Love Lost

Life turns her face toward me—this time, the barrel of a gun

asking me the only question that really matters—splintered into

a million wavering facets, a riddle in every language

that I don’t know how to speak:

Who are you? Why

are you here? How badly

do you want to be?

I know so many words, it seems.

Yet they all evade me when I need them most.

I’ve learned all about vanishing

from some of my favorite people. I have

opened fire into the afternoon sky, demanding

their release. I have crawled towards it,

intent to rip open the fabric of time and drag them

all home.

But the sky does not relent. So neither have I. 

I’ve been every kind of sick I know, but

it’s the getting better that counts in the end. I’ve turned

every place there is to turn—heavily against myself

some years—only to end up at each dead end. 

The drugs don’t actually kill you, most days.

They just make you forget how to live. My will

is intrinsically serrated. What I want is never

what I actually want.

So then what

is a little more confusion, a little more grief—a knot

in my neck, perhaps, or a new twinge in my wrist

maybe—when I am already a mason jar filled with

the memories of better people who did not have the luck

to survive themselves as I did? Tell me, by what kind

of artifice—what law, what awful magic, what sleight

of hand—might loss eat

from me today?

Every wound in the earth I’ve peered inside

has taught me a new name for hurt, a new place

inside me which needed to be filled. So I have dug

endlessly in this life, nailbeds stained

with the dirt I refuse to join—my fingers

some nights mostly tombstones.

At the end of the day substance was always

a cruel god, who ruled deafly and without forgiveness.

It was a lonely way to worship. Prayers

were each returned as blackbirds dissected

before me, entrails forever revealing my every

sin and shortcoming. Still today, my mouth

fills with feathers each time I must ask

for something that I need.

All pain is reproducible

I say, forever breeding

greater and greater lines

of succession. It is relief

that is often difficult

to come by.  

There are so many ways in which

the body will ask for the things we can’t—lips

turning blue to beg for breath, hearts speeding up

to spill the blood they cannot find to hold—but I

do none of these things instead. I spend most nights

awake in my most dedicated study of what is wrong

with others—and in the morning, the white lines

of the highway drag me back home. I am clean

in the way of an instrument which has been sterilized 

after many gruesome uses. I long ago buried

the person I was when I was learning to survive, but

I’ll still bring flowers to her grave on occasion. 

Every graveyard on Gravois knows my name, 

but has finally stopped waiting for me

to return their calls. 

I, too, once wrote love letters

to drunk drivers and falling pianos. The guardian angels

of gas station tap water carried me across four state lines

just to drop me off at Kingshighway and Chippewa.

I’ve been demon gossip. I’ve lost entire years  

to breaking.

And yet.

Today, I choose not to take stock of myself

by accounting for the things which are missing.

Secrets demand space inside of the body—I hide this one 

in my stomach, like something which I must digest 

endlessly. Like something I crave,

but can never taste.

Carbon steel overwhelms my palate.

Life—forever on her own terms—demands

her answers at last.

I tell her that I would flood Basin Street in brass

for a soul like this one—gifting back the heart

which I’ve been holding onto for a friend—shaking

and shimmying my way through the French Quarter,  

busking the electric violin for one last

kiss.

I tell her that I do not know the word for this bloody crusade 

in which I eternally war to stay where I am, but

that it will always be one of the things

I know best. 

I tell her that she’ll never catch me

with clean hands.

Appeased, she grants me

another day.

• Cierra Lowe, 2023

Kerosene

I want to do to you

what the dawn does to the sky,

and for all the same reasons.

I want to wash through you and chase away

the dark. I want to light you up and paint you

every kind of pink.

I want to warm you.

I want to put a contract down

on your smile. I want to learn the topography

of your rib cage, the soundtrack behind your

scar tissue, the cheat code to your good days.

I want to mass produce good days for you.

I pack all of this into every “thank you”—stuffing

this poem into two words like every good outfit I own

into a battered suitcase and I have no idea

where I’m going.

Wherever you want to go.

• Cierra Lowe, 2023

Hungry Work

If forgiveness were the one thing standing between

my spear and my supper, I might perhaps

one day regret being unable

to endure hunger.

I do not hunt to kill—and yet, here I live

and eat. My conscious, as always, is quiet

as this mausoleum. I sleep like the dead.

I return home from every war

with my shield instead of on it. I am disinclined

to sacrifice where I might instead conquer.

The horse I ride in on is black as pitch.

I try my hands at benevolence again

and again, pruned and blistered

as they are.

My lover is no Diego Rivera. My hair has grown

long enough to cover my breasts, though

I don’t. His deciduous heart

blankets the earth in a predictable

yet honest fashion. I teach him pointedly

about conifers, yet assure him that I

(usually) do not mind

the raking.  

My books reveal naught about love’s

half-life, but I suppose as long

as I can chloroform myself with

his t-shirts, he gets to choose between

an entry wound and a mouth to feed.  

I myself remain unaffected by the change

of seasons, so his mutinies intrigue me.

I observe. I fashion jewelry out of sun-bleached

bones. I eat whatever berries I come across,

tempting fate and her sisters. I steal

and burn priceless paintings.

I lick my fingers

clean.

 - Cierra Lowe-Price, 2023

Father, Figured - Pt. I

I gain consciousness as a sentient human being

in a shitty motel room somewhere in the greater St. Louis area.

The music video for The Macarena is playing

on the small television in the double bed room, which

places this memory somewhere in the early to mid 90’s.

I am four or five, and my sister is here with me.

The door is open, and the sunlight and summer

warmth waft inside to greet me, bringing with it

the familiar scent of my dad’s Marlboro Reds.

My most prized possession while I am living in my

father’s world—which differs staggeringly from that

of my mother’s—is a peeling red photo album, the kind

they used to make with the adhesive pages covered

in a clear film. I spend my hours making drawings and

carefully fastening them within. My dad once bought me

a pack of Big League Chew bubble gum, whose package

graces my collection as well. I like to remember the things

he buys me.

In the wintertime he wears an old brown leather

jacket, and the inside is a map. I like to pretend that he’s been

to all of the places inside and is some kind of magical worldly

traveler, which would explain why sometimes I don’t see him

for awhile. He lets me do things my mother never does, like

get Slurpees when he takes me to 7 Eleven late at night.

He always runs into his friends there. Once, I was woken up

by a man knocking on his apartment door. He was wearing

a white suit, which I thought was very fancy. He crouched down

to introduce himself and ask me my name. He told me

he had a daughter my age named Fox. I did not like his cologne,

and I thought Fox was a weird name for a kid.

I am six. It is early in the morning, and the world is covered in

snow. My father is driving me to school, but his car breaks down.

It has a hole in the bottom and I can see the road speeding beneath

my feet when we drive. We walk the last mile or so, my blue

Winnie The Pooh backpack slung casually over his shoulder

as I do my best to walk within his footprints so my socks won’t get

too wet.

I am seven. I make my dad a beaded bracelet, which I’m really good at.

It is rainbow, of course, because he deserves the coolest.

We wears it all the time and never takes it off. One day, I notice

he isn’t wearing it, and it is instead looped around his gear shift.

Bereaved, I ask him why he took it off. He tells me he’s sick of

guys at work asking him out. I don’t understand what he means.

I am eight. My sister is living in an apartment with our dad

on Enright. My mom hates us staying there, but I don’t mind

that all his furniture is made of red milk crates and plywood.

He sleeps in a hammock, I sleep in a papasan. One afternoon,

he lets me rip up and throw away all his cigarettes.

But he buys more the next day.

I am nine. My father picks me up from school. He has a long nail

sticking out of his foot from an accident at work.

There is blood all over his floor mat, and I beg him

to go to the hospital. Instead he drives us to Great Grandpa’s

where he is living now. Great Grandpa loves Walker Texas Ranger

and God. He paints pictures of trains all the time, because he used to be a bad guy

who robbed banks and stuff, but then he had a dream where God spoke to him

and told him to get onto the train before it was too late.

He did, and woke up a changed man. When we get inside, Great Grandpa

speaks in tongues over my dad’s foot as he yanks the nail out with

a bloody rag and rips his soggy work boot off. I do not understand

why he didn’t just go to the doctor.

I am ten. We all got out of school this morning because two planes

crashed into two buildings in New York. All of the adults are crying.

My dad picks me up. I ask him why this happened, and he tells me

that there are some really ate up people in the world. He lights incense

in his apartment and spends a lot of time in the bathroom. I just want

to watch Pokemon like I always do, but the only thing on TV is videos

of planes crashing and crashing and crashing into buildings.

I do not understand why my dad spends so much time in the bathroom.

I am eleven. My dad is living at my Nana’s house, which I really like, because

it's very nice and clean and she cooks really good food. I’m staying here all weekend.

My dad has third degree burns all down his legs. I ask him what happened,

and he said he spilled boiling water while he was cooking. I carefully remove

his bandages, apply the ointment, and redress them twice a day like the doctor

told him to. I don’t understand how he got burned so bad because he doesn’t cook.

• Cierra Lowe-Price 2023

Lilim

When I was fourteen, a strange boy

came up to me at a dance. He searched

his pockets for something intangible, and then

solemnly informed me that he thought I seemed

to glow. The trap door of my heart

swung wide open, and generations of doom

roared to life.

At fifteen, I would catch grown men

looking at me. I would look away

and they would look longer.

I was sixteen the first time I was unceremoniously

pinned against a bathroom wall by a stranger

at a party. I could not comprehend

the thinness of the air around me which

stole my protests, or the heat which rose

from my skin and cauterized my hesitancy.

All I could hear was the singular base note

throbbing from somewhere deep within my

limbic system, chanting:

“For you, for you, for you.”  

That night marked the beginning

of my own Cold War, of lessons in starvation

from which I could only be granted brief

respite. Of need like a wound from which

I could never heal, nor perish.

I woke to discover a bear trap

in place of my body. I became a shiny thing

in a murder of crows—a nesting doll,

forever undressing. If I had to execute every

part of myself which has defected to a

halting grasp, I’d be spread across

a hundred shallow graves.

Hunger is a most painful sensation, a clawing

need which demands to be met. You must understand

how it feels to be haunted by vacancy in the place

you call a home.

Love is a violent handler, sure, which is why

our hearts are the same size as our fists.

Desire, however, is murderous—barbing us

with teeth and nails like concertina wire

with which to snag you up and draw

a bit of blood.

Yet, the trace of fingertips across

the backs of my knees is holier

than any garden I’ll ever set foot in.

I’ll die happy, a thing of dirt and broken

ribs, knowing why Eden never felt

like home.

• Cierra Lowe-Price, 2023

z/k KTR

 I never grew to be as tall

as my first handlers had hoped. Still,

for what I lacked in size and strength,

I more than made up for in resilience.

A mildewed rag absorbs both blood and screams  

as my shoulder is shoved back into place. This place

is so unlike the desert which I once called

home—never dry, nor warm nor bright.

I practice writing my old name in the strange condensation

which eternally clings to these concrete walls. At all hours,

men are screaming.

I myself am no longer a person, but a battleship. A gun.

Violence is the only thing that sticks to my ribs.

I keep the pale rider busy as ever since they broke

my fingers into tombstones. I collect the teeth

of my conquests. I do not blink.

Freedom, like other drugs, is so good

it has a certain taste. I can’t remember it now,

but I bet it has an effervescent quality,

like those fancy flavored waters. Imprisonment

tastes metallic. Like blood. Like rusting wire

holding your jaw together.

If I ever get off of this forsaken island, I will

wash myself in gasoline. I will flay this place

from my flesh. I will find a kind, soft woman

for my own. I’ll hold her every night.

I’ll never utter a Cyrillic syllable

ever again. I will forget.  

• Cierra Lowe-Price, 2023

All Things Eva

In the dream, I wept as your family packed

personal effects into open boxes. Everywhere I looked

I saw lingering evidence of our existence there. Photos and

paintings, some of which I watched you make as I smoked

naked in the beds. The plants were all dying.

I feel your annoyance, even now. The house

was never mine. But it felt like you, which

made it home. An endless variety of surfaces, and one

hundred secret rooms. Carpeted closets and freestanding

bathtubs. Furniture aged and worn, intricate scrolling,

inappropriate metals. A house somehow, in a way,

like you. Strangely charmed.

The old mansion and all of the grandiosity

it both promised and also sometimes delivered

is no longer in your bloodline. I wonder who is.

Fractals and nudibranch and warm water.

An eyelash for every time I wished to have you

back. She was a curator of all things. Her hair

is everywhere I’ve ever slept. A woman like a four-poster bed,

a handful of sequins, acrylic paint, and fish bones.

My feet remember how to step around a bedroom like a minefield.

My hands still smell like butane and graphite.

A vagrant of the universe, fortune’s darling—she

was a genre all her own. Old paperback novels and floral

fabrics, dismantled furniture and unbound drawings. Beauty,

but also, disarray. Her world was my peace.

Moons and moons and moons

have waxed and waned above us. Oh Eva,

who knows how many different types of

popcorn plaster have kept watch over you

while you slept.

But tonight, on a rooftop in Silver Lake,

clad in only string lights and prayer flags,

the pleasure is mine.

• Cierra Lowe-Price, 2022

Baby Teeth

When mother told me I was born with a body instead of a bear trap

I think what she was saying was that I rather lacked the teeth

and the temperature that I stood to inherit from her

I imagine it must have been rather a disappointment to discover

something which was begotten at such a devastating cost

might dare reveal to be so very unlike herself

But I found my sharper edges in time.

This made her happy, I think.

When at seventeen they found me half gone

in that bathtub, I think she fancied me a person

like a snow globe, who only became more appealing   

the more life shook me up.

We have a chicken, a fox, and a sack of grain.

Nowhere we go is safe.

What I mean is that someone once taught me

to either kill it or leave it, and it is a wonder how far your feet

can carry you away from the things your hands

can no longer bear to hold.

What I’m trying to say is that loss is a plant life

which springs eternal in innumerable forms, rising to greet me

from every crack in the sidewalk.

When I’m finished gnawing these vines off of my ankles,

I’m going to circle your block in a long coat.

I’m going to climb the highest hill I can find.

And I’m going to hang the moon, just for you.

And it will all be worth it

to finally hear the wolf cry girl.

Come morning, they will be able to see him pacing

head bowed in the overgrown garden of an abandoned

school, distressed and wondering in what form

I might wane his way tonight.

• Cierra Lowe-Price, 2022

A Letter to Mata Hari, Dead at 41

I can envision your pilot, 

roiling within his apartment that 

mourning—despicably 

frying eggs and renouncing 

your conception. As if 

your essence was merely insult 

to his injury.

I bet you were born on Rosh Hashanah. 

I bet you used a rib as a hatpin. 

I bet that those twelve barrels seemed a curious affection 

as they peered upon you—they say you

blew a kiss to the

firing squad. They say you wore

white gloves. They say you kept

your face to the sky.

You were then deafened by God’s silence. 

It was French bullets that made love to 

your body for the last time. 

Blood wept from your abdomen, 

and still-blind gathered around its 

mother. Undancing legs 

curled beneath you like an impossible 

chair as you birthed your first

Rorschach test. To France, 

it looked like moral ambiguity.

To General Nicolai, it looked like 

a breech of contract.

To your creator, it looked like 

spilled ink.

• Cierra Lowe-Price, 2022

The Revival of Brother Love

The staples nestled into your scalp

guide my fingers like abandoned railroad tracks

to the place from whence your thoughts depart.

What dark cargo freight you now, little engine?

Upon which boxcars have your stained and swollen

knuckles rapped, and which granted you entry?

To where do you stowaway tonight?

Your body and your thoughts weigh heavily

against my breast—your truths are iron ore,

and my hands too gentle for mining. So I hold you

in the cradle of my hips instead. I would never hurt you

like they do, but it is my doing nonetheless.  

The first time we came together, Leviticus 19 fell quiet

from your lips as you slowly revealed my miles of

painted skin—still, you worshiped at the altar of me.

I do not understand the place from which you come,

Brother Love, but I understand the needs of the flesh.

And while needles have been used to pull different things

through us, in the end, they’re all sutures.

This is my way of stitching you back together,

the only prayer for healing I ever learned.

Tell me lover, where lives your God?  

In a windowless basement apartment like this one,

I fear. Do you praise Him on your knees

like you do me, or are the hymns I inspire in you

unfit for consecrated soil? When you leave here,

do you pray for forgiveness, for me? Or am I

beyond the graces of your Savior?

Hunger draws you to my door night after night,

but the dawn baptizes your retreat in self-reproach.

The bed we share—sheets twisted and now cold—yawns before me

like an early grave, and a one-way passenger rail to the place

you fear the most. I search the face in the mirror for evidence of

unholiness, of the devil’s work you suspect is at hand,

but see only a woman.  

• Cierra Lowe-Price, 2022

Kid Gloves

Whoever you thought I was, I wasn’t her.

I was not the Madonna, nor her adversary. I was not the moon,

nor the red-taloned demonness taking pot shots at your heart

only to call her friends later and laugh about how quickly you

bled out. Why you were looking for her in the first place, I

cannot be sure. But maybe we did our hair alike. Or both

had similar curves. And yet, while you waited for me to

draw on you, I never did. Eventually you fell asleep

on my couch, confused at my lack of malice, and happy

to be the little spoon. I asked the back of your head why

you came in search of your executioner. Your soft snores

were my only reply, but I was glad

she never had the chance

to finish you off.

• Cierra Lowe-Price, 2022

Violent Ends

“These violent delights have violent ends, And in their triumph die like fire and powder, Which as they kiss consume. The sweetest honey Is loathsome in his own deliciousness, And in the taste confounds the appetite.”

— Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare

His smile was a wound, teeth glistening

like broken bone protruding from a garish laceration

of flesh. I winced at the strangeness of the sight,

the straight line of his lips which I tightrope walked

slashed apart—laughing at a joke that I didn’t

understand.   

When our thighs would accidentally touch

I’d burst open like the fourth of July, shamefully

lighting up the room for everyone to see. He

most likely murmured something about noise

ordinances and debris as I willed my lungs

to re-expand, fighting against the soot and ash of

my own burning need.  

A seventeen in one hand, and nines

in the other—I fell for a man like a weapon that I wished to 

turn on myself. I studied his mechanisms, the way

in which he might be dissembled, where

his safety may be hidden. I yearned to dwell

within his chambers.

When one day he passed the heavy metal

backwards to me from the passenger seat,

it was the first time I ever truly felt the heady

bestowal of trust. If he’d have told me to aim

for my knees rather than the guard rail,

I would have obeyed.

Every night I sent out search parties

for his love, only to awake among wet leaves

and exhausted hounds. No ballistics expert could identify

the ammunition with which he riddled me. The broken magnet

that it was, I extracted the faulty organ which cowered

between my blackened lungs—I pierced her with a long needle,

and trained her as a compass instead. 

Even now, years later, fireworks and gunfire still

sound the same—no matter how far south

I roam.

• Cierra Lowe-Price, 2022

Howl At The Moon

Today I met a girl with yellow eyes. No shit, her irises

were golden like scotch and sunbeams mixed together.

I wondered what her tears tasted like, if they would

burn. I, always the poet, greeted her: “You look like

a fuckin wolf.” She grinned, revealing blunt canines,

and confessed she hated them when she was younger.

How typical, I thought. For us to instinctively be ashamed

of the things that make us shine. I hope for you, reader,

to never dim that which makes others linger curiously

on you. All the better to see you with.   

• Cierra Lowe-Price, 2022

Junkie

Scenes which remind me of your absence

pull at the seams of me. Carefully stitched patches

of healing fray. I am a sea of wetness—blood, tears,

spinal fluid—that you once swam. For you,

my flesh tore. My levees broke.

But this is not a love poem

any more than Katrina was a shower.

The first time skin became a panic room

that I could not coax a man out of,

I breathed for him. I cracked his ribs

trying to remind his heart its lines.

The door they opened into his throat

led to nowhere.

I am the child of three first responders. My blood

smells like a campfire, I was raised by people

haunted by their own ghost stories. One of them

ignores them, one of them plays house with them,

and the other one joined them. He walked right though

that door to nowhere, with cracked ribs and a

stage-frightened ticker.

His absence was a laceration

whose edges could not be approximated.     

My last name is a scar.

They say when you put two violins in a room

together, that if you play the one, then the other

will sing back to it. But I am something more like

a cello: admittedly less delicate, and more burdensome.

Still, in spite of being tone deaf, I sang back to my father

in the best way that I could. When I first picked up,

it was because I wanted to know what it was

that he loved more than me.

When I finally put it back down, it was because

I’d finally learned that love had nothing

to do with it after all. Sometimes irony

isn’t all that funny.

I won the war they say, but I never came home

from it. It has been eight long years

of being a refugee in my hometown.

The person I used to be

is the old country.

Every gas fire is gunshots.

Every cookout is a hot metal firework,

a Roman candle aimed right at my spine—they say

that smell is the most powerful link we have

to memory. I don’t know shit about science, but I know

that sometimes cooking dinner tastes like Dormin.

I cook dinner anyway. I know that the way blood blooms

in a solution makes me understand sharks better.

I bloom anyway.    

My blood, as it were, is a smoky siren

that I could only ignore for so long. My first language

is the sustainment of life. Sometimes something’s

gotta break to keep the show

going.    

My second language is the firing of synapses,

my neurons reaching for one another

to weave together one cohesive tapestry

of everything I’ve seen: a world

like a beautiful mosaic,

even the pieces that

are broken.

- Cierra Lowe, 2021

Live Wire

Life holds my head with two hands, talons spread wide with

prey in clutch, aiming my face towards everything that is bleeding

and burning, and demands: “What do you see? What do you see?”

I gag and choke and mutter:

“Anything I want.”

This is what my arrogance looks like.

My arrogance does not walk me into a room and tell me I

am the prettiest girl there, it has never hesitated to share a seat

or a cigarette with a stranger, it does not look down.

My arrogance does not tell me I am better than anyone else.

It tells me that I am better than myself.

My arrogance thumbs through clips of me retching 

in unfamiliar places, of begging for rides and money

and a place to crash, and chuckles: “How young we were.”

She looks at a mistake we have made and tells me it is impossible

to do so again as she walks me up an unbraced ladder. She thinks

that my scars are like my stretch marks in that something in me simply 

needed more room to grow—and yet, nothing was ever born

of the things she put in me.

Back when I decided it was time to take a break

from God, what I really wanted to see was if God believed in me

too. Both times I tried to return myself to sender He lost

my letters, and then when the angels of barely getting by carried me

all the way home from Georgia, all my arrogance said was:

“Love me more.”

That’s all she ever says.

I have written more eulogies than sonnets.

My Punnet square is chain-linked, my father is in ashes.

I know the difference between a garden and a graveyard better than most,

and yet my arrogance tells me that silence is golden when I suspect

it is only brass. Of all the violence I’ve witnessed in this life,

my arrogance is the most profound.  

Today my ribcage delineates a preservation area of forgiveness.

But my arrogance forgets why forgiveness was needed in the first place.

— Cierra Lowe-Price, 2021

Hunt & Gather

As I take in quiet breaths, my body shifts these leaves

Still I move in silent grace for I was born of thieves

Yes, this here flesh is more than just a cage for sin and need

Still my instincts stay steely sharp because every animal bleeds

I make good fire that brings good heat, but heat curves all the lines

And even so, hunger has a way of consuming all else on our minds 

So then as one hand grasps a crest, two fingers will trace the bow

And the thrum of a new bass will beat against my bones

I keep watch of shifting muscle beneath distant pelted skin:

No, I do not hunt to kill—and yet I still must eat to live

- Cierra Lowe-Price, 2021

Sunshine and Saccharine

Memory is the enemy.

Memory is a persistent beggar with an opiate 

dependency and cigarette holes in the upholstery. 

Memory is a slippery slope and a jammed clutch, always 

trying to drag you back to a place that was once home.

Memory is a lonesome god.

Memory is a false bottom, a trap door, a trick candle 

that embarrasses you every year on your birthday.

Memory is a neon sign you can see from every highway. 

Memory is the rabid dog that follows you 

all the way home after work.

Memory is a wayward soothsayer. 

Memory is a casket with a peephole.

Memory is a clock that weeps. 

Memory is a self-loathing prophecy with cracked lips, 

begging for another pull of the past—and her dizzy Oracle, 

dagger pressed against my breast, demanding recompense 

for every tomorrow I thought 

I’d never see.

- Cierra Lowe-Price, 2020

In Utero

Destiny foregoing, 

I suppose the unknown is a lonesome thing. 

My hypothalamus sieves the relevant from the not,

and my bronchi siphon the distance from

my beginning to end. But—my larynx is not 

like the inside of a raven. The lines in my palms

do not shift. All I know of the future, is I’m told

it is bright. 

Time weighs two coins on my eyelids. 

All of this skin, and I still bleed. 

Light is born of something burning—while

the dark persists in and of itself. It

is where we all come from. It is where

our family still lives.

The Pleiades sing to me of their mother, of she

who bore them into existence to hide us from the place

where darkness lives. 

I too am a mother. I have carried. And I have birthed.  

I do not fear the dark.

I fear the end of darkness. 

Billions of neurons, and I still cannot make fire.

My thorax is now like the inside of a raven.

The lines in my palm deepen. 

Destiny and its coins aside, tomorrow 

is a populous destination. 

All day long I smell something burning. 

There is no place we need hide. 

— Cierra Lowe-Price, 2020

Helsingborg & High Water

Dresden, Germany, following the bombings.

(To be featured in the upcoming print of Dime Show Review.)

My ancestors went blind drinking 

from radiators & distilling their furniture. 

Their gifts smell of ether

& iron. Their blessings

turn & rust. 

My Punnett square is chain-linked. My affliction 

is a family heirloom that looked garish 

in every room. With left hands & blue eyes, 

I have learned of recession. 

I have wondered how long it would take 

to distill my bedroom sets. I have wondered

how many stones my heart weighs, how 

much of me was carbon. I have wondered

of my dog, now blind and in Lismore, and if he

remembers me still.

My bones are Belfast, my lungs are Dresden. 

My tongue is Glasgow, my eyes are 

Birkenau. Trauma is a lineage that 

does not disinherit. Relief

was a coffin ship that never

made it to port. 

I have prayed for hands big enough 

to float me across the North Sea. I have prayed 

for fealty, lucidity, sanctum. I have prayed 

for vertebrae like braille that read 

“have mercy.” 

The Silver City sleeps tonight,

still across the Atlantic—but mercy, 

as it were, has been

granted.

— Cierra Lowe-Price, 2020

Euphoric Recall, Daddy Issues, and Moving Forward.

“I have no right to call myself one who knows. I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in books; I’m beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me. My story isn’t pleasant, it’s not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.”

— Hermann Hesse, Demian

---

Among other things, I am a hoarder of happy circumstance. I am naturally inclined to remember the good, and forget the rest—this has served me well for the most part, and allowed me to be a person of generally positive expectation. However, it’s been in the last several years that some more difficult aspects of this particular disposition have truly risen to the surface, and I’ve been forced to examine and amend this perspective to fit my life as it is today. 

As it were, instances in my life wherein I had various places, situations, and relationships with people that I deeply enjoyed—regardless of how these things developed and eventually ended—have been seemingly difficult for me to let go of. I’ve spoken candidly about this before. Everything from the townhouse I grew up in, to the truck I drove in high school and college, to restaurants I’ve worked at and happy memories of past romances—the appreciation I was naturally inclined to hold for these things was deep enough that it had interfered with my appreciation of what was right in front of me. Some of the circles that I run in dub this as “euphoric recall”—and for me, it was rampant. Thus, it turned out to be one of my deepest flaws was this: I had been forever looking backwards, watching the scenery get smaller and smaller and trying to focus my eyes on it so that it cannot disappear from me, and meanwhile missing the spectacular view of what was coming. I was finally able to see this peculiar setting of mine for it for what it was, which at its core was a fear of loss and letting go (doubtlessly born from traumatic losses I experienced early in my life). I have since been able to take this mechanism of mine apart, and slowly learn how to rewire it. 

Of course, it has been a dubious process. Changing perspective is oftentimes difficult and unnatural—especially when it is not brought on by anything sudden or powerful, but instead a mere realization of inefficiency. There are still certain things that are triggers for me, certain places and songs and faces that bring up certain memories by whose ephemeral nature I am inevitably saddened. But, I have made great progress, and I believe that this sadness will one day approach an average breed of nostalgia. Today, when I feel the sting of loss, I take time to evaluate all of the wonderful things in my life today, and even more importantly, to be preemptively excited for all of the wonderful things that are yet to come. 

The first massive issue with the system which I had in place was that I was allowing the positive to overshadow the negative when and where the negative had a purpose. In general, I tend to forget the darker and more painful aspects of various circumstances. Selective memory, if you will, makes me remember things as being better than they actually were. As it were, a vast majority of the experiences and relationships I had had were undeniably unsafe and unhealthy, regardless of any fondness I might have had for them. So first and foremost, doing my best to accurately remember all pieces of these experiences has been a great help. I’m now able to look at a situation for what it truly was, appreciate that I’m a person that holds onto the good and be grateful for the good times that I have had, and work towards viewing them from a more holistic and realistic angle. 

One of the biggest examples of this has been my relationship with my father. Many girls and women can’t help but to glorify their dads and put them on a pedestal and feel very attached to them—I’ve witnessed this time and time again, especially after their fathers have died. However, those of us who had dysfunctional or absent or addict fathers tend to be too forgiving, and to remember them only by their merits. The problem that this gave rise to in me was an unrealistic expectation of other men (failing to remember the great many flaws and the great amount of pain caused by our own fathers) and unnecessarily resentment towards them when and where they failed to meet my expectations (which they inevitably did), while still being innately drawn towards men who reminded me of my deeply flawed father in the first place. My father died of a fentanyl overdose when I was a freshman in high school, after an extended period of being very touch-and-go and failing to be present and satisfy his obligations as a parent. For many years, any anger I might have held towards him was lost on me. He was Tommy, he was my dad, and he was wonderful and brilliant and hilarious, and I would have done anything for one more day with him. After battling addiction myself, I was better able to humanize him, acknowledge that he was a broken person with his own failings, and forgive him. Moving from denial into acceptance was a powerful evolution that brought me great relief here, and my personal experience with addiction is to thank for this—among other significant parts of myself. Today, I no longer regret any of the things I’ve done or mistakes I’ve made—but I am also no longer bringing flowers to the grave of the person I used to be.

The second massive issue with this attachment system, as I’ve eluded to, is that this forever-backwards view impeded my ability to be present, mindful, and content with where I currently stood. I wasn’t able to love anything that was mine as much as the things which I had lost. The present was constantly being subconsciously filed away as something that would need to be dissected, categorized, and glorified at a later date, instead of being appreciated while it lasted. This was the more generalized equivalent of people filming a concert on their phones instead of watching the concert happen. And so it was that I came to find this way of life to be objectionable, and began making efforts to affect a change in my mental processing. 

This shift has been a major theme in the last couple years of my life, and the biggest measure of interpersonal growth that I’ve felt in quite some time. The healing of past trauma and renewal of a true and deep faith in tomorrow has allowed me to begin the journey of recovering from this unhealthy attachment pattern. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Just because something feels familiar, it does not mean that it is where you belong. At its core, that’s what all of this was always about in the first place—I felt safe in places that felt familiar, when I felt safe I was able to let go and feel free, and, of course, when I was able to let go and feel free, I was able to have deeply enjoyable and memorable experiences. It wasn’t of any consequence at the time that what had become “familiar” to me were situations which were chaotic and escapist and unstable people with whom I felt marginalized and endangered. It was home, and I was happy there. Until one morning I saw it in the daylight, and noticed all the crumbling foundation. “Wow,” I suppose I might have thought to myself, “this structure is compromised and possibly even uninhabitable. I may need to find a new home.” 

From there, it was about creating a new and more healthy familiar. This is easier said than done, of course—it takes years to get comfortable with a new “normal” and a whole new set of parameters and measures, especially with a life change as dramatic as getting sober. But, ultimately, creating a newer and healthier “normal” for yourself is always in your best interest, even if it is uncomfortable at first. When you’re used to staying in shitty motels, the Ritz, at first, feels somehow repellent. But eventually, you grow used to good sheets and room service. And then there will come a day you can’t even imagine how you used to sleep in the places that you once did. Not saying that my life today is like living in a luxury hotel, but you get the jist of what I’m trying to convey. We don’t get to choose what “home” feels like for us initially—but there will come a day when the warped floorboards and the ghastly wallpaper strike you as uglier than before, and this is your chance to move uptown and recreate what you want “home” to be. 

Today, my home is a stable and committed marriage with an emotionally available person that I can depend upon. He requires and expects certain things from me, he likes to know where I am and what I’m up to, and he has feelings that I am capable of affecting. None of this was “normal” for me before. Emerging from the shambles of a life of no dignity or accountability, the beginnings of our relationship were a massive culture shock for me. I had to learn the art of compromise and consideration for another person, and how to communicate with someone I’m upset with in a way that doesn’t ruin that person’s day tomorrow. Because tomorrow, we will both be here—and practicing gentility and empathy have turned out to be far easier and more productive than frequent apologies and hurt feelings. And so it is that growth, in this respect, has forced me to concede to the fact that the world and its people do not dance around me and my whims, and that my actions have consequences on others. 

Today, home is responsibility for my children, their happiness and well-being. This is one of those things that is so huge and overwhelming that I have to take it one day at a time, otherwise I inevitably find myself imagining my girls in therapy 20 years from now talking about how I made them sleep in their own beds and scolded them for making messes. 

My home is being sober and in bed at 10:30 on a Saturday night, watching ER and tinkering with various crafts. I was talking to a friend last night about how the fact that I genuinely look forward to spending my evenings in such a way would be a hilarious disappointment to the me from ten years ago—but this, I believe, is a good thing, as it shows that I have evolved. 

Home is being present, and dependable, and as selfless as I can be. It is making plans for the future, and doing the things I need to do before I take the time to do the things I want to. It is so many things that I never knew or wanted or knew I was capable of wanting before—but here I am, safe and free, and grateful that I have been able to build this life that is mine. Today, these things are all my new normal, where I feel comfortable and at ease—and I am so glad for this. I am able to see how it was all born of an initial and honest awareness of myself and my circumstances, followed by a genuine and continued effort towards improving both. 

I heard someone speak about grace last night. I think that grace largely involves not feeling entitled to more than you have and being able to find gratitude and contentment in that which you do. I think it also depends upon an ability to forgive others enough that their shortcomings cannot rob us of our own serenity. Everything that other people do is a reflection of how they feel about themselves, and if we take their actions personally, we are taking on more than we need or are able to carry. Keep close those people who embody what you want your home to feel like, and graciously separate from those who feel all too familiar. If we are able to temper our ambition and expectations with this sort of grace, then I think we will never be strangers to joy.

One of the most key things to hold onto, I think—no matter where you are or what your present situation might be—is to find something on the horizon that you can fix your gaze on. It is imperative to have things to look forward to, to spend more time imagining the future than ruminating on the past, and to muster the dignity to pursue better things for yourself. Love yourself enough to recreate your life and your circumstances to be as fulfilling and wonderful as they could possibly be. There is good everywhere you look. And also, out there on the horizon, there is that which is even better. Be happy where you are, and also look forward to where you might be headed—most importantly, be self-aware enough to know where you will be the happiest, and stack the deck towards that outcome to the best of your ability. 

Your future self will thank you for it.