can you see my heart palpitate? it has to be visible beneath my skin. my pulse has risen to a crescendo, and how can you not hear it? the ivory ribs above the butterflies landing, heavy as hammer pangs, against my heart’s taut strings.
i tuck love notes and worries and pain into that little coffin– forgive me, the piano’s body is a case, not a tomb, and those notes are intentionally visible. do you know how much my fingers bled prying that weighted lid up? i propped it toward the sky so my heart could always see the moon.
i didn’t know, as i played, that other people would sit on the bench and thoughtlessly drop their hands onto keys. are the ghosts of their fingers why i’m so out of tune? the freedom and the vulnerability intertwined, always, with my organs displayed.
but make no mistake– i write only for me, and this is my body, my life. that crescendo is the gorgeous red of a smashed cherry, rose petal, wine stain, and i am alive and aloud as defiance.
maybe it’s a trick of the light, but i swear i spoke fears into a cold exhale and you held out your palms, catching them midair. tangible ghosts danced in your hands, the color richer each second. i want to know if i’m spectral inside too, a pirouette-sashay-plie soul, or if it’s just my breath like an afterthought. you remind me, you say, ‘you are the fears hopes dreams you breathe, and my skin is just a mirror.’ every shard of you morphs a flat palette into a kaleidoscope– my god, the hues of me i never knew
I have sent a digital copy of Audre Lorde’s essay, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex” to multiple people in my life. I doubt the link has ever been opened on their end, let alone considered, digested, invested in, discussed–
though I imagine reactive disgust to the topics at hand. To call a condensed spectrum a binary means identity erasure. A grab at the tiny, mighty pink end of a Ticonderoga to scrub the bi and wish it goodbye.
I am sitting here facing a diagnosis and wondering how illness rooted its way into my brain’s soft dirt and spawned a maze of limbs that grow faster than I shear. Did Audre Lorde’s trauma harvest her mind, the same one crafting A Burst of Light?
-making me catch my breath wondering how many women I’ve done a disservice to while cradling my compulsions and calling them pretty. If I leave anxiety on the doormat and depression in a trinket dish, can I say I always wear them? I drown out thunderstorms with headphones. I swallow pills with iced tea. I sleeve my feet in designer socks when the floor germs scare me. Am I even real, ill, beneath this veneer, and does the binary call me traitor when I cry hope into its cracks?
is a record in my head and, wait, was that when the seeds sprouted in my mind? A kid holding out her hands waiting for love to fall and catching language instead from binary’s purveyors– the someones she loved taught her so many lies.
What would you say, Audre, if you were here in the hell of now? Am I even entitled to wear your words tattooed on my skin or am I feeding the problem beast by saying, yes, me too? How do I weed a tangled mindscape by hand when I ache for a scythe
I have always had trouble sleeping. Some people struggle to string words together in daylight hours, but I am constantly talking my way to the alphabet’s Y
and never reaching the elusive
Zzzzzz.
I eat late at night, my stomach’s black hole replacing the darkness of REM cycles. All of the bolognese in the house can’t plug that spatial area that magically disappears carbs and anxiety and the self-love it takes to accept rest as a gift,
not a crash.
__
Is disorder a sauce-laden treat sucked into a black hole and burning my throat on the way
downdowndown
and wouldn’t it mean
defying gravity
to reject the pasta’s path
from kitchen to fork to gut?
As chaotic and uncertain as that force is, and as infinite as the Y seems,
I pull a soft nightgown over my head and slipper my feet and brush out my hair
Do you know the warmth of home during frigid Decembers? An electric candle in each window, packets of Swiss Miss in kitchen cabinets, the allure of spiced tea and sugar cookies and
tiny Lenox houses peppering a window sill or tree skirt?
Or is it trauma response to wrap frenetic memory in a box, layer it with paper, seal it with a bow and a painful kiss, and call it
nostalgia?
How many homes can fear and follow you as you float through walls and mirrors, a ghost of Christmas Past?
You have spent too many thoughts and breaths and sentiments in wishing wells
I went to Chagrin Falls, Ohio for an overnight stay. I carefully planned outfits with
rhinestones, embroidered socks, teacup earrings, red Mary Janes
To realize ostensibly I am not made of Mary Janes or a diamond-crusted history
but know intimately the feeling of walking home in worn-out shoes and hiding holes in favored clothes.
I play pretend well, I think, when I flip a tag or praise a blouse or walk into work, head high, and the reality is I am displaced, asking
can wealth be an anachronism like time?
Maybe my history is why I spent the past day guilt-laced in my $40 boutique top as I cut someone’s hope into confetti, scraps of bills sliced from a starving wallet
and a human heart making connections is salve, not sum.
Nice girls do not call attention to themselves. They do not wear crop tops or rhinestones or mini skirts. Their favorite color is not bright red or hot pink, and they do not own anything studded.
Crystal truths rasp a song at those whispers:
The definition of NICE GIRL is a suffocating social construct.
wallflower. 