logophilia

poems and various other writings by @strawberrv

[lesbeet]

postpartum

postpartum, i limp out of the raging waters the love lake full of blood, the crater where my heart once learned to grow shards of bone pierce through my purpled skin, my lungs deflated now the party is over i do not see the vultures but i feel them watching i see the atrophy devouring my fingers but when i try to scream my mouth is full of dirt and i choke when the winged things finally land on my sagging shoulders scab-skinned and repulsive there is nothing left for me to say so they eat me alive

[-sefa]

[stanzae]

we pray from behind our eyelids while we sleep, swallowing the echoes of our footsteps and clasping our hands together with a sloping, unspoken grace. our open mouths, open palms, rose cheeks and honey tongues, swollen bellies like cascading hills of mossy green, and flower petals covered in morning’s hazey dew-- it is near impossible to know where tenderness ends and deliverance begins. in this world we teach our children to trade their teeth for money, little white pieces of soulstuff crackling beneath downy pillows, from cupped hands to hidden corners of drawers and jewelry boxes-- or is it pristine ivory palaces? sometimes it can be so difficult to keep the stories in place. it is important to remember, when we enter this place shrieking, agony forcing us blind and white-hot with the pain of existing, to always exhale, and exhale, through the open lips of a worshipper, lest our mouths become filled with blood.

primavera // j.d.k.

[stanzae]

just because there are no words-- just because it doesn't translate (hips to heart to throat to your crawling skin) doesn't mean it doesn't exist, sitting there, a lump of black ash and bone fragments, the clot of blood in my veins, the creak in my old-young knees. i am trying to purge, to cleanse myself  of your toxins, all the dirty words you left behind, collecting dust and stale air. lemon water and cayenne pepper, bottled neatly in a mason jar, and all i can hear is your laughter echoing in my chest. i will force you out of this skin. i will excommunicate you from this body. my body. i will leave you amongst dead cells and clumps of hair on the dingy carpet, and when the middle-aged cleaning lady comes next week she will vacuum you from the floor  while she hums along to disco music.

eviction notice / j.d.k.

[stanzae]

it's your muffled scream while i hold the plastic bag over your head. it's my mother's voice  shouting down the stairs that  it could kill you, please be careful,  that isn't funny. it's a little bit funny in the way that a sharp knife is funny, after it's been extracted from someone's chest, in the way crab-apples drop from trees and are stepped on and run over, and they just reek and reek and reek until the seasons change. it's dusk and the walls are tinted from the sinking sun and you're still screaming like she's the only one who can save you. look at me. look. i'm the one with the hands around your neck.

suffocate // j.d.k.

[stanzae]

i want to ask the clock why it’s laughing at me but it can only talk with its hands. i never learned to sign because my fingers are spiders legs. would you let me wrap you in a web if i promised to keep it safe from all the brooms, all the scared children who kick at it with muddy sneakers? i am trying to breathe now. i am trying to breathe now. every strand of hair is a question. i rip chunks from my bloody scalp and you run through nursing homes kissing bald spots. where is my kiss? you must have lost it on the way over here. sometimes it’s hard to make the lips remember what to do.

if my heart cracked my chest open like an eggshell would you take it home and teach it to fly? or would you clip its wings and sell it to someone for dinner? i wish you had known me when i was a miracle. the sky wraps around us like an overcoat and we are too big to fit. there are eyelashes tucked into the pockets. make a wish.

[stanzae]

i am thinking / there are daydreams crushed like leaves in my small, childlike palms / i am thinking / how do you start with nothing and end up chewing on beating hearts? / lock me up, lock us all up / we steal atoms from the dead and show no remorse / our tire-track spines / our daisy-root fingertips /  you can drown in the ocean / nobody talks about how it feels to drown in light / how it pours into you like hot sand and melted gold and trickling flames / scorches your throat like whiskey but more / and it fills you until there is no room for anything else / and your bones are pushed out of your skin and / there is blood everywhere / you may suffocate / but at least you will be filled with light

illuminate // j.d.k.

[stanzae]

-who allowed you to do this? i say to the stars, they're so far away i don't know for certain if they've heard me. -nobody allows us to do anything i hear, it's not a whisper, really, not a sound at all, more like a feeling in between my lungs, -what feeds you? what keeps your fires raging? -we were asked to burn, and so we burn -by who? who asked you to burn? -the universe, and everything in it, they respond, the specks of dust and the shadows between, from the smallest thing to the container in which the universe resides, the bed on which it sleeps. -and what is your purpose? i plead, i beg their light to blind me, to fill me with warmth and grant my wishes, and they do not budge -to be, to be they answer, and it feels like a sigh

an interview // j.d.k.

[stanzae]

You see, I feel so much of everything all at once, often it nearly hurts, you know, hands trembling and breath ghosting through my lungs so quick I can't tell for sure if I'm inhaling or just pretending. So when he told me, "there is no sense in being timid, here," I didn't know what to do or  how to act. Do I pretend I can't feel our skin seeping together, smeared paint on a canvas that was torn in two so long ago? (Our edges line up in all the right places-- you can never be shredded to the point where you're unrecognizable, not really.) This is a time for tenacity, for gripping white-knuckled and sweaty-palmed, in that I-would-lose-my-mind-without-you way, in that it-hurts-when-we-are-apart way. Forgive me, but I believe  our souls must have joined this world holding hands.

for touch // j.d.k.

[stanzae]

Where does it come from? Who gives it to you? You know, the stuff that tumbles from your fingertips nearly too fast for you to keep up, the colors and lines and words and notes that feel like shooting stars soaring through hailstorms, landing deep in the swirling sea. How do you take thoughts and turn them into something you can see or hear or touch? And then, how do you take those and turn them into  something you can feel? Much is said about artists, about no heat and dirty floors and cheap apartments and ink stains and dark colors and bitterness and smoke and torture and torture and torture-- it's all true, isn't it? Does it matter? You see a painting, how does it make you feel? You hear a song, read a poem, and you can taste it, you can feel it surging through you like a revelation, like atonement. Someone took that grimacing knot from inside them and forced it (shuddering, screaming, violent, and so, so helpless) into the world, and for what? Some would say money, or fame, or empathy. I think it's so they can remember how to breathe again. What I'm asking is, how can I learn to create?

Dear Artists // j.d.k.

[stanzae]

I heard about a man who got sick-- he loved art so much they wheeled him to the museum once a month on a stretcher to look at the paintings. Maybe he was pretending to be in them, but it's hard to look at things from a hospital bed and expect them to be the same. I'm the kind of person who's always telling people to look at the moon. She hangs with such poise amidst the stars, like there's nowhere else she has to be except gently lighting up that endless sky. She's just so beautiful, I think it would be a shame to let her go unnoticed. I know how that feels, you see. Imagine: It's mid-afternoon and you're  laying in bed, and your hands  don't feel like your hands. Water, you think, water will help, because water is always supposed to help. But the white tile of the bathroom  seems too far away, and there's a person looking at you in the mirror, and you know you should recognize them, but you don't. You think you'd remember someone with eyes as dead as those. We're all looking for something to take us out from inside ourselves. The thing is, though, once we find it we want nothing more than to crawl back in and stay there for a universe or two.

Musings: Pt. I // j.d.k.

[stanzae]

i'm sorry that when you found me i was already cracked open, insides spilling out like candy gone rotten, stuck to the pavement and dried up in the heat of the sun. i didn't used to be this way. music didn't always used to stab me right in the chest, and people simply looked like people instead of gods, always so above me. i wish you had come sooner. i wish you had seen my eyes back when they  still had the light in them, and when i had something nice to say about everything. where were you when i was still lovely? why did it take you so long? i used to be so much more than this collection of half-finished sentences  and resigned gestures, stale words and a heartbeat that never quite stays in tempo. i wish you had seen it. maybe you'd have loved me then.

lessons in loving an optimist // j.d.k.

[stanzae]

a contest of passions: hot breath like smoke upon winter-wrapped goosebumps, mumbled oaths tangled together between tooth and tongue. a gun stuffed beneath a loose-fit t-shirt, nails digging like daggers into  sweat-slicked skin, leaving scars like hieroglyphs, like signatures. guerrilla heartfare, atom bomb detonations held in clammy palms, wounding and wailing, kisses thick as jungles, leaving  swollen lips beaded with bright blood. i want us, bound by bedsheets, wearing ligature marks proud like bracelets, bandages like badges, like trophies, we love so much we can't  hope to contain or control so we do not bother to try. the day you rip my beating heart straight from my splintered ribcage is the day i will truly know that i could never want anybody else.

thorns and roses // j.d.k.

[stanzae]

they devour bone, suck blood right from the veins and burrow into the spaces in the ribcage, hungry and shrieking, ever greedy and unsatisfied.  they render the eyes blind, dull and useless and unable to capture the light, there is no light, it is as if the light never was, and darkness covers all; it tastes like smoke and rain and wanting. torn flesh, delicate and reaching, peeling backward to make room for cascading drops of red, a heavy, heavy red so deep it is like being swallowed by the sun. muffled prayers bounce off eardrums and land on dirt and gravel, they are stepped on and dragged in mud and left there to die, withering, no louder than timid whispers, oh god, oh god, let us find something holy here, amen. lost things stay lost, stay shivering cold and motionless, broken teeth chattering and mouths whistling like harsh winds, bloodied tongues and scorched throats, this is how bodies become homes for monsters.

A DEMON IS SHACKING UP INSIDE ME, AND GOD IS NOWHERE TO BE FOUND // j.d.k.

[stanzae]

i. You fight because it is the most intimate act you can think of, the way blood flows from one body and spills onto the other, the way your bones collapse on impact, a meteorite fist landing in your concave crater cheek. ii. There are no skeletons in your closet--they're stuffed into the confession booth beside the altar to which you have chained yourself, and they rattle and they shake like a warning when you feel yourself drifting too far. (You are unsure whether this is because you are pious or because god is something you can see without a working pair of eyes.) iii.  Your memories are flame-licked and stained with blood, you've learned to read the wind and it whispers secrets into your ears. You know there is a pair of lips waiting to swallow you whole, heart and all; the shifts in the air tell you that you are gravitating in the wrong direction. iv. There is a compass tattooed to your insides and still you are hopelessly lost. Heaven and Hell are warring inside you, always brutal, always merciless. If you fall, does it mean that you, too, were once an angel?

manifesto for the unsung martyr // j.d.k.

[lesbeet]

i see your regional gothic and i will raise you: outer space gothic

You know it is breathtaking and beautiful, so striking that you are not sure you believe it even though you’ve never known your senses to lie. It is beautiful and yet there is something creeping at the edge of your vision, floating behind you and twinkling like a distant star, always blinking out of existence as soon as you turn your head.

It is the silence that suffocates you more than anything, more than the lack of oxygen, the pressure on your lungs that feels so foreign. It is a silence so crushing, and then there is a whisper. Radio broadcasts from an earthly war long past bounce between the stars, and occasionally you catch a glimpse of one, full of static and desperation–or, you think you do. You can never really tell what’s real, out here.

You are floating somewhere inside Ursa Major, and while each bone is light years from the next, you cannot help but feel like you have indeed been swallowed by some great beast, devoured whole and left to decay in the everlong darkness.

They say we are all made up of stardust; it is supposed to make us feel sacred. Instead you feel compressed, you look at the vastness and feel it pulsing inside of you, the bright stars calling every molecule home. You see planets, bold and looming, you feel yourself being pulled into their orbits against their wills.

You have yet to encounter a black hole, but you are bracing yourself. You know that the silence and emptiness you are experiencing now are childsplay, that getting swallowed with the light will burn more than the fire of any star could. You feel the universe expanding, flowing as if from your fingertips, reaching for something, some endless light beyond it all that you cannot see. You know with every part of you that it is there.

[stanzae]

i. You want to tell them you're surrounded by ghosts, not like the one in the room across the hall but the ones who crawl inside your throat and stay there, handpicking your words like tart berries and tossing them from between your juice-stained lips. ii. Your brothers smell like fast cars and asphalt, rage and danger and shadows and something like want, like desperation so potent it could engulf the world in flames. And what do you smell like? Cologne and lead pencils and a distant longing for a box of matches, just to prove to yourself that you, too, are capable of burning. iii. She smiles at you and you want to sew it to the inside of your wrist, so she can taste it every time your pulse quickens. iv. You are crisp and clean, you learned to say yes, ma'am before you knew how to call for  your own mother. The branches of your family tree tear at your eyes, its vines wrap around your aching throat. This is all you know of a mother's embrace. v. You are reckless and wild, something kept you alive and you feel it pulsing through you every second, sometimes it is louder than your own heartbeat. You want to say thank you but the only words that come out are i'm sorry, i'm sorry. vi. Rip out a page from your notebook and upon it, squeeze the blood from your swelling heart. Give them something they can use, for once, understand that your words mean nothing. vii. There is a target on your back and you don't even know it yet, but you feel it. You feel it and it burns, it aches, and you are so tired of waiting. hit me, you think, just hit me already.

an open letter to a would-be king // j.d.k.

[stanzae]

what god doesn't understand is that his angels know better-- we see heaven as it is, claws and all. the best way to hide the darkness in something is to paint it gold, hang tinsel and clouds and crystals, some feathered wings to make it seem like you could go anywhere except straight down below. halos are simply promise rings that carry oaths too heavy for humans' brittle fingers, binding and searing, molten metal that leaves angry scars. we bare our throats to god and he breathes something like holiness into our crippled lungs, and though we try to starve ourselves, to rip the light from underneath our skin (for we are so tired of shining, the glare burns our eyes and we can hardly see) we know deep down that there is nothing quite like it.

it’s all just decoration // j.d.k.

(prompt: “an ornamental heaven” from punkanubis)