#mine all humans are secretly birds
the little mermaid
there is a girl and i am kissing her before the closed door to my family home and the peephole is dark with a pupil. my mouth gapes open like in death so she puts her tongue in it, the hook in fish-mouth. her hands slip beneath my shirt, the butcher’s knife, and she peels away the bones of my spine until i am nothing but sea foam in her palms. the cavern of her mouth, wide as a maw of a lonely whale, swallows me whole. when my mother opens the door she sees only the sea witch.
i am tired of writing poetry, and of you thinking it’s about you. the sun, i say, and you think it’s a metaphor for the way the scorn hangs from the corner of your lips. if i burn my feet because i ran barefoot on the path it is because you’d touched me when i had not wanted to be touched. the forked tongue is yours. the cleft feet, those are yours too. that metaphor about seabirds is a poor imitation of the time you’d brought me to the cinema and left the tickets at home. i am tired of your misreading. you are not beautiful in metaphor or hideous in parodied imagery. if i wrote about you i would speak only of your hands and the bruises, not of flowers that bloomed. if i wrote about you i would say only that the sun did not set nor rise, that being with you was a terrible stasis. i would not mention the curved neck of a great blue heron or the dead metaphor of a whale’s skeleton, i would not talk of floods when all you gave me was silence.
disembodiment is loss, you used to say, as your hand circled my wrist like the world’s most beautiful shackle. it is the loss of function, the acute feeling of absence, your fingers graze the side of my neck where the veins are the closest to the sun. we go to a museum that displays the fragments of hands, and you say, somewhere, the rest of the sculpture must be hurting, and i read the plaque and tell you that there is no rest, the hand is the sculpture. you cannot understand it. it has to come from somewhere, you insist, and your arm traps mine in a noose.
i understand it now — disembodiment. it is not about absence, about the loss of meaning or the gush of blood. i see disembodiment and it is the way i no longer love you; i cannot be kept the same way that fog cannot be caught, the same way that sunlight fills the sky, limitless. i am the ocean, always in motion, slipping through cupped palms.
midlife crisis at seventeen by @/horationed
cw // allusions to religion
on misplaced faith by @/horationed
