming blue that would swallow your life whole - and then what? I should not have been unhappy, but I was. I was so unhappy it frightened me.

Yiwei Chai, The Jacaranda Years (via crowsummer)

[thiswinterheart]

winter, for exam season

[artificialmonsters]

Dream Boy (a chapbook): “Congratulations, dream boy, you broke the ice queen’s composure.”

read it here 

[thiswinterheart]

51/52 weeks

crows bleed their shadows on the water

all winter. time means nothing to them

just cyclical incoherence, and we, insect-

like, clutched like eggs in her web. break;

her yarn-veined hands reach. 8 eyes watch.

crows chase mirrors on the water - beyond.

[crowsummer]

By Moonlight

I wrote because I had nothing else to do. Listen to that. Some ten thousand miles away, a girl is all by herself and so lonely. She sits in the walls and stares at the floor. Come quickly, come gently; she is vanishing and soon she will be gone. Like a bird; don’t startle her, don’t feed her. Just watch. 

I stuck to the paper because nothing would stick to me. That lonely bird girl, I saw her in my dreams. I could not sleep because of her, she tormented and harangued me, she plucked out my two eyes with her two hands. Before that, I was already blind, but this just added to the insult. And I was so insulted, I thought I would finally grow a spine just to snap it, whip like, across her back.

Ah me, ah my. Ah, the things that should have been mine. Through her, I was vicariously lonely. I forgot my own loneliness. Like a glass jar which lived in a glass house, I had a dream where she took out her organs and named them after all her feelings. This is the Heart, she said, but it is not really the Heart - it is only nine to twelve pounds of Flesh, which is a strange lie, because we live in Australia. I could not stand the sight of her liver and lungs, her stomach and spleen. Her milk-sop skin was unhinged like a door; when I woke the smell of it was still in the air, like laundry detergent and baby formula.

I ran to the bathroom and retched and retched until I thought I had died.

[artificialmonsters]

girl as wolf / girl as snarling mouth and sharpened claws / girl who stops running through the woods / girl as injured, bleeding animal / girl as broken body / girl dragging her self across the snow / girl howling at the night sky / girl as small, shivering heap / girl as tired as a girl can be / girl as survival after defeat