pre-tense-ia

in breaking mirrors,
I break myself.

in looking at broken glass
I see shards of self:
broken bottles stuck in bloody hands

and I drink my reflection
like a poison.

there is something beautiful
in the skin of the dead;
thin and leathery, cold and pale--
old books splayed across
bodies.

I read you in your grave,
and mourn.

Spoiler

inspired by viewtopic.php?f=196&t=93857#p992725

I have a daughter,
and she is a sun.

She lays nestled in my body
like a shell
or peony,
pink and soft and quiet.

In burning,
she warms my body, a steady fire and I curl,
become almost vapor.
Mother tells me I glow,
shine
pregnancy becomes me and as my stomach
grows outward
I feel that I could swallow galaxies
eat stars and lick the dust from my fingertips
like crumbs.

My daughter is heavy; I struggle under the weight of her,
jealous gravity presses hands to my stomach
to feel her heartbeat,
praying against my skin,
seeking god in the sun and unable to find her--

She sleeps.
She is not yet born, but burns, expands
lengthens and in the round moon of my stomach,
she shines.

It seems I can hardly take myself,
nestled in the stomach of my bed,
and step away before I am swallowed
by the rest of the world.

I eat fruit
in the hopes that it will blossom in me.
My mother used to tell me
"Don't eat the seeds, they'll grow
watermelons in your stomach,"
and I'd save them for last,
swallow them like medicine or communion
and wait to be overgrown and wild,
to wake up with vines resting gently against my skin
curling round my arms, stomach, legs.

All I got was a sour tasting stomach,
a short lived sugar rush,
and a little bit more distrust of the world.

She took me outside the other day,
said, "Listen up, Coral,
what I'm about to tell you is the reason we're alive,
our hearts our beating and our lungs are breathin', hon.
See-" I listened to the birds
in the park instead.

I've gotten so used to pigeon claws at my roof and their shit
on my lullabye attic windows but these
are small creatures that don't even fly but flit.
My mother leans against a fountain,
which is graffitied and covered in bird shit but I don't say anything
because her voice gnaws GOD at me
like she's telling me she has cancer and I just can't take care of her anymore,
she drains me like winter flooding down a sewer grate
and I'm so fucking tired of this dingy, dirty, shitty, shitty world.

I'm gone from rain to flood to tiny trickle under cities.
I don't want to be seen like this,
like anything,
I don't want sentience or intelligence
(enough to know that I'm not),
I don't want consciousness- I want to be the floating debris,
white and bloated,
that everyone glances at or drags out of rivers
and tosses into the sand or stone or street to get run over
by filthy cars,
because being is examined is so, so inutterably terrifying.

I can't take care of her.
there's just so much brokenness and crippled limbs and late night cries for
"Make the nightmares stop, break the black, pass me my box of pills,
ignore the labels, this is all a dream sweetie, just pass me my pills" and my hands

tremble, trickle, as I open bottles and she prays "pillspillspills"
with a rhythm of turning biblical pages and I swallow the seeds of all the apples I eat,
arsenic turning to iron to quell all those quakes
and I tried to grow a garden in my stomach and lungs but there is just

empty rain, too little to count for anything.

I'm gone from rain to flood to tiny trickle under cities.
I don't want to be seen like this,
like anything,
I don't want sentience or intelligence
(enough to know that I'm not),
I don't want consciousness- I want to be the floating debris,
white and bloated,
that everyone glances at or drags out of rivers
and tosses into the sand or stone or street to get run over
by filthy cars,
because being is examined is so, so inutterably terrifying.

^that.

Holy crap persy, I think I found your tumblr. You were just featured on poetry.

I wake
and my ribs ache.

I can't take bone snagging bone
snagging blood,
like my blood or tangled network of veins
is some bird's nest that is this close to falling apart-

each step is a rip and tear
and sometimes I just find it better to remain inert.

quiet. focus on the feeling in my toes and ear and elbows
and hope to god that my bones haven't broken too much.
I can still dream
and hope
and here are the things I see when my eyes are closed,
etched in each wrinkle of bedsheet and curled limb
and there are nightmares in the mattress,
in the patterned white walls that are like
braille as I run my hands down them
and I think they are clouds

they are stories, written, waiting to be written,
close mouthed and vicarious,
as am I.

in talking
I hang myself
with my own tongue;

in chewing self hatred
I cross mirrors like broken bridges
or crackle like tea leaves in sun dried pitchers

and I think I fixate
relate
and ignore because I have grown so old without age,
skinned my feet across streets and they stretch
like long stemmed straw
or month burdened stomachs.

things were simpler,
maybe easier,
when my teeth weren't so rotten
and words weren't so rough.

it's back--

the self loathing
of a reflection
(in books and parables and the stories that people tell you
when they want to show you horrible people are,
how you could never be like that, but you might as well take their name for your own)

it's back and in this carelessness I might find myself
riverside bound again,
legs hanging off the side like threads
loosely tying me to responsibility,
things I love, the caps of pill bottles
that seem to empty without reason
because

mother promised me a psychiatrist
and I've been waiting for my sofa to sob on--
my tissue boxes to empty like unpaid bills
crumpled to the trash can and in waiting

I think I might be going crazy
like, Aunt Gemma crazy
where I talk to pigeons and teach them how to preen
(she smells like oil and holy water
because they're angels, hon, they're angels
and they gotta keep clean) and
my room is in shambles

when Aunt Gemma brings her books to me--
the rooms of her houses are crowded with them
so when we visit, we walk with our hand against the wall
and only the very tips of our toes, where they can fit
and she is strewn across the boxes and stacks
like a book cover or a silver pin up
or a corpse.

They overflow and she puts them in my room when we move
and tells me that reading will kill the crazy;
I read Self help books first, then dystopian
and then the Bible that Sarah gave me
when she said my aura was black as a cross starred moon,
but the Self helps made me sadder, the dystopian made me madder,
and the Bible burned away my patience like a lamb.
I found solace in the gaps between each book
where I can fit my fingers and hold them up and Aunt Gemma
walks in, admiration strewn across her face
like the lazy doilies she makes
and I find that there is something about supporting something else
that makes feel a bit more sane.

yes, they break when I break
and they might as well call it quits when they have to come to someone like me for help,
but I depend on them to depend on me and
it is back--

I am broken,

and I am selfish,
and I am taking their names for myself,
because my own is barely strewn across myself,
more shameful than suiting to begin with.

he flies south for sun,
north for a nest,
and he carries winter home.

in lullabyes,
the devil sings and dances on wings
like wind or dust (or oil) and in the closing clause
of a broken contract,
see

North for nest, south to rest,
and they are drunken
sailors careening through south swept winds;
gold flashes in their teeth, angels wear trenchcoats
and walk the streets with frail, crippled legs.
They scout the coast and act the ghost
and search for compasses or maps;
The devil has taken their sense,
at God’s expense,
and there is no getting it back.

they carve winter into summer
and say “spring is coming, spring is coming,
ready the sun”
and the devil sits in its churning heart
like a swarthy spider—

angels knit nets with fingers
curled and mottled as starfish.
they catch dreams and the unspoken sins
men confess to empty bottles and
crows confess to telephone wires
and they haul them to heaven like
a fisherman’s catch
writhing and churning.

the sun calls them for each broken promise
God has made,
and the angels are made to fly not north nor south
but away and they are swallowed up
and spat out like sunflower shells
or lichen thrown from bark or
ash, floating gently from the sun
and the devil laughs,
peeling back the bones of a trout
and he sucks the juices
from the sun

like an orange or a bird’s body, rotting on the cement,
or maybe even God, leaking tobacco smoke
and pretending that this was his intention,
smirkingly self satisfied
as the devil strips him of his wings,
and swallows up the sun.

I wake up on a rooftop, crying
because dreams are devastating
and people in the street
think it rain.

We picked dandelions from the cemetery
and tucked them in our coat pockets.

When the construction came,
they dug up and moved the bones
and burned the rest like
banned books or bibles in a broken neighborhood
where faith keeps them warm (even if it doesn't put food on the tables).

They built a great big house on the cemetery plot
and named it Hutchins Manor.
We call it Haunts, and tell stories about skulls
leering between each beam and ghosts
whispering about how horrible heaven is
through the radiators and vents.

The dandelions have wilted since then,
but still hang limply in our pockets.
I think of them as ashy bones, sometimes
maybe because they grew on them,
or maybe because the cemetery died too,
in its own way.

in talking
I hang myself
with my own tongue;

a little late. but I feel like so much is in these three little lines.

I broke down the other day,
like an old car run out of fuel,
and told him that I didn't know what to do.

He unzipped my chest and said,
"Someday, all these bones will
be right;
they will line up like clifflines
or horizons,
straight and narrow."
His hand fits between them
like a hinge,
even when it makes a fist, and it hurts.
He didn't say anything else,
but I think we had more conversations
about it, and that was enough.

He talks about the beach incessantly.
He drives me there with a noisy engine
and a quiet conversation and we sit on the hillside
(ribs or skeleton, sometimes)
and he talks about the how the moon
pushes the ocean to shore,
like a mother trying to wed off her son.
I find shells and try braiding them into my hair,
but I've cut it too short.

We climb back into the car and I find sand
caught in the lines of my hands
like stardust, or shards of bone. I keep a mussel shell
because it looks kind of like a galaxy painted
on black.

The car breaks down,
and he gives it the same speech he gave me,
but I don't think it believed him.
We sleep on the beach, and I wake to find
the muscles in his arms churning like the ocean
as he lifts the weight of the world.
He sleeps, splayed, hands soft,
arms raised like wings.
I want to pray to him,
and I press my hands together
only to find my chest healed,
and I shift, and my bones are straight as the lightening horizon.