#elsa kennedy

[writelikefools2021]

tsunami mommy - elsa kennedy - day 7

your skin is the sea your brain is a brick melting and molding to me

in phrygian exhales you ground an albatross scatter the arrowhead geese

your hunger is catastrophic, babe the mountains are purring, bucking off bridges like thoroughbreds in estrus

i’m just a drinker licking up landslides building new homes with my tongue

[writelikefools2021]

i’m not mad, just disappointed - elsa kennedy - day 6

life is taking me longer and longer for shorter and shorter amounts of time

now i just let myself scream in slow motion now is the time that would’ve been the time after the time that was the ‘It’s Time’ like the part where after living & dying the next thing happens whatever that ends up to be

this would be the best new beginning if it wasn’t trying to birth itself from the crypt of all the others that died prematurely

i’m so fucking high and i don’t even like being high i can’t remember the last week

and im not sure if it’s because my brain is so, so thirsty and so, so close to water but it’s big legs are in the way or if it’s because of the weed, better than alternatives, alternatives, alternatives..

i dont even like being high but something seems broken inside my usual willingness to throw my pain to the wolves for consumption in exchange for another 24 hours of life i can’t throw my pain and i can’t use it i can’t see beyond, before, or beside it and i can’t find the words that made my constant, silent martyrdom easier; there is nothing on the tip of my tongue all the languages are leaving my hands quiver as i try to hold my coffee cup i see her face and it throbs in time with the building pressure

and my brain, my brain my brain, the scapegoat’s scapegoat, my brain, it can’t stay in here, it’s cut itself off my brain, my brain my brainmybrainmybrainmybrainmybrainmybrain

[writelikefools2021]

a cinema for dreams - elsa kennedy - day 1

the hanged swan sewn with a lead head.

her face stays planted exactly where her neck broke.

here, she feels the earth’s eye, and sees the ground as it sees itself unshy of light.

the musk of burnt pitch minds to sift perspectives from a world with it’s face down -

she has opened a cinema for dreams she calls hallucinangels telenovelas with wings

to watch when she forgets what it felt like to fly.

cast on the backs of earthworms, a cinema for dreams.

[writelikefools2021]

edvard munch - elsa kennedy - day 28

i’ve unzipped myself out of innumerable skin suits for both crime and chastity. for neither does the metal tongue seek my permission

before a gaping mouth of nakedness closes around me and brings with it all bitten brutalities, like teeth thrust through a bottom lip.

all the swallowed screams erode for millennia, the approximate amount of time it took for an apology to drag itself up to die at my feet.

my silence is expensive and my patience is unyielding and my memory is inhuman; it will take sharp shape in strangers and saints, should i stop biting before the screaming begins.

[writelikefools2021]

palomino - elsa kennedy - day 17

truth be told it hurts more than my other duties to steady my hand

around her shaking. she roots around amongst the dreams we’ve discarded,

this circadian wasteland, our kingdom of glass and mismatched nightmares

a palomino tosses her head against our shared air that’s shrinking

against the contours of everything that lives here between our bodies

where is the eye, she screams with her galloping hands, of this hurricane

[writelikefools2021]

a to-do list before brain surgery - elsa kennedy - day 8

to do: - find slippers - make sure rent is rentable - get some microwaveable food - try not to cry or laugh - don’t smoke after sex - write down the names & crimes of my mortal enemies in separate encoded notes - assign each enemy to someone i trust, for the vanquishing of said incriminated individual should they still be living at the time of my death - decide the appropriate punishment to be served to each individual should they be living - hide each note in a secret location only to be revealed via self-immolating letter should i be diagnosed with brain and/or total death before any one of aforementioned incriminated individuals - burn my hard drive - call insurance - facetime for pasta *wednesday???* - freeze that soup from last week - get the dog stuff for the dog - pants

[writelikefools2021]

nothing but a body - elsa kennedy - day 5

i rehearsed tonight with herculean resolve; heard the traps shriek out with consumptive, kneading need and kill, again, the mother inside me;

felt the petals closing fast - like a woman’s hand like rose-spun chainmail all of our velvet rage cast in iron and quartz - on the cooled twin moons of my breasts pressed to the glass;

saw only blurry Van Gogh night, from my naked post, basement window swatting at streetlight phantoms; i was a spayed cat remembering heat for a bitter spring, stalked by maternity and eternity’s glare;

kissed by mineral light, curving for the pleasure of these indigo moments, when i can be nothing but a body draped in ideas and sidewalk shadows;

perched in the corner of a tired person’s vision, a bright flash of flesh on the long walk home.

[writelikefools2021]

aneurhythm - elsa kennedy - day 3

there’s this earworm, and it’s been here for a few weeks, and i don’t think that we can live together.

not peacefully, not when it’s a sound and a soul splitting one brain.

it won’t be much longer, not much longer at all until one of these tunnels caves in

and all my sharp, eaten words all the good days i’ve been saving for later burst to shrapnel, perforate the veil drape us instead in thick, symbiotic death.

mezcal con gusano, take me with the maguey worm. have the high but hold on to the bitterness -- this grub and i, chanting dying in 6/8 time: ‘my time is running out | feed your head my time is running out | feed your head’