My Voice Crackles Like The Edges Of Burnt Paper / Absinthe And Green Teathe Lining Of My Throat / Is

my voice crackles like the edges of burnt paper / absinthe and green tea the lining of my throat / is ragged from disuse and the effort of healing. my words are sparks and gasoline / burning their way up again and again and the scar tissue covering my wounds / is made into flame

@cityskylinesofimaginaryplaces, SCAR TISSUE (excerpt?)

hello rain.

give me a world cleansed of hatred, discrimination, humanity. tell me, how is the rain not an attempt to wash away the stain of our past lives? a futile offering in the face of our sin. and now: a flood, the myths foretold, to wash away the vestiges of guilt, jealousy and all our other emotions. how have we not been swept away yet? ‘the storm is coming,’ the weather forecaster says; except he doesn’t know the true meaning of rain. it’s not something to be taken lightly. it can take, and it can give life in a cycle only the storm knows. tell me again, what you said- that the rain was just rain and it couldn’t come inside- when I could feel it already in my bones filling up my lungs? tell me how to stop the tide that breaks in my chest. give me a world in need of cleansing, in which we suffer from an evil of our making and the storm will wash away our bodies the lives we pretended were our own. tell me, no i’ll tell you- you could not have stopped this if you tried.

U.S.S.R (Ukrainian Remembrance)

i am in love with the way she says Ukraine like it’s not a place but a presence & the little trill in the back of her throat where it resides, waiting to be released. on the way home she tells me home is not a home anymore, or what it used to be; i’m not sure of the translation. she remembers as a child living somewhere that wasn’t here & how it felt to have to lose her words to find new ones. i am ashamed that i love her voice so much when for her it means she will never belong but there is nothing i can do to tell her. now blue-blonde-purple hair swings in my face as she turns the key & opens the door into a world of 33 letters, made up of people fleeing from the past. her accent stays in the air with me long after the door closes on all her words, shut in the back of my throat. i try out the sounds in my mouth to find they aren’t as strange as one would think & that maybe a presence could live inside all of us if we let it, or learned to grow to love it. inside they rejoice because 24 years ago an empire crumbled to its knees. now they celebrate to the sound of the warbling voice of time singing along to old national anthems, only it can’t remember all the words so instead it just sings freedom, freedom, freedom & hopes everyone understands.

omnipotence doesn't mean you have the power to act

isn’t it awful to be the narrator of a story and know not only the good but all of the terrible things that people are going to have to suffer through? to think that maybe you could save them only to know that tragedy must run its course. the winds will always blow. the wolves will keep on howling. the witches will brew the future and tell which path to choose. the world will turn and turn and turn you with it until you’re dizzy, stumbling down into the forest into the deep, deep woods. there must always be blood and someone will have to pay. you know whose blood will whet the monsters’ appetites and you know exactly whose future those witches were brewing when they said tragedy and you know which moon those wolves were howling at and you know that the only things left will be the winds. you know what will be taken and given and given up, what wishes and dreams and hopes and fears are riding inside our heads. you know. but you’re not telling.

mid-life crisis

there should be a word in between young and old for that middling feeling you have when you're not quite dead yet but you're still dying slowly. except in between isn't like a "halfway there, here's the tipping point oops now you're old" there's this whole entire section of your life that isn't young and isn't old and is something entirely different, which is why it needs a name and a word so that we can all write the address down and visit it. this is where we should live, in that strange middling in between that isn't in between at all and is instead like someone dropped the bottom out from under you and now you're falling into the dunk tank, cold and wet and shocking but you can still see clear through the water and glass to the rest of the carnival you're just not a part of it.

love her. love her. love her.

there was one time i tracked orange paint all over the room in the shape of a star.

i was painting (of course you know that) and trying to cover up the words on the outside of a lid and i painted it red first, because i thought blood covers everything

except it wouldn’t cover this and i couldn’t understand why the paint wouldn’t cover up the stupid white letters that didn’t mean anything for god’s sake who wants to read ‘SALSA’ on the top of a universe in a bottle?

so i painted the top orange instead and that covered up the words easy and i don’t know how i managed it but i got orange paint all over my foot (or at least that’s what i told my roommate) because really i was waiting for the paint to dry and i wanted to feel like i could’ve been something special.

there went an orange star i put on my foot, out of spite because everyone always said don’t get paint on you dear

and it just kept growing and growing and growing along the bottom of my foot because i had to even out this side and stretch out that point so it looked proportionate but that made the other side look too small until i had a star stretching from my heel to the ball of my foot and all the way around

i let it dry and walked around with it for an hour or two until i had to wash it off and down the bathtub

the paint gathered all around the drain and left a ring of orange that won’t go away no matter how much i scrub and i didn’t mean to tell you all this its just that i cried when i had to wipe it away

i know it’s silly but it felt daring and special and wild and it was just a stupid star that didn’t even look pretty

besides i hate the colour orange when i’m sad because it looks too happy like it’s bloody smiling at me and saying i should be happy too and i just can’t

but i didn’t hate that star because it meant something to me and it reminded me that i could be special if i tried (it reminded me of blue ink and a bathroom sink) only less existential and contemplative.

anyway i’m only telling you this because i thought someone should know just in case the water comes back up stained like a northeastern sunset drifting below the horizon or the inky black night receding to leave a morning star in its wake.