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
wallflower. 