I think my backne is coming to life
I’ve only ever known living things to complain, anyway and those pissy pus-filled monsters are as bratty as they come They borrow my sweaters without asking oh, and they cry a lot they cry on my sweaters I didn’t realize pimples could have so many feelings but they do I would know they’re all over my sweaters I like to imagine that they’re a metaphor sometimes like their rosy complexion is the touch of prophecy from a hand up above but this lasts only as long as I believe in God so it’s more likely that they are noisy tenants on my skin that never pay their rent Reminders that even if I cloaked myself with the skins of the night sky all the moons would find something to scream over disappear themselves into black holes mottling the swarthy fabric yarn unraveling and twisting on its own strands I feel like a cross-dressing warrior wondering when my insides will reflect my outsides Backne is both devil and angel on my shoulders One compelling me to cover my spine at the BBQ for fear of all that exposure and the other reminding me that those who love film wait for it to develop trace bodily constellations across my back with a thumb mark my memory with their tongues and they won’t be talking about my backne because it is mere accessory to a bigger life It was never like this in the dreams Somehow, I was always either the fairest of them all or the beast guarding her tower no one said that I’d be more like Halfling Some upright thing stuck uncomfortably between the form of girl and monster her mind a ghost her body a root suffocating underground as backne grows like overripe purple fruit threatening to feed gravity and fall or, like baby birds cradled by tree arms throats hungry their orphaned wings prophesying flight
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How many Asians does it take
to shut racism down? Trick question. Everyone knows Asians die quietly. While dancing through admissions systems not designed for us as the world runs on railroad tracks our grandfather's backs laid where does the train go today? The one time we raised our voices was when they prosecuted us like "the Blacks" like our skin wasn't stitched into the golden hide of history enough Wanted to be America so bad that we colored our racism the same lines barely capable of containing all that negative space The violence inside of us forgetting that in the end, Peter Liang's blood would've been an identical stain on that starving, naked floor Woman
as if I need a man to be woman without a man is wo in Chinese, this means Me Means permission to be a person that I gave to myself I Wo Means waking up to thunder and heat rumbling from black tangle of hair no one could force my hand to shave Means making my own forest out of flame and the smell of it coaxes ravens to flee the wolves sing a hymn as the logging industry is razed to the ground my eyelashes the moon that winks through the elbows of smoking branches that are both altar and lamb both the sacrifice and the betrayal and the forgiveness and the holy Wo was here before the 30th birthday was here before the man here since the first old maid Wo was woodsmoke in belly was blood in dirt and through the veins of leaves that gave shade and wilted under it Wo gave and took it away took and made two of herself she married her the sky cried for days there was a fire that the logging industry razed to the ground the ashes turned into a flood all the leaves wilted and the altar was bloody on the 30th birthday, someone wrote a bible and it was wrong they forgot about the ravens the ravens saw this happen captive, they are known to speak And then she became the epistemology she can't stop talking about with herself
Little kid asks if God can be God and His own mother Bible study teacher says this is a silly question explains God is bigger than your brain we can't claim to know His shape or motivations or how He pushes a bud into blossom or how He swallows up the blood of an entire nation leaving behind only fashionable coffee shops and fading shrieks of graffiti know simply that He does It is beyond the tender slips of minds to conceptualize so niggling and impossible a thought as why? The child cries, How, then, if we are so small and unknowing ignorant and baked under our own sun can we presume to know as much as His existence? Maybe the holiest creed is not knowing is never knowing or ever proclaiming what does not a have a name to proclaim Upon her saying this, all the lights went out the room somehow crawled smaller The child is afraid, but never so sure of her unsureness she worries that when God comes she won't believe in Him But maybe the child is God's pinky maybe the child is God and her pinky is an acorn and her fingerprints are the forest and an acorn is smaller than a forest but also somehow bigger balancing on the folds of God's pinky and God is a child and the child isn't you but she was yesterday This morning I woke up in someone else's arms
my skin bubbled away from the chokehold even as every bronchiole tugged me closer begging for a whiff just one my hair was falling off and every artery slipped and pooled, noodle-like, on the sheets that were white yesterday teeth crept back to their roots fingers crawled into oddly pouched knuckles my spine curled into an interrobang caricatured in mock surprise that my hands were trying to kill me again I.
Imagine stepping into my hollow tank your toes splaying against the smooth tile steps you're wearing your best dress and a full face of makeup Ketchup will never again plop onto the pale lace mascara will never run again The Experience Machine will never allow this. So step into me. II. The technicians circle you as you ease your whispery bones into the tideless liquid placing electrodes on every spot that betrays a pulse This is the beginning of an endless dream the best you've ever had You feel like a funny little astronaut as they pull a respirator over your nose you imagine rocketing to the moon there is a spaceship and enough freeze-dried ice cream for you to always have extra I slosh with promises as you twitch your muscles into a calm A whir begins, signaling a woman without a face to clap fluffy headphones over your ears unbidden, you start the countdown in your head you glide under The door has latched shut but you don't notice I trace your heartbeat ringing through my glass walls excitedly your ears straining into the deafness Step into me. III. You wake up in silk there is a tray of gouda, palmiers, and your favorite tea simmering in a porcelain cup that never cools or shatters there are real elephants on your porch your porch stretches like a football field and it's the prettiest football field and you imagine you'll have time to learn the rules later you imagine you are already the star quarterback and you make up all the rules I am stringing together dandelions and Christmas lights that will sing for you if you touch them and you will touch them Step into me. IV. maybe you'll swim later in the blue lake with soft white sand or the streets that have never seen a hungry knife or hail you don't want to remember what those are so you forget the analogy you were making I hug you closer it is almost gone Step into me. V. you decide that you will nap you aren't tired, but you close your eyes anyway maybe you'll dream about your life before maybe you won't dream at all VI. A billion miles ago, another little girl gets lost in the Experience Institution the lights have dimmed in the cool room the scientists have all gone to sleep she skitters away from a beep in a machine and stumbles into me peers into my glass panels and sees pale lace and a full set of lashes and Christmas lights runs the other way looks back only once All my life, strength came from the ways
I could keep my fists up hide my sides with barbed brick elbows protect my nose with a zipped-lip smile that said I'm just trying to get by so thank you for not testing which of our bodies would break first upon each other not knowing that there were more ways to hurt a girl than a stoning or a crucifixion for the world spoke sticks and stones, I thought But words are what built me see, I was lonely before I learned the language of human being so I traced the alphabet of a book spine licked scraps of people I wanted to be off the pages and let them breathe through me I should have known that people made of ink and paper burn eventually When you said I was a wolf, a stain, and that you hated me I bled. For the first time, I saw red and it was not at all what Shakespeare said it would be It twists me to be talked about and the more I crumple, the less I feel like the wings of a paper plane and more like a rough draft suffocating in the trash can Maybe blood slipping from my lips could stand trial to prove my humanity Maybe if you knew I was capable of sleep you'd stop seeing your monsters reflected on me realize it was my shadow you were afraid of not these fingers not these teeth I've been dissecting your misunderstanding for awhile now I walk with a straight back wear a quick smile and Converse humor on my tripping feet I weigh 103 lbs, they call me skinny I laugh and say I'm just light enough to fly after all, with wings you gotta know a thing or two about self-preservation modesty is preferable white is best easier to bury when clad already in mourning but for all your looking, you missed a few things I walk with an iron bar up my back because if you fall, they'll kick you The smile is to distract you from the eyes that can barely see through all the water Converse shoes don't replace the layers of skin whipped straight off my body I may be light enough to be skinny, but to fly you've got to fall and if you fall, they'll kick you But you'll crawl by and you won't even know ever ask ever exorcise the spite blinding your eyes you'd sooner watch the favored one fall and kick her like, she won't miss a tooth or two she's too busy counting her lucky stars as if the stars come out anymore and the nighttime stretches on forever I've never wanted a story to end this bad. I used to love reading pages flicking forth and back and forth like wings, falling and rising, inventing flight I used to read my favorite lines over and over but you've forced a script into my mouth and it's saying terrible things in your language of sticks and stones I'm a bone you've sucked the marrow from the insides of You know, there won't be any left for the mushrooms if you give my all to the dogs I wish I were the wolf you made me out to be then, maybe, we could have just talked it out
Don’t cry
you tried your best Never ever tell Secrets are most fun when brought to hell so put your thoughts back on the shelf you ain’t going anywhere You’re going down with your pawns Aren’t you glad I ain’t coming Too late to look back now you have carved your coffin or were you just planning it especially for me? Oh, please. You’ve overestimated your worth to me You’ve made a mistake that don’t wash out easily So now that it’s just us what do you have to say? Don’t you know that games have rules? I know how you like to play [Nick] Secrets burying you with secrets You write only secrets and now they’re wronging you [Nick] You’ve overestimated your worth to me You’ve made a mistake that don’t wash out easily So now that it’s just us what do you have to say? Don’t you know that games have rules? I know how you like to play Secrets burying you with secrets You write only secrets and now they’re wronging you There is something shady about legumes
which leads me to think they must be good for you but still, I can't bear to slide their little torsos down my throat It feels kind of cannibalistic how forgiving their sandy innards are as you break into their skin patterning your teeth with them like a beany kaleidoscope Second grade ruined the exercise of eating when I wetted some Bounty in the laundry room tucked my lima bean in and found not a day later, my bean began to grow unfurling a little green pinkie like a peace offering or early lesson on the hazards of puberty When I saw this reaching and needing for light I didn't understand how anyone could stand to digest something so obviously alive I am listening to an end
when mechanical silence slices the artist's voice into emptiness and the room is awash with salty waves of nothing but the unfeeling snip of my nail clippers My brain is a metastasizing bramble bush of indignation This was not a matter of bad transition into another song, no, this was a bad transition into its own end I felt that the oaky croon deserved better than an unpunctuated sentence leaving me only with the hot deprivation of wanting and crashing into nothing but eggshell expectations before realizing this was the first time I felt something the entire damn time I got to thinking in that pause before the female warble of the next queued up body jauntily erased the quiet that there must be some meaning in nothing then |
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