Secrets accumulate atop my tongue, making beds in rooftop ridges and gap teeth.
After dinner I spit them out, all blue and crazed in a bathroom sink on another Sunday.
A girl prays to a god she feels unworthy to be loved by-
anything, or everything, or nothing at all
It is the wonder every September:
I feel her heart beat again.
I stretch my arms down a drain,
frantically searching for the means to scream, to be anything, or everything, or nothing at all.
goop thickening the walls,
syrup-like and sorry for making everything worse
much worse than ever before.
I follow the ant trail to a sad pillow,
heating up the center where agony breaks free.
I follow the ant trail to therapy every Monday at 11, and say much yet nothing at all.
I follow the ant trail to the walls I wish I’d step outside of.
I shower it over myself in hopes the thing inside is able to thin it out in time,
like tea on an anxious Tuesday.
But my sisters are perhaps weary of what clings to their shoes,
of hands stuck upon doorknobs and kitchen sinks and Wednesday’s dinner engulfed in goop.
I am frightened to believe what I have become.
I run to the supermarket and make a mountain of salt in aisle 24,
hoping to counteract the monstrous situation upon me,
smothered in the taste of all the things I needed to say,
in the sour shame coming back home all the same
on old clocks, windowsills, light switches, and more pillows, cold pillows on lone Thursdays,
I must not look at myself
slugging around and destroying a home I’ve made none but my own.
She is in picture frames,
Lovely and light and easy to hold
behind glass, handled with care.
Pity is dreaded fear, a pungent knock I want to ignore every time.
I weep onto the smile, the what-was, a known.
stretching myself down the drain,
uncertainty a growing depression—a well-known symptom of a heart beating faintly on Friday, under layers of each day before.
She is somewhere in the hollow parts,
in the shadow dancing on the edge of what lives outside,
in the music sticking onto a seen but unexperienced.
Saturday, I am the soles of hurried feet,
thump, thump, thumping like knocking—a thunderous prayer possibly heard.
I follow it to my mother’s voice,
shoes kept neatly in spaces just for me.
To follow the ant trail to the old town lived once before-
I feel her heart beat again,
the center where agony breaks free!?
An ant trail follows me down to
the places that consume me.
She tastes the sweet outpour of will,
or anything, or everything, or nothing at all.
A girl prays to god, on a Sunday-
titsay
baratheonpilled
kianamaiart
yousharknotpass
turnnoffyourmind
theartofmadeline