emmarose back from the dead
You are 15
and your life is
sandpaper.
It wears at
your heart.
you let it.
You have a
coyote’s howl
stuck in your throat.
you cut off your hair
but I know that
you cut off
so much more
than that
You read Pessoa
or Bukowski
or Hemingway
and these old men
haunt you
with their hurt.
stop wiping tears
off of the dead.
stop feeding statues.
-Lana Maric, The Inner Workings of A Sympathetic Hurricane or Note to Self
packing boxes & empty closets & trash bins full of memories
Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers.
—Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds
what goes through your head after he leaves you
You change the locks on your apartment, wash everything
he touched. Even if it means scrubbing the toilet bowl,
the bedsprings, the kitchen floor three times over.
Smash plates one after the other, dump out all the mint tea.
Learn how to pronounce your name without his immediately
after it, it’s hard at first, like holding a peach pit in the precise
spot between tongue and tongue’s roots. Lie awake
in a pool of your own sweat remembering his kisses,
eat cereal naked in the kitchen until it tastes like sawdust
just to get the taste of him out of your mouth. Start treating
your body like kitestrings, get tangled up in bad men
who fuck you over the same table you didn’t have dinner on
buy little black dresses then tear them up and dance
under their confetti like a séance. Record your voice
saying his name and play it on loop, burn the little bridge
in your backyard for real then light up the bedsheets
with the stain from the first time. Make people afraid
of how much they love you; steal lingerie to wear
in the beds of foreign strangers. Write sympathy cards
for yourself but send none of them. Miss him.
Go lie in the carcass of a giant blue whale beached
on the shore nearest your house; make a home from
its rib bones only, rattle them until they match the sound
of your heart. Dismantle the carcass with your bare hands.
Start over again.
Start clean.
I knew it wasn’t too important, but it made me sad anyway.
—J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye.
saying women shouldn’t be allowed to get abortions because they were the ones who had unprotected sex is like saying smokers shouldn’t receive treatment for lung cancer or drivers shouldn’t receive treatment in a car crash because they knew the risks when they got a driving license
Shirin Neshat with Sussan Deyhim. Logic of the Birds, 2001.
Inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.
—Anthony Marra, from A Constellation Of Vital Phenomena
