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