#a pen and some words
“he raises his voice
higher than he would his hands
and for that I guess
I should be
grateful”
- d.c.
what are you doing
when I am loading my pockets with pepper spray
and walking in the dark
through the neighborhood that raised me,
canister clutched in my palm
the whole way of my
pre-planned and pre-approved route,
inconspicuously tucked
within the sleeve of my jacket,
finger on the trigger,
keeping careful watch
of the shadows appearing and disappearing
on the pavement before me,
ready
what are you doing
when I am wasting time
sifting through statistics,
weighing the odds
of the blade being turned upon me
if I choose to carry a folding knife
for my protection
except it’s not a waste of time
because it could make the difference
between me being here tomorrow
or not
what are you doing
when my father is telling me
I shouldn’t be wearing those kinds of skirts
and my mother is nodding sadly
alongside him in agreement,
staring at my knobbly bare knees
what are you doing
when I am screaming at you
to look around at the women
circling the parking lots
for a space closer to the grocery store
because a shorter distance means
we are prey for a shorter window of time
what are you doing
when my brother asks me
how my walk was
and I tell him it wasn’t a walk
but a funeral procession of my liberties
and a march for my rights
all in one
what are you doing
with all of this information?
what are you doing
about this now.
- d.c.
“have you noticed
how the sharply delineated edges
of bad memories
soften and curl in on themselves
when inevitably placed
to the flame of time
they are burnt by a nostalgia
that in the moment
you could have sworn
you would never fuel
if we cannot forgive
life makes us forget
so that we move forward
with lighter step”
- d.c.
“the girl with the hummingbird heart
is me.
it sounds like a beautiful companionship,
but it’s not.
there are no flowers in my chest;
their necks were snapped in The Trampling
by the muddy, spike-clad soles of
disingenuous relations past.
their decapitated heads have long since
decayed into the soil
that now fills my organs with
dirt and death.
nothing grows anymore—
there’s not enough air.
they took that with them too,
but they left this
poor,
silly little bird
whose wings are too strong
for me to break.”
—a metaphor of my anxiety
- d.c.
“i am overcome with
the feeling
that i am failing
at something
somewhere
in a very vague
and abstract
but terrifying and
convincing
kind of way;
i mourn not for what i have known
and lost
bur for that
which is lost
on me”
- d.c.
“Have you looked at this world?” she parried. Her demeanor was calm. Her question, rhetorical. Her gaze, fixed upon the forever expanding horizon that lay infinitely out there before us. As impressive as I knew the landscape to be, for whatever reason just then, I could not take my eyes off her. And with the slightest hint of a wry grin, she smiled through her answer. “I romanticize to stay alive.”
- d.c.
“It’s not enough to
have you
in mere
stolen moments
that are
too
few
and
far
between.
I do not wish
to dip
my toes
into that
in which
I cannot
freely
wade.”
- d.c.
“Do I love him
more than I love
how much he loves me?”
- d.c.
“Sometimes loving greatly means losing great love.”
- d.c.
“was it lust for him
or love for the way
you saw yourself in his eyes?”
- d.c.
“I am keenly aware
that my feelings
do not make a dent in his life,
but deep down,
in a place of twisted compassion,
I know
I wouldn’t really want them to.
So I’ll watch out the car window
with a rubber neck
as someone
who looks an awful lot like me
gets absolutely totaled;
the wailing sirens
and flashing lights
performative afterthoughts
of warning.”
- d.c.
“why does he look like morphine
but taste like pain”
- d.c.
“I can make peace
(I think)
with the way things are
and might always be
and I will try not to want more
(of you)”
- d.c.
“…and for a second there
these silly little delusions
looked to me like
big subtle breakthroughs of truth.”
- d.c.
“the lows burry me beneath the rubble of hell but the highs no drug in the world can parallel” - d.c.
“we’re a losing game
i know that
but a sick part of me
loves the torture”
- d.c.
“we locked into each other’s line of vision
and neither of us could deny
how the possibility of that life,
for a mere second,
broadcasted upon our lighted retinas
like a dusty, old movie projector
flickering awake
a private viewing for just us two
misbehaving strangers
sat on opposite sides of a
red velvet theatre
staring at the same panoramic screen
playing a fabricated fiction
of tempting what-ifs
and could-bes
i won’t hold it against you
if you choose not to acknowledge it aloud;
i was just as terrified to open my mouth
but as we stared,
our eyes conversed
and they disclosed
everything.”
- d.c.
“Never make yourself more
palatable for others;
they’ll either eat you whole,
or nibble you away
in bite-sized chunks.”
- d.c.
“I find I exist most authentically
somewhere between
cursive and chicken scratch—
that is to say
in written word,
not lens,
for photography fails and deceives
in so far as it tries
to contain me
in an immortalized image
whereby the eye defines me
a perceived singularity.” - d.c.
“we were two silhouettes
on a cobblestone path
wading through the orange blood of lamplight
our liquor-laden limbs
lassoed around each other
our fingertips
sizzling with sin”
- d.c.
