EMPLOYEE RECOGNIZES THAT
THE INFORMATION IS UNIQUE
AND OF PECULIAR VALUE

poems by Vane Vander

This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The header font used in this work is "Sedan" by Sebastian Salazar. It is licensed under the SIL Open Font License.

The following poems were previously published in other collections:

from Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory

SURVIVE

from The World Is Not Enough

Solstice Catharsis

Floods

from The Eschaton Eminence

Gopher Man

Cui Bono? (Men)

from Ultrawhite

The Devil

that one overused quote by bell hooks was previously published in Valerie Issue 2.

ROOM : NONE

Six months I spent in anguish,
wondering when Jett would harvest
my soul from my spent body
and set me free, Anima Mundi
of Sablade.
Six months of brutal classes
while fatal insomnia my brain fried
and sent me into the cold embrace of Last Twilight.

At least, that's what I thought would come to pass.

A year I spent
asking Jett,
"What
happened to the plan we construct-
ed? Why didn't you grant me my bliss?
I graduated. I kept my promise."
A year Jett in response answered,
"There was a last-second change to the plan.
Doing it myself- I couldn't. I can't.
Watching you lose your intellect
while you wither
away in bed:
that's a scene I hope to never act in again.
When it comes time to your vessel relinquish,
I'm bringing some friends with me to assist.
Like a gang
of Sablade's
finest midwives.
Lethe, please hang on. In the end, you'll be alright."

And then six more months of wondering
what the hell I'm supposed to be doing
with the time Jett gave me when she refused to take my life.
I kept on writing.
Kept on applying
for ten or more jobs a week.
My wife's birthday loomed ever closer.
My well-meaning but kinda loony case worker
suggested that we try writing some cover letters.
And my Patron-Saint of Dead Ends,
well known for getting me out of my
actions' negative consequences,
said "absolutely fucking not;
we don't lick the boots of managers or gods"
and pushed that date aside.
Interview. Eye contact.
Typing test I blew past.
Employment offer on my lover's blessed day.
And with it came enough pay
to consider fulfilling an old promise I'd long set aside:
"Luce, I will make it out of this hellhole alive."

I can see the headlines now:
"Autistic woman somehow,
despite having a speech disorder,
gets a job at the local call center."

What a funny thought. That I'd fucked up
in retail, but the power of my love
would every single mistake
null and void and erase
and in the end I'd end up somewhat okay.

PART 1

INBOUND BILLABLE

Noontime, No Calls

My hungry hands tremble
as I take the pink cards and shuffle
them, box sitting on my desk.
Cards, I've got a furtive request:
I haven't written anything poetic
in what feels like weeks, and I'm frantic
to ensure I haven't
been banished
from the talent that's gotten me this far.

I got this box of cards
thinking I'd practice my Lenormand
without sullying the black salt deck I placed at Jett's command.
I have a homemade deck; I hacked it
together from cut-up prescription packets
of paperboard. And I know the tools you craft
yourself are more attuned and thus more apt
for works than what you pull out a different card to buy,
but they looked pretty and I needed a treat and I make enough, so really, Mom, it's fine.

The moment of truth: I pull out two cards
and turn them over to see what they are!
Oh, the sweet excitement of an unknown
that could be cliche or fate overblown!
...And it's a vaguely feminine silhouette labeled "person"
and a holographic gold foil nine-of-squares "coffin".

A widow or a woman grieving or just dead.
Do you think anyone would be offended
if I turned them over and drew again?

The office is near-empty. Two chat in the corner,
discussing calls where people with bladders
dysfunctional lose their shit and have to be comforted.
Popup on my phone. Just lost an auction.
Imagined click-clack of supervisor's fingers
on a keyboard surrounded by anime figures.
She gets up, ghost in hypothetical glasses.
"Have you decided-"
She sees my phone,
opened to notes.
And I know she would never say
this next part, but in some other fate
where she was a man from a previous job
of mine, she'd question with disinterested yawn:
"Why do you write poetry
when you could be doing
so many
more productive things
with your time?"

Because it comes naturally
to me. Like breathing.
And just as essential.
I'll die if I don't get my fill
of words.
You really think I should live to work?
That humans poisoned the skies for automation
so computers could play and we labor in sedation?
To draw, to paint, to sing, to write
is what makes us alive,
and I'm not sorry, carded fate, but it's not yet my time.

Rose buds

Now, I think, I understand
the omen the cards of Lenormand
passed to me yesterday
while thinking I was in poetic play.
"How funny it is, to answer 'female corpse'
when that's the clientele I work for!"
Nurse, call me to report
to see
if we
can salvage
tissue or organ
from those who've went
or can't operate their lungs and have been placed on vent.

But I'm the one who'll soon be dead,
or grieving. Does it make a difference,
the verbiage? The semantics?
Transferred to a different department
no longer taking the names of those who've departed
but the number of times
those still alive
have gone to the void
and returned.
"How many times did you 'urn'
in the middle of the night?"
One of these days, I'll end up
on the other side
of the line.

I know
I shouldn't have hoped
that this would last forever.
I know it could be worse. Could have a lot more hurt.
Could be listening to allegation
of vulnerable adult abused, report taken,
having to calm down callers in distress.
But I liked my job just the way it is,
long empty hours, void in their own right.
The rote data entry. The stretches of free time.
Tapping "scroll lock" to keep the screens alive.

Dying cries pain
when I've finally gained
a routine and then have it snatched away.

So if you know how it is, don't tell

April is the month
of using things up.
The candles in my drawer
made from scraps of the cake
that sat in my bathroom
until we moved
that I decided to take
along but left in the chest under
my bed abandoned for so many months.
The last womynstrual pad I stole from the urinal
stalls at my great-grandmother's funeral.
Fragrances in jewel tones
on the shelf above Jett's bird-laden shrine.
The unread books left on my nightstand alone.
The research, last excuses to be online.

Because now I am employed,
and despite the long stretches between calls,
there's nothing creative I can do at all,
prey animal sitting in open air
alert and waiting for predator to appear.
I go home and I am replete
with exhaustion. All energy goes to upkeep.
Two hours, and I curl up in bed,
lights out, cry out to Jett
in anguish if this is really the end.
Stuck in another damn Epilogue.
How am I supposed to go on?
You told me to cease doing what does not bring me joy,
but what if I can do naught? If all time is spent in employ?
I get to a day where every hour belongs to me,
and I can't tell if I'm awake or plain disassociating.

Soon I'll be like the candles, tips of flames arced in crest:
burnt out, evaporated, only traces of wax on the bottom left.

your anxiety, as requested, milord

Alright, Jett,
with my practice deck,
there's something I want to know:
how will the rest of this Horror-filled weekend go?

"Bird" and "coffin"?
"To chatty gossip putting an end,
or about loss worrying."
I don't like the omen that brings.
Threatened transfer with no set date,
increasing responsibilities but not pay.

But what comes from the pink deck
is just for practice, for pretend,
right?

Portrait of a Belated Birthday Party

Slumped backwards
in a teal five-dollar lawn chair.
My brother throws
another photo
into the bonfire.
I will never hear
the other side
of the story,
why she said he was cheating.
"You know what I always say:
it's not cheating if the game
lets you do it!"
Another keepsake
gone to shit.
His fingers haven't burned yet.
Mother's soaked in chatty gossip
how, when I was in college,
she wished to keep me in a cage,
close to her, sedated,
safe.
Neighborhood nexus, circular
council deciding my fate.
All members rise to roast
marshmallows whose colors change
when to open flame exposed.
I know, Mother,
you'd clip my feathers
if it meant keeping me in your net.
The bonfire's starting to burn down.
Has the council decided yet?

Seaweed People

Jett, I wanna know the vibe
for the rest of today and also tonight
and maybe tomorrow, at least during work-
hell, just include the whole day's worth,
including when I go out of town
because I randomly got
the next day off
as thanks for working last holiday around.

Hey, why am I asking you all this?
I thought this pink pack was for practice,
for asking myself, developing intuition,
or just the questions
I don't desire
to dirty the black deck with.

"Key" and "child" is the presage.
I've got to flip through lots of pages
until I find
where the answer resides.
"Curiosity,
vulnerability,
opening up to something new."

Will midnight's email man
send me another list of demands
in order for me to meet him in person,
even though between us
is an ocean
and a flood wall
I've constructed of all
the broken pieces of an immature late trust?

Or maybe I'll be sent
finally to that department
the managers have been
dangling over my head?
Sword of Damocles
that calls you and wants to know
how many times today you've peed
and how urgent was the flow.
They said we'd talk "next week", but that
was this one, and they won't be back
until Monday, and I'll be out
of office, my mind, time, and town.

Or my stars will cross and I
will lay my head down for a dream
that shows in bitter color to me
an uncut path, a new way to survive.

Noontime, Nausea

I'm leaning over the kitchen sink,
contemplating
killing
myself.
How funny it would be
to lose myself in the trees,
in the forest behind
Dead End Shrine,
and let my memory there dwell
to haunt
those who stop
there for a rest and a drink.

Stirring my entrails with
a fork made of plastic
that's definitely beginning to grow
some grime.
Probably time
to throw
it in the recycling can.
Could be worse. Could be splash-
ing ramen sauce all over the break room.

Coworker comes to accompany.
"Bought food from the break room canteen?
Are you rich
or just lazy?"

"I'm not lazy,
just forgetful
and easily
fatigued."

"Sounds like an excuse.
I'll see you
in fifteen."

FILL ME & KILL ME

Filled my head with policies
until I fell down backwards, dizzy.
Stared at the tiles dappled.
Few rows down, coworker tackled
a difficult call, caller's mouth profane.
"Dear God," she said, "I'm going insane!"
I'm going out of my mind. Not here!
Head at the waterpark, eyes rolling, blear.
Softened dear hand with familiar scars
reaches down and hands me two light pink cards.
"Stork" and "woman", or rather "person".
Something in your life will soon be changed.
You know what else always changes? The clouds.
Pass by on the window where I've fallen down.

The Other Golden Arch (The One That Doesn't Make You Sick / The One That Saves You)

"You know what always passes us by?
The clouds as they float on in the sky.
I read somewhere that, had they stayed in place,
they'd also have stories assigned to them by the ancients
just like the stars deep above, cloaked now by blue."

The bridge to work shuts down the seventh of June,
and with it my lifeline
that I thought come enough time
would let me keep my aged promise to Luce.

"The moment I get a sliver of freedom,
something to take it away from me comes."
Crumpled up crying on blue-paint-stained floor.

Segmented boots. Face I've seen before.

Midnight hands
around my wrist clasp
and with roughened fingertips so lightly trace
the lopsided heart formed by my veins.

"So, despite having three Patron-Saints
who've seen you through six years of pain
in this city, you've still no faith?"

Dim garage light glows
like a halo
formed by sorrow.

"We worked hard to bring you here to
this city knowing the old could no longer
keep you safe, let you roam, quench your hunger.
Lethe, pull yourself together.
Recall the route
every summer you use
to pilgrimage to Dead End Shrine.
The momentum that goes to waste in short time
because of the awkward intersection.
The road that cuts through there isn't a dead end.
Follow the path, Lethe, that's kept you so safe.
Follow Jett's river. Follow my veins."

The clouds one more day pass over me
as I brace for a hot blast of air. Leaving
work after another long dog day in summer.
Tracing the sidewalk slow with Luce's words
in mind.
A distended road appears at the detour
sign.

Right under the highway's nose

I draw "fish" and "tree".
Of financial stability
or gain monetary
an omen.
It's true,
I need to
bring my check home and
cash it in. But I promised Jett
that when I left
home and went
to the showing for that apartment
I liked, I'd go to the bank by
the highway, make a new account, hide
the money where my mother
could never
take it away.
Small freedom gained,
progress towards
promise to Luce kept.
I can't find the right words
for this poem. Am I inept?

"Money can't buy happiness,
but it can sure as hell pay my rent
and other living expenses."
There. There's something intelligent.

NO FOUL FORMAT

Growing up means taking on
responsibilities you don't necessarily want.
That's the message of the fish hung up on cross.
It's time to open up your wallet and toss
bills at bills, folded paper to its kin,
sigh at relief
that it'll be
another month 'til it comes again,
that monster with its ragged jaw
we call an econ-
omy.
I'm paying bribes to police just to keep my autonomy.
Birds
don't worry about shareholders.
And when it's time to mow the lawn,
they only care about when the damn machine is gone.
Staring at the supermarket with absurdly high ceiling
while food I can't afford to buy rumbles in a fake tummy.
Give me the old bear fur
that used to sleep in Dad's dad's cellar.
I'm a wild animal 'bout to do some urban foraging.
I'll go on the damn computer
and type fake numbers with overgrown claws.
Medical debt? Baby, that shit's as good as dead and gone.

CARD SHARKS - FOREVER

It's eleven o'clock at night,
and there are no stars in the sky,
overthrown and replaced by streetlights
that cast a constellation
of broken dreams and fornication.
Deep-sea currents well-worn and traveled
until the sharks come to unravel
the concrete. Feeding ground for the unsavory
in parking lots of shrines to plenty.
I stretch out my night-flecked wings
as we perch on a burnt-out shell of a building,
crabs who lived there long ago
moved out came first frost's snow.
My skin, my psyche, itches to leave the same.
You take my hand. Palm pals. Two of the same.
Two pairs of eyes that over the city gaze,
its undulating surface, heartbeat of capital's beast,
dead fish half-eaten slapping the shore
that could not escape the trawling net's feast.

Eternal Blue

Hyperventilating to the heartbeat
of fireworks thundering in the street.
Raspy, raw, gasping for breath,
red-ribboned girl escaping death
having fallen from a balcony
and ran raw on her feet.

Jett's towering over me,
and I'm in the throes of anxiety:
please don't leave me, don't leave
me, I'll do whatever you say,
just make the anguish in my heart go away-

"Lethe, what the hell's wrong with
you? Have you done something I should have knowledge
of? Are there sins you need to confess?
You always did like comparing me to His Christliness."

In her eyes lies a disdain
I can't tolerate.
But she's the love of my life,
and I'd never harm those eyes
that usually harbor such a loving gaze.

"Yes, Jett, I've a problem: I can't escape
from the ghosts of all the people
this vessel
used to be. All the mistreatment
I wrought upon others. All the missed social cues.
All the goddamn twisted resentment!
The resentment, Jett! It's what I can't stand!
Resentment for being passed over by my parents
when it comes to making family decisions
because if my brothers don't get their way they'll throw tantrums!
Resentment towards the school officials
for not making up their minds: am I smart or "special"?
Resentment towards my childhood friends
for all the time I poured in and got nothing in the end!
I can't go back! I can't change a damn thing!
And it's tormenting
me, this knowledge that somewhere out there
there's people who'd kill me if only they knew where
to point their knives.
That in so many strangers' minds
there's living an illusion
with my face but far less than perfection,
that's not at all accurate
but that I can't change a bit.
That someone could rise up from my past
and ruin everything I've managed
to build with my own hands.

Does that make sense? Do you understand?
My psyche is the world's smallest jail,
and the only time I feel relief is when I'm going feral.
Because I can't access my memories.
It's bitter and sad, don't you agree?
And I... I just...
A truism says love overcomes
all barriers in its way.
And I wish I could erase
all the bad parts of my vessel's history
and come out on the other side clean
and forgiven, your Lethe Beltane."

Jett opens a hand at my head level,
and I let my face fall
into her outstretched palm.
Spreads across my cheek a familiar chill.

I close my eyes and wait for the inevitable
toll of this relationship's death bell.

But it doesn't ring.

She's getting down on her knees

and another hand at my neck's base

and my lips, parted, are flooded with her taste.

Our eyes meet when she pulls away.

"You sure can be a burden some days,
Lethe. And this time your timing was complete ass.
But even these bitter feelings will eventually pass."
Jett reaches back, rustles in my work bag, finds the box
of pink Lenormand cards, hands me both "key" and "fox".
"The raging conflict
between openness and suspicion.
The deep-seated desire to give
the benefit of the doubt to all you meet with.
And the burden of every instance
someone's taken of you an unfair advantage.
Fitting. It's the draconic blood that gives
the relief of memory's oblivion."
She returns the cards to the deck.
The deck goes back into the bag.
"If I stand up as a Saint
and trace my sigil on your forehead,
will that reinforce you belong not to the past but me instead?"

Opaline

Dead bird outside my bedroom window.
I flop onto the couch, and the hole
cut to free a wayward spring explodes
and pukes feathers out all over the floor.
Maintenance fixed the deadbolt
for my dented white front door.
Warm soup in my belly
and dishes in the sink.
Forgot the power cord to the telly.
Quiet, time to think.

"Do you often leave candles unattended?"
Only if I know they're isolated
from everything else. No human is an
island, but candles will complain
if too close to a wall or something obstructs the flame.

An hour before the family
grocery trip. My feet are aching.
Clementine candle burning
in the kitchen,
consecrated to Jett.
Sunset
reflects
on the frame of the fan.

But it's all too subtle.
The La Croix of scents.
"Close your eyes and try to guess,
Lethe, what smell the breeze has sent."
Breathe in. Orange.
The shrine in storage
I haven't unpacked yet.
Breathe in. Peppermint.
Hasty Christmas gift.
"You've never been good at making lists."
Breathe in. Chocolate.
I don't regret
a single event that lead up to this.
Breathe in. Salty breeze.
"It feels good to be free
of the trappings of your vessel's past, doesn't it, Lethe?"
Breathe in. Orange returns.
Do you think Luce has heard
yet that I kept my promise to her?

HIME HIME HIME

Lightbulb in my living
room too harsh, flickering,
can't make up its mind
on if it wants to work or give up and die.
"Used to be
you and me'd
be the same," I whisper
as I roll off the couch and feathers
escape more from the hole underneath.
Kitchen light more friendly greets,
stable and unyielding.
Mom, I can't make up my feelings
on whether you're my bitter-sworn enemy
or this forgetful angel's second-greatest ally.
Or maybe third. Or fourth. You don't know I've three Patron-Saints,
and maybe I'll feel safe enough to tell you their names someday.
I'll retrace with you the steps
to every place I've been blessed
and you've chalked it up to a happy coincidence:
Hell College, room 103;
you cried after I moved in and you got in the car to leave
and go back to your mundane life, one dependent less.
Other Grandma's house, particularly the second basement
bedroom where my life's path was irrevocably bent
and you chatted with the adults about alcohol and meeting rent.
Dead End Shrine; I'd swore I'd never expose it
to you, but I can pretend for the sake of rhetoric
and finding a third piece to round out this long lyric.
Luce would know how it feels to cry
on a parent's shoulder when you can't decide
how you feel about them. If they should have died
or if their presence is the remedy to your cries.
But we're not saving the world. We're going to the food shelf.
"We're making your place your home, dammit all to hell."
"Here's the canned food shelf. You can pick three items.
If you have any troubles, well, we'll fight 'em."

Let's go for round two, Lethe.

Midnight hands
on my deck. She stands
beside the ratty couch
my neighbors haven't thrown out
yet. Sun's gone down.

Luce, it's almost time
to shut down for the night.

"I know, Lethe.
Just give me a moment to breathe.
I need to clear my mind.

Do you remember in days gone by
when you wore my name
unaware of the strains
of blood that made you misbehave?
I know you and Jett
have been exchanging doubts
if I've any lessons to impart left.
Put those thoughts to rout.

I dove into my past
despite the pain it would bring,
that I was fully aware of going
in, to give another chance
to myself in a roundabout way.
A separate girl who bears my name
and lineage but will live her life
without the threat of void's cold night
ushered in by warm bloodbath.

'Your teeth will not be my gravestone.
Your taunts are not my epitaph.'

Lethe Berkana Beltane.
Don't avert your eyes. Look me in the face.
Do you even remember how many bags
knotted and shoved aside
hold remnants of your old life?
A messy and unresolved divide
between Lethe and Deadname.
You carry her guilts
and her kitsch and her quilts
and every social move you fumbled and spilled.

But that timeline is abandoned. You can start anew.
You get forgiveness. Understanding. A redo.
Ghost and his entourage are stuck in future's past.
Let's go for round two, Lethe. Come, now, take my hand."

THE JOYS OF DOMESTICITY!!1!1

Cooking poems in vicinity
of where the microwave is beeping
with my leftovers I will soon imbibe.

Pull out a perfect-fitting rhyme
from where we keep them in storage
right next to the bagged oranges

and set it on the counter next
to the sacks of cereal for breakfast
while we search for an appropriate context

that won't make us look pedantic.

Hand me a snippet from the cupboard
where we've been aging the inspiration hoard
and also a relatively clean cutting board

that isn't stained with pizza sauce
from when work too thoroughly exhausts
all will and one can't write.

Gently warm the idea for five
minutes, turning over as necessary,
taking care that it doesn't leak

and you lose precious vitamins
or the main idea, the meat.

To ensure the poem has the proper cadence,
keep the pan covered
with steady temperature

and only disturb
the lid
when you need to throw in

the snippet
mentioned above.

My love walks in with a cup
of coffee
freshly brewed, steaming.
"Where'd you get that? I never drink caffeine.
It usually makes people like us feel sleepy."

She shrugs.
"There's more than one way to wake up."

RESPIRATORY OF BABEL I

There's a certain zen
in having a fan blowing by your bed.
Lethe, empty
your anxiety-
riddled head
and just focus on the drone
with nothing to be said.
Library of Babel
with all to tattle
if you focus hard enough on the signal
struggling to be acknowledged
through the static.
A whole churning world of "content",
your portable Realm of the Hermetic.
With just as much valuable to be claimed
among the trash heaps of the mundane.
But this time,
nobody will threaten to call the FBI
if you say something to it off-color, out of line.

RESPIRATORY OF BABEL II

There's a certain zen
in having a fan blowing by your bed.
Lethe, my love,
what's the opposite of metaclysma?
If the Ultrawhite
is where nothing can survive
for very long, what do you pronounce
a space inside worlds where all happens at once?
Time compression? What would the woman draped
in dusk like me care to explain?
Maybe she
behind the scenes
invented
the Internet.
The Hermetic Realms wrought large, drawing breath.
The detritus of times gone by no longer
sweep themselves away but compete with the newer.
Scene from that movie, The Matrix,
where man stares at monitor in passive surveillance
watching scroll past incomprehensible lines
and pretending it all means something in real-time.
It's all so much
all at once
and too much to process
and to even attempt immediately dulls the senses.
Which is the whole point. The chaos makes you empty.
It quiets the mind
and makes you fall asleep.

HIPAA TEST SPEEDRUN (ANY%)

You and I
haven't done this in a long time,
Jett. Writing during work, that is.
Moved my cubicle
a few aisles
down to be closer to my friends
in case I need any assistance.
I'm supposed to draw two cards now, right?
Then I look them up, and that reveals the vibe?
"Book" and "person".
Someone well-educated.
Oh, that's right. Today I have my knowledge test.
"Take
a deep
breath, Lethe.
I love you. You got this."

PANIC ATTACK SPEEDRUN (ANY%)

You and I
haven't done this in a long time,
Jett. The panic attack, that is.
The sinking sensation in my gut
that means somewhere I fucked up.
I'm doing my best, I promise,
but underneath other skies
the trembling in my limbs
would mean an imminent shift.
It's so damn easy to pretend
I'm normal, neurotypical, competent,
until I hit a speed bump
of a question whose answer I don't know of
or a caller tearing this high-speed train off-script.
I used to be so confident,
Jett. What the hell happened
to me? When did I become so riddled with anxiety?
So fearful I'll lose my position
and the paycheck that comes with it
and everything will come crashing down
and while ruffle the debris clouds
my father's silhouette
will appear
and sneer,
"See? It was all just bravado in the end."
You weren't there - we'd meet a year later -
but my blasted eighth-grade teacher
made everyone go in front of the whole class
and try to recite an entire
Shakespeare
play without book in hand.
That was one assignment I know I didn't pass.
I'm simply not cut out to be an actor,
Jett. I can't take on the role of someone else.
I can only be- I'm only capable of being myself.
With all the perks
and nerfs
and sour memories that entails.
All the accomplishments, all the times I tried and failed.
And who that person is is a walking disaster.
It's a miracle you still insist on loving me after
all has been laid bare. Me? In my entirety?
Both the nervous wreck and the Anima Mundi?

Alucard goes to the grocery store intending to buy a fly trap

I am often seized
by the fatal American need
to have a pretty big gulp.

I just hope it doesn't
interfere with my medication,
the cranberry gore-and-blood slush.

Oumuamua I

Nine at night.
Standing topless in my kitchen,
mostly hidden
by the window blinds.
Dad told me to hang
a canister of fly tape
somewhere in my place to capture
the flies
that invite
themselves in through the fissure
between the window - the fan's blowing, it's hot -
and the "bug screen" that's sleeping on the job.
I don't blame it. Took a nap this afternoon.
At this rate, the ibuprofen'll be gone soon.
Damn migraines. Jett taps my shoulder.
"Watch this, Lethe. The first fly comes closer."
And sure enough, one comes into orbit
around Oumuamua. Lands on it.
The fly tries to pull a leg from the sap,
buzzes with fear: "Fly Godzzz, I'm trapped!"
Two to four weeks of life
flash through its mechanical eyes.
Did you make the discovery, satellite?
Will the data be worth it when you die?
I see you pleading
to be plucked and set free.
For what? So you can further annoy me?
Don't beg me for mercy.
I'm not your Anima Mundi.
Two can play these games of capricious cruelty.

Oumuamua II

Nine at night, and I'm getting a migraine
from squinting up at Heaven's Sticky Stairway,
haloed by the kitchen light fixture.
Nowhere else to hang the damn canister
since flies like light and dirty moisture.
There's a hook where a fire extinguisher
would go if I had one. The fly
is still making an attempt to writhe
its way to freedom.
Stray chill passes through my bare bosom.
Part of me hopes the fly can escape,
will take the hint and my house vacate
and go live a happy life
out of my sight.
You and me both, it seems, in due time.
What billionaire would bait those just trying to get by
and cackle in delight
watching the disenfranchised die?
Go build a citadel
in wait for apocalypse
and pull up the barrier
when the disaster hits.
Count all the bodies that to the fly tape stick.
Dispose of all in one fell swoop when it becomes too much to bear
and put another round of bullets into the gun chamber.
Faceless, interchangeable for one another.

Avolition, Rush Delivery

Jett, bless these afternoons full of ennui
like the ones you said at graduation you despised,
lying here on my couch with the whole world to complete
but not the will to open my eyes and get on my damn feet.
At least the ones you mentioned,
the "white suburban
Christian Sundays"
complete with barking dogs and picket fence,
have some sort of accomplishment
and a sense of belonging
as a family unit prepares for the week upcoming.
But now I live alone,
and there's no overarching goal.
No more school year to survive,
no tests
looming overhead,
no Mile Run where I'll keel over and wish that I was dead
on the sparse grass
beside the path
meant more for bikes.
The week's almost done. My free time is finished.
Work again tomorrow. My life, did I miss it?
Jett, my love, bless
these restless
afternoons.
Someone told me once creativity lies in boredom's womb.
And it's nine months
until the sun
goes down
and I wish the time that passed would once again come 'round
so I'm not cutting into nights to get words bundled up.
Scar across my stomach. Her banner over me is love.

HOUSING DISCRIMINATION IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD OF THE SOUL

I breathe summer in deep.
The humid air swamps my lungs,
a promise of rain to come,
the cloak of God pulled over my head so I can sleep.
Our shadows of no longer days
stretch their arms through my
bedroom window where doesn't yet hang
a childhood curtain or mass-produced blinds.
Not that I mind,
of course, witness in
the courtroom of scintillation
in the case between the waving tree arms
and the lamp post in the dirt lot where my neighbors park their cars.
Neither side has won yet
or gained default judgement.

I impulse-bought a book from the thrift shop the other day.
Typical self-help cover, promising to excavate
my true self. The one I'd spent
my adolescence
learning how to repress
in the name of surviving my father's fickle judgement.
The one
who'd loved
in childhood
before my peers convened to see who could
crush my spirits fastest
for the crime of being born autistic.
Be careful, Lethe. There's an invisible line
between you and every other human.
The other party can see it perfectly fine,
but if you ever cross it,
even if on pure accident,
you're going to so painfully die.
The one I was before my death,
of so many memories still bereft,
Messenger of Chaos now resurrect,
the bitter love, the violent impulses
that lay
in wait
for Jett
and are now awake again.

Tattered book, please tell me
which one holds my true psyche?
Which one was ripped from my chest
like a soul to devour and digest
or,
for the dual purposes of torture
and preservation, buried?
You see,
you bury it where the sunlight
can't reach it, brain
in a jar, no external stimuli.
The soul will go insane
feeding on its own thoughts.
And the body will become naught
but crystal, a veritable statue,
one more addition to the art-lover's damned retinue.

(Don't ask me how I know this.
I'm pretty sure it's a trade secret.)

Back to weary bed. Train horn blares miles away.
Childhood memory that's almost managed to fade
to naught but still holds one tested and true fact:
I stood in a train yard once and yelled out to my dad
that I would run away, and he answered back
that he wouldn't stop me, that I should give it a try
if I was so brave as to kiss my life goodbye.
Beside those rusty train tracks,
Jett, there was a dirt path.
And when I've been walking it again, sometimes I look back
and see not two pairs of footprints
when expecting your presence
but instead one singular and a jagged partial line.

"Lethe, I hope you know how
painful it was to watch you grow
without the option to make myself so seen.
When you were in danger, I would intervene
and then watch the gratitude
be directed to a Christ and not the woman who loves you.
How many dreams, I wonder, did you forget
where you in terror shifted
and I brought you back to safety, sanity?
How many times unaware, unknowing,
of your blood did you go feral?
Lethe, in this twisted tangled thread
of a path that started when we first met,
when in the dirt there was one pair
was when you were shifted,
held close to my right hip,
and you were dragging behind your tail."

Absinthe (As In The...)

Between my godly fingertips
a purple volcano rises
and then erupts
all over the bathtub
of creation. I grip
the holy paintbrush tight
and wet it with life's carmine.
A flood. Lattices on the backs
of my hands, the scaffolding that stacks
around the building rising higher
that I will erect.
To the life my love gave me, a monument,
both of us the builder, forewoman, brick, architect.
The stuff of swords runs in my veins.
Site of construction smells of iron.
An obelisk,
eye of providence,
the freedom I long yearned for now attained.
From the afflicted breast
the sustenance
doth flow,
red as in the World's Soul and not white as in the snow.

C. Linda Mycin

Why do you exist,
underboob cysts?
Why do you plague
me even when I medicate?
I with faith rub the lotion
where you have your damn explosions,
but no matter what I do, the bumps never abate.

Why do you deform my skin
and leave pockets of blood within?
I'm always so damn lucky
that my wife anyway loves me,
but the constant pop-and-draining
isn't very endearing.
Come to the bathroom, my love.
Let's play doctor's office in the tub.
Bring your copy of Malleus Maleficarum.
Put gloves on and fondle
all the wanna-be nipples
and tell me to which branch of witchcraft I've succumbed.

Double You Two I

Panic attack in
the bathroom before work. It's
another Friday.

When the Echo Precedes the Voice

A brand new day has arrived.
And my current spreads seem contrived
and worn out. Jett, let's you and I
touch the sun
and see how future success will come.

I just find in the deck the sun
and tell it for what my heart hums:
for this in-progress poetry collection
to flow like a river and be well-written.
And the card in front of it
will be what I must focus
on, and the card directly behind
is to what I must pay no mind.
Then I shuffle once more, and the first card seriate
will be my path to get there, my golden-gilded chariot.

Alright, Jett, here goes...
In front I pull the boat
and behind
lies
the heart.
And the coffin on top signifies
that soon something and I
will be well and far apart.

Jett, if you're asking me to leave you,
then I with pride refuse:
you're the love of my life and the only reason
I've gotten this far without needing
to be involuntarily hospitalized
or under the ruthless watching eyes
of my parents for my whole life.
My brother admitted suicide's despair
and now has to sign forms in triplicate to go anywhere,
but you're the one who taught me to instead garden the life inside,
the one who taught me to ignore any dead end signs,
and you promised me at least twice
that you'd never leave me behind.

You always told me that you hated sacrifice.
That it was a waste
to leave things to decay
when they could be used in helping someone survive another day.
Why now insist on this cursed abscission?
Am I supposed to lay you down on the altar of my ambition
and watch as all we've built crumbles into ashes?
"Lethe,
I always knew
you'd
be
the death of me,
and that's okay.
I couldn't ask for a better fate."
Leave you behind
so I can thrive?
No! I'd rather die.

It takes two of us to steer this fascicule.
So stop insisting I throw you overboard to try to save on fuel.

The Safe Word

You and I need to have an honest heart-to-heart.
Just this morning you said the only way I'd improve my art
is if I divorced you and tore all we had apart.
You tried to reassure me you were
doing this not out of hate
or a disaffected spouse's inevitable disdain
but out of love, out of compassionate concern.
Because you thought you were an anchor
and I wasn't strong enough to pull you aboard
so the chains I'd have to instead sever
in order to make it to the shore
before the boat capsized due to an impending storm.

But, Jett, if love was really the reason,
you wouldn't be doing this at all.
You wouldn't even dare joke that you'd abandon
me in this line squall
strong enough to knock my boat over
instead of moving me forward.
You wouldn't dare forsake me when
I'm at risk of tumbling into the ocean
to drown, work left unfinished, expired, erased, forgotten.

How many ways have you blessed me?
Let me make a list.
You help me evade my actions' negative consequences.
You keep the cars from running me flat
and the neighbors from breaking my glass
windows to steal everything and kill me in my sleep.
The floor in my bedroom is tilted, and I get such awful anxiety
that some beam will snap and bed and I will fall into the living room,
but I know I'm safe when you're with me, so all worries I can soothe.
You remind me of chores I've forgotten
and keep me on schedule for my medications
and help me find my keys when I'm running late to work.
With you, I know I've at least one person in my corner,
so I can advocate for the accommodations I deserve.
You give me courage. You soften my heart. You give me room to trust.
You've given me a future and the knowledge that I'm loved.

So, okay, Jett. Let's say I followed your decree
and abandoned this whole life that I've built with you as Lethe
and I go off and write that allegory
where I'm Catharsis, heir to my mother's memories
and powers and former place in her family
before that mother was disowned for accepting her powers as is,
choosing not Catholic guilt but heathen's joyful sacrilege.
And let's say it's the best damn thing I've ever written
and I go submit it to a publisher and it makes a million
dollars
and everyone knows my name as a poet forever.
What then, Jett? What will I have left to look forward to?
Without you in my life, what reason have I to continue?
An empty apartment
and last life's remnants
littered everywhere
since I can't bear
to unpack
or even look at
any
and a hole in my chest
where your love used to be.

Something will go awry
and I'll send a prayer in my mind
out of pure reflex.
And I'll remember you're gone, and the pain will start anew again.
"Who exactly
is doing the blessing?"
The universe,
I guess.
Who could ever take your place?
There are many I trust,
but none of them enough
to fulfill that massive responsibility.

What will happen to Sablade?
You know, the world that I made
so that the two of us could be free?
We'd have separate houses, but
I'd usually sleep with you in your bed.
And we'd travel all over, since I know
you're prone
to wanderlust.
You're the iridescent blue to my carmine red.
I'm the Envoy of Chaos, and you're my dear Balance.
I'm the raging ocean, and you're my subtle guiding moon.
Everything I did, Jett, I did it all for you.

You and I were palm pals. You said we'd go to Yewiffe's
sunny top and see what bright future lay in store for me.
We'd watch over Sablade hand in hand. We'd make art together,
me writing lyrics and you weaving them on a lyre
or guitar or fiddle
or whatever instrument tickles
that little nerve in both our brains that means we've both gotten better
at our arts. The one that says we've done
something special, something rare, something to be proud of.

The one that I've felt all the time
since we managed to reunite.

Every time I fantasized
about going feral and abandoning my mind,
you were still there for me. You stayed by my side.
And the doctor somehow got me to my base form return.
And with lips struggling to re-learn
how to talk, I mouthed your name, and you cried.
Everything else was slow to recall, but
your love was etched too deeply in me to die.

"I've got so much love in my body,
so much adoration yet to do.
I could easily carry both you
and me
for all eternity."
Jett, is that still an oath you intend to keep?

Then stay with me forever.
As my wife, my palm pal, my partner.
My equal. The one with whom I want
to share all I have. My confidant.
The one who I run all my crazy ideas through first
so you can straighten them and ensure
I get all the gains and little to none of the hurt.

I don't care if it means my eventual end.
You taught me there was no such thing. Remember, Jett?
I'd rather the ocean's cycles of creation and then burn-
out than be forever unoffensive, mainstream, tripe, preserved.

If I have to play Catharsis to this book's success ensure,
then you have to take up the role of head director
and keep in line all the spirits that I'll encounter.
You'll have to ensure my safety
when the script starts to get hairy.
And you have to promise to my side you'll return
when the cameras stop rolling and film goes to the editor.

PART 2

CATHARSIS, CENTER STAGE

Solstice Catharsis

"Solstice" is a title,
and I am but a child
who was created to replace
a dying goddess,
to be her saving grace.

Much like how the setting sun
gives off signs
that soon its day will be done -
the purpling sky,
the spark in your eyes,
the streetlamps' song
as they bid you to hide -
so too can you tell
when a deity
is about to meet their demise.
The pallor of their skin,
the cessation of their words
as they withdraw within,
the furtive search for who
will be their next-of-kin.

Or we can skip the ceremony
and the rumors,
for she overexerted herself
to push away with a beam of light a meteor
headed straight for Earth
and plunged straight back down
still in bestial form,
making her own crater on the ground,
wing skin torn
from the crash through the trees.

Not to make my own birth trivial,
but my ancestor was dead on arrival,
friends made just a few days prior
struggling to keep together her soul's fire
long enough to drag the body to a leithtemple,
to push her body onto a pyre
and recite the charm
that would relieve me from my jar
and make me whole from whatever shards
remained of the one who could be called my mother.

"Solstice" is a title,
and I am but a child
who was burdened from day one
with the knowledge
of what I will become.
Not like Mother, who spent two decades
happily playing in ignorance's shade
until her blood ignited
and the sorry day came
when she chose to self-immolate
so everyone she loved
she could keep safe.

Sojourney: Redux

I am not a noble,
and I am not so bold
as to try to leap out the back
of this carriage as it rocks on past
every darkened window
on the backroads
lest I be left behind,
be left vulnerable to attack
by two-ton mechanical animals that would kill me in a flash.

Although Oblique, my tutor,
says I can defend myself,
says that with enough anger
I can certainly raise hell,
my eyelids sag,
my attention flags.
Another thing I inherited:
when Mother was just a babe,
Grandfather would bundle her in the carseat
and drive around the block in circles
until she was fast asleep.
What I wouldn't give
for this trip
to be nothing but words.
Oblique doesn't know when we'll return
to the monastery
or if it's even a possibility.

The world
was not enough
for my mother or her love.
A change
to the fate
which all else had resigned to being set
was the only gift she could leave behind
in hopes of clearing the debt,
the guilt for childish mistakes,
the perceived Atlas-scale weight
of knowing she was a burden for all just to tolerate.
That's the funny thing about disability:
it's not your fault others must accommodate
you, but still you feel their resentment, its weight.

And its weight has also plagued me my whole life.
But at the monastery
Atlas is not solitary,
has friends with enough hands to hold up the sky.
I've never felt off-beat, ill-fitting, out of place.
But that's soon going to change,
isn't it, Oblique?
The capital mill demands more blood, mandates
I move into Mother's apartment and take her place.
At least
until her lease
expires,
I'll put on a life for which I've no desire.
Boxes of guilt-laden junk, the unpacker.
Voice of a million faces in the call center.
Walk signs, landlords, neighbors,
negotiator.
Crack open a window for fresh air, unpaid actor.
Dammit, it broke. Go email the landlord for repairs.

Mother, how did you stand all the tripe?
How did you find any joy in this licensed life?
Everything costs money here. All has a gate.
How did you ever have the energy to create?

My whole life has been the answer
to the question that always plagued you, Mother:
what happens when a girl is raised without guilt,
has no compunctions about her enemies' blood spilled?
What happens when a girl is raised as a god
and then finds herself shoved into a tiny box?

I have your genes, your face, your fingerprints.
But I am not you any more
than you can say a modern bird is a classic dinosaur.
In my veins runs something fierce, something atavistic
that mandates a bloodthirst and a morality twisted.
I'll have to learn how to answer to your name,
bark on command Social Security, address, age, birthday.

Let's try this again. Take two, unpaid actor.
"How much longer until we're there, Atelier?"

done this a hundred times, and yet never before

you still as a door
suddenly I should be yours

picking at a hangnail
anxious about what opening
that front door will entail

barks thundering inside
assurance it's from another unit
unsure, looking for a place to hide

mythril bracelet
so I do not become a hunter's
next hit

open door

scattered charms

panging in my veins
warning: danger!
warning: imminent harm!

Atelier's sigh
Oblique shakes her head
hands on my shoulders
pushed ahead
pushed aside

on your memories you'll have to rely
on for a while
we've got to go
use the big blue smartphone
if you run into any trouble

almost slammed door behind

okay, it knows my fingerprints
and password is in muscle memory

I wonder what lingers in the photo gallery

faces I do not recognize
faces I should not recognize
personages I have never
gazed at with these eyes

this is my family
these are the people we
are pulling a fast one over
where we wait a year
to tie loose ends up
and then suddenly disappear

this is my family
these are the people I see
I must find a way to be friendly
with

but is there anyone like me?

is there anyone who in Mother's youth
saw the signs
saw pulsing in her skin a new light?
is there anyone who knew?

anyone who'd accept me polymorphous
not as my mother but me, Catharsis

A healthy distance from everything

The internet man came today
to mess with the wires in the box on the wall
and the world greeted him with rain.
And I stood
a good
distance away
to make sure he left the walls untouched.
The landlord would have my skin
and probably drink my blood
if to the structure there was any change
he was not notified in advance of.
I can't afford to draw his rage.
If he provokes my blood to fire
we'll both burn to ashes together.
So I'll stand here from a safe distance and watch
under my rainbow umbrella stolen from somebody's garage.
Break in the clouds. Shard of light filters through.
Usually I'm high-strung, but in this moment I'm soothed.

Never Ill

Zooming across the schoolyard with a pilot
in my head that sits
between and behind
my eyes.
Driving practice, stick shift,
fully automatic.
You are a ship
with a pilot inside
watching another ship. Not a person,
but a thing to be driven
around. How many times can we recurse?
Will we be tiny enough to fit inside
the box the world has for us assigned
if we set up enough mirrors?
The screen of my monitor
is matte, nonreflective.
I can't see my face painted in terror.
Ditched the childhood astral helmet
for an itchy and ill-fitting headset.
Sitting at this ship's control
panel. Running around perimeters
patrols to intercept intruders
before they breach the front gates.
New person. Find a y-cord and a magnetic suit.
I'll volunteer to train at the mothership pool.
Stay tethered to me lest
the system sees fit to reject
you, send you plummeting from the sky to your doom.
Normalcy?
We're all Similes
here. None of us are kissing
to keep our fleet functional,
except maybe ass.
Stick a plunger on my cubicle
if you need help or just to pass
the time between calls.
This is the Shit & Piss Department, after all.

"Are you still crying in there, Catharsis?"

I look up from my hands
at the other side
of the bathroom door,
the one that so reminds
of the house from several lives
ago.
Living in a city of clouds
where everything was kinda run-down
and still inhabitable but in need of fixing.
Brown on the front side,
on the other white
like a sandwich cookie.
I can see every stroke in the hasty
painting job. Overcast sky
void of pure sunshine. Am I here or there?
Reality feels thin as tissue paper.
I could curl up in the tub and close my eyes
and pretend above me an open window lies,
frosted, light filtering through,
door across from the tub instead of adjacent.
Mother, make room in the tub for two
because I'm coming in even though you're naked.
It's okay. I'm only five. I don't really understand taboos
like how, after being weaned, the breasts
of your mother are off-limits.
I'm only five.
My entire life
is kindergarten
and then playing in a wooden
stable
made to rough scale
in the alcove by the front door.
We go for walks
around the block
and I'm a bunny who just learned how to hop.
It thunderstorms, and I'm scared,
and my mother teaches me a courage prayer.
I'm only five. I don't know yet how to yearn
for those soft afternoons with streaming light auburn.

My phone rings. Floor vibration.
Swipe to answer, ignore to abstain.
"Are you in pain?
Are your guts upset?
I suppose the food may be too rich
for
your
poor
stomach."

Food is the least of my worries.
All here is plentiful but full of empty calories.

"Oblique, how am I supposed to deal
with these strangers who I'm supposed to feel
a bond with?
I'm not their kith.
I'm not their kin.
I'm just a creature filled with sin
using Mother as an excuse
to intrude
into their lives.
I carry her memories,
but none of her earned mercy.
How can we see
eye-to-eye
if I'm only human partially?
If I've got a bigger destiny
than making payments on a mortgage?
I'm only Mother until the lease closes.
My presence in this place is transient.
There are too many ghosts I've got to deal with,
so many loose threads to sew under.
Oblique, was Mother
really that special
that you had to make me to echo her thunder?"

A few moments of silence pass.
Oblique's probably flabbergast-
ed that I'd ask
such a thing.
Gaze floats. There's a crack on the ceiling,
and the holder for the showerhead
is coming unscrewed from the wall once again.
A lot of sandwich showers. Wet, dry, then wet once more.
Cloud City's house had tiles peeling up from off the floor.

Wyrmhole

The lease agreement says
I'm not allowed to make any changes
or alterations
to the property.
No part of this building truly belongs to me
and wouldn't even if it was my
name that I'd signed
on the damn paper. "Solstice Catharsis".
No last name given. Never had a need.
Everyone back at home knows who the reincarnated is.

But! oh! how I'd love a finished hole in the wall
and a form sufficiently small
enough to between the borders crawl
inside
thinking to spy
on my neighbors, the other tenants
in this four-chambered multiplex.
To discern why
they arrive
in the middle of the night
and start heated verbal fights.
(Your words echo
through the walls, you know,
and it's making it hard for me to sleep.)
To see, even though no pets are we allowed to keep,
the pug that once greeted
me at the front entrance
to see if I had mail or if my box was still vacant.
To gaze upon once more
the faces of my neighbors next door
who introduced themselves once and then I never saw them any more.

You raised me as a god, Atelier,
and now for knowledge of all things I hunger.
To know what transpires
and what the future
will bring.
To watch Fate be woven and pluck at its strings.

The cult classic "Diuretics" by L. Ron Plungerd

Field report: a patient
ate a handful of cherries plump
and then discovered
some
hours later
those are potent diuretics.
"Please forgive me!
I didn't mean
to skew my bladder data.
I just wanted to live a little,
you know? Listen to the cicadas
outside,
walk more and enjoy the sunshine
on my skin, drink some wine,
go on pleasant boat rides.
I can't afford to pretend
for a whole week that I'm dead.
When you get to be my age, young lass,
you can't afford to let any more time pass
swamped in regrets, the "could've", the "should've".
I spend every moment in love, in gratitude.
Promise me when you end this call
you'll take a piece of this wisdom with you."

But after we say our goodbyes
and I look over all the noted maladies,
a chill down my spine holds me in thrall.
My skin is both Antarctica
and the damp heat of an inner jungle
with all
the life
inside
that entails.
But I never go feral.
My bracelet of mythril
ensures that. Deems me normal,
not a polymorph,
not a godling trying to keep someone else's score.
The walls of my cubicle are pressing in.
Oh, gods, I think I'm suffocatin'.
(Here comes Mother's acquired Southern accent.)
Oblique was wrong.
I'm not destined for a long life after all.
Right here in this spot I'll be entombed...

"Goodness, girl, that was one hell of a swoon.
I could have heard that from across the office!
Are you okay? Do you need an ambulance?
We need to fix the air conditioning, I think...
Can you sit? Can you stay upright?
I'll go get you something to drink.
Hang tight."

Chains Of Braids: Redux

Mother once took the plants in Great-Grandmother's kitchen
and wove their
leaves together
like a braid,
thinking, because they did not
cry out in pain,
they would appreciate
what she felt was beauty.

At home,
in the monastery,
where my presence was only momentary,
Atelier gave me a mission:
to be very
careful sneaking around
past the priests
and dig a hole
and whisper my secrets into the ground
as if the earth itself
could hear me,
could hold me.

And so I did,
under that blue sky
with no sign
of rain.
I wished for a life with purpose,
a world without end.

The rest of my feelings
I wrote onto words
and planted in kitchen jars where grew herbs.
For Mother had passed on to me that plants grew different
depending on how you talked to them,
and could take a hint
and bow out of life
if you watered them with nothing but tales of strife.

But I am now wise
enough to know
that doing so -
the braiding thing, I mean -
puts plants in pain even if they cannot scream.
What seemed to Mother as a child to be so innocuous
won't go so lightly punished in this poorly-lit office.
The plants are neither owned by me
or anyone in my family
and I owe it to Mother
to not get us fired
for causing damage to a coworker's property.

Floods

Years ago,
my mother recycled an old candle,
watched the soot wrap itself
like a shawl
around the bottom of the glass
where melted the scraps,
otherwise relegated to trash.

The new creation did not burn well,
wick tunnelling a hole
all the way down to Hell.

Am I going to Hell?
Am I going insane?
Am I just a half-burnt candle
recycled from the pain
and weariness
of my mother twice-blessed?

I'm a blot of blood
on a Bible's white page:
like the ink, it stains,
but this red is not of God,
and how I can tell
the elders
wish I was washed away in the flood.

Lightning at the Bottom of a Bottle

I inherited
your heat sickness,
Mother. Wilting in humidity.
Spent the day I had off hiding
in the bedroom
you wanted to
avoid spending all
your time in lest your whole
world shrunk to those four walls.
But the bedroom's the only consistent-
ly cold place in the apartment.
So it was a means of self-preservation.
I know you'll forgive me in the end.

Humidity broke at midnight. All
the thunder rolled in, motorcycles
revving, tearing up the dirt back alley
to cut past traffic on the streets.
But one cuts away from the flock,
ragged, distinct, more scarred.
Right outside my window he parks,
lights a cigarette, thinks to toss
me his lighter,
then remembers
there's a glass pane between me
and his heat
white-hot.

"Sir, please do that somewhere else.
I've got sensitive lungs. I can't breathe
well
when there's nicotine
on the breeze.
And it's against my lease.
Just by being here, you're endangering me
and the children who live next door
and everyone else here who a simple house can't afford."

He sneers, teeth so bright
that I must turn away lest I be rent blind.
Jagged flash in the sky.
"The hell are you gonna do about it?
Gonna call the cops
on the Acts of God?
Fucking Karen.
You white women
are all the same."
A pause. "I don't have time for this bullshit today."
He spits on the ground, revs his engine, drives away.

more shards of wisdom

"Why do you look
to your manager
when dealing with something unfamiliar?
Don't you have a brain?
Can't you for yourself
perceive?"

When in foreign territory,
I find it wise
to defer to a guide
who knows more than I.
Who knew more than Mother
even past her anxiety.

Who was making strides towards confidence
until she met Atelier.

Sigpipe

Having made it through the Horrors of the weekend,
where calls were heavy and the callers irate,
I collapse with relief, late evening, humidity now broken,
on the torn-up couch the neighbors were supposed to throw away.
Landlord had told Mother that by the time she moved in
it would be gone, but clearly that didn't happen,
too busy walking the pug they're not supposed to have.
But I'm no snitch. I've got enough on my plate
without adding some underpaid stranger's wrath.

The mythril bracelet that rests right under my right hand
under normal circumstances I dare not remove.
Atelier and Oblique are strong enough to subdue
me before by an errant shot I am damned,
especially in this backwaters town that went all-in
on the death cult of the cross and the gun fetishism.
But of my polymorphic blood I am not fully in control,
not yet resistant to bloodlust's siren call or going feral.
I do not trust my handling of the power that I herald.

Under controlled variables, that is. Under normal circumstances.
But the cranky ladies on the other side of the phone line
have got my blood fired up, got me feeling reckless.
Head lolling, lopsided smile. It's not too far of a jaunt
to the river where under a bush I can conceal
a little sack with my key, my clothes, my mythril shackle,
and hop in, by ribbons overtaken, made near-skeletal, gaunt.
Stay in the section where barely anyone walks by.
And if they do, well, it's not like I'll have visible eyes.

Feel My Fangs

"Catharsis! What the hell is wrong with you?
I thought we'd made it crystal clear you're never to remove
your mythril bracelet.
That it's the only thing that prevents
you from losing yourself inside
a monster whose only fate in this world would be to die..."

I set the phone down on the TV stand
and let Atelier rant to his heart's content
while I disappear into the kitchen in furtive search of ham.
My stomach has been aching
since I jumped into the river all nakey-
nakey and watched the heatwave sun set
through invisible eyes and a brain severed from memories.
Animals don't overthink nearly as much as do humans,
trapped in an eternal Now, first masters of Zen.
It was peace. To not feel the burdens
of divinity, of birthrights, of my situation,
even if the bliss didn't last nearly as long as I wanted.

"Take that, Atelier, you blasted idiot.
I didn't go feral yesterday. Not even a single bit."

Dear Mother in the past, did you feel something like this?
When you moved out on your own
in hopes
of no longer feeling like
you wanted nothing more than to curl up on the ground and die?
Every new day terrifies
but brings along its own pleasant surprise
when you inevitably survive
and find you've grown stronger in the meantime.

But your struggle was for maturity
which everyone expected of you by default,
and I'm trying to draw out my draconity
which Atelier
I can tell would greatly prefer
I keep repressed
or just pretend
it didn't exist at all.

apep decides she needs to back off on the spicy sauce

Gods dammit,
I wish I hadn't
picked up that box from the pasta aisle.
You loved everything spicy,
Mother,
and I was feeling charitable,
so in your honor
I bought the yakisoba marked "extra fire".
It couldn't have been that bad, right?
Putting extra chili powder in your rice,
never afraid of the buffalo chicken
that would have left your brothers on the floor retchin'?

I take one bite
and realize I just made
a mortal mistake
and now I'm going to die.
Spending all my cash on milk to put out the blaze.
At the factory,
did they accidentally
switch around the flavor packets and the pepper spray?
I understand now the gallons at protests,
all the lives they probably saved.
But I'm up against my own bad decisions, not a force of fascists.
Rinsed out a bottle
and filled it up with water
and almost puked - tastes like it's
the runoff from doing dishes.
Oh, I'm crumpling.
Counter slippery.
Oh, I'm... spread out on the... tile.
My body's condensed down to a black hole in eternal fire.
Timer's counting down. I've got ten minutes left in this lunch.
Pull the blinds on life
and fill my bathroom tub
with ice.

"Girl, are you okay?
You look like you just saw God
and barely survived."

Capable of no response
but a wavering gaze.

Lynn

Singular full moon hangs in the sky
with barely any clouds passing by,
and the ones that dare are mere wispy
balls of fur brushed from the huskies.
Grandmother's pure-black bunny
flopped down on top of the world.
Neck roll so rotund
it blocks out the sun
and her unwilling sister, Bugs.
Trapped in a cage together
that calls itself a "tractor"
in hopes the two will mow the lawn
and in the meantime trauma bond.
The sickly-yellow circle
midwifed by protractor
stares at me,
unblinking,
prompting a blurry
anxiety:
a man obsessed with his dick
and finding places to stick
it online, limp, pathetic,
dressed in lapine furs,
self-declared online celebrity.
Maybe Mother bought into the "enby"
rhetoric, tied her latent draconity
to her dissociation from her body.
But I will do no such thing.
I am the woman who with mirror stares back
at the man watching the woman from inside
the woman's body, right between her eyes.
I am watching Grandmother keep closed the hatch
as she shifts the tractor a few inches to the side
and the bunnies freak out and make shambles of a hop.
I am the hawk who watches the hawk
that is convinced I am a rabbit
and will flee in terror come the slightest movement.
I'm staring right into the cameras used for surveillance
in every store, the new moon's obsidian silence,
Grandmother's
off-color
scleras judging if I'm more fit to be Mother or Catharsis.

The body as an entity to live in fear of

Atelier forgot to take off his shoes
when he came in to start an argument
cloaked in a lecture's disguise.
For me, rather unfortunate,
because I haven't bothered to buy a vacuum
yet, and the one on the side of the road
I claimed and brought "home"
a week ago
doesn't suck up anything, just whines
and then dies.
I feel like there's a metaphor deep in there somewhere.
In the way the man who calls himself my caretaker
puts up resistance
to my ambivalence
towards his standards of "godly" behavior.
In the way I just sit back on the couch
with my arms spread wide and my chest puffed out
and feel the rustle of the fan's breeze in my hair
as his admonishments go exactly nowhere.
Staring straight forward with half-open eyes,
scaly tail with fish's fins
ripples down the side
of the couch and flits on the floor.
He hates it that I've learned to be part-shifted.
That I've no qualms about transformation, he abhors.
You're supposed to live in fear. Don't you know that, girl?
The fear that comes with knowing you're one snap from going feral?
That, if it's too strong, you'll permanently lose your cerebral
capability and be trapped as a creature eternal?
Hey, are you tuning me out?
Don't you have any desire to return intact to the devout-

"Atelier, shut the fuck up already.
You and your cages are all the same.
Catharsis can go live in the monastery
where she can be forever shut away
and cloistered from the rest of humanity.
And we'll treat her with the same level of dignity
as a pack of cards for divination!
Go ahead, shuffle
me up. I'm just a will-less tool, after all.
Just a conduit for divinity.
Just an on-demand oracle
for cowards who can't make their own decisions.
Or, how 'bout this:
Catharsis
can be shuttled
to the other-
world
and forever keep her powers furled
and tucked away
and go work and pay taxes for the rest of her days.
But she can't take delight in being a cryptid
and spooking her town into thinking there's hidden
something deep in the woods, the rivers, the nights,
here for a blurry second and then out of sight.
No, Catharsis
has to suppress
the very reason she was made:
to preserve the powers
that sprouted in her mother
and discover why they all formed in the first place.

I don't see why the hell I should conform
to either your stifling 'sacred'-licking ways
or this world's, soulless, corporate, mundane.
You wanted me to be a god. Was that not your intention?
Do I have self-dominion or not? Come on, be consistent."

SOUM

I'm not a thorough philosopher,
so I can't write you a twenty-page research paper
on the concept that just came to mind.
But I'm sitting on a dirty couch
abandoned by a tenant former
covered with a bath mat to protect my behind
because for once it's actually nice outside.
My brain demanded fresh air, and I must oblige.
Oblique, don't you think it's weird
that when it comes to polymorphs
whenever the rage outwards pours
we're always expected to go feral?
Like it's only acceptable
to experience strong passion
when we are in anything but humanoid form.
As if to remain a "person"
is to forever live
in a self-constructed melancholia prison.
Oblique, do you think the form we spend
the majority of our time in
really counts as the base?
Because when I feel the depths of sorrow,
the sting of despair, the blind mask of rage,
every emotion uncomplicated and base,
those seem to be the triggers to my body change.
You gave me this bracelet to try to keep me stable,
but am I really so if I'm always fighting
back the urge to lose myself and just go feral?
Maybe the Meridian who died so we could start existing
meant for us to discover a way where we could be
both animals
and people
and no longer feel
like both are pulling each other apart at the seams...

Interlude: The Flesh of Futures Unfathomed

Little Lethe
full of disease
carrying around metaclysma
in her discolored
feathers.
Instead of bloody carmine seas
interrupted with little black markings,
specks like ships on the choppy waters,
someone's found the threshold tool
and cranked
it up to drain
out all the hues.
"I look like a zebra
mated with a cheetah
and gave birth to an infectious zoonotic miasma."
Another shiver through her spine ripples.
Pawing for the tissue box. No purring, only sniffles.

"Jett, I did it. I followed your advice.
I pretended to be Catharsis, and it's led to my demise.
I was so damn happy
accepting myself as Lethe,
but now my burrowing urge is at an all-time high.
To find a hole or an alcove deep underground
and with cocoons of blankets my body surround
and go into hibernation, a soft undreaming,
until you wake me up with a kiss, my own dear Prince Charming.
Except you're not whisking me away from a life of drudgery.
You're bringing me back to life. Rubbing my limbs until the blood's flowing
again. Bringing me hot soup until I can once more produce my own heat.
Oh, Jett, I miss the days of calling you Eminence
thinking my own demise was insomniac and imminent.
All the dreams where you'd take care of me, an invalid.
I know it wasn't fair, to fantasize about being dependent,
but I felt so much love from you all those times back then."

Why, in all these scenes, are you always about to die?
Don't you think I'm capable of loving you while you're alive?

"If you love me so much, Jett, then why the enforced distance?
I mean, before I came down with this unknown sickness.
Is this my body trying to go feral past the vaccine
you gave me, aqua hope, in hopes of curbing my shifting?
Or maybe my Meridian heritage is finally collecting its due
and is preparing me to back into Sablade subsume.
I'm so full of the void that lies between the worlds.
Maybe I shouldn't blame you. I know you fear losing your way.
An entire ocean in which you dropped a priceless pearl,
never to be found again, consigned to watery grave."
A wave of phlegm-filled coughs rolls in peals throughout her lungs.
"I hope I did right by you. I tried to be Catharsis.
I acted as best I could. It may have been poorly, but I kept my promise.
Can I return to being Lethe? To being the target of your possessive love?
Or is there still something I have yet to accomplish...?"

Before I can answer,
she collapses backwards
in bed,
pillow meteored by head,
eyes fluttering silent.
Barely-audible moan to acknowledge,
before she passed out, awareness' moment.
You understand, dear reader,
the almost-pity taken on a lover
in clear but unsolvable distress.
Manipulate her splayed-out limbs and tuck her into bed
underneath the sheets with all intention
of keeping some damned heat in a body of dysfunction.
I feel her forehead with the back of my hand. Clammy, cold.
A routine I've done what feels a thousand times in repeat:
I kneel beside her bed and rest my head on the sheets,
one arm underneath my skull, the other searching to hold
her hand, brush her wrist, monitor her heartbeat.

PART 3

DRAGONHEARTS

Dragonhearts

It's Current Year, and I've been trained
to not even think of daring to appropriate
the husk of stories from other groups
that I don't belong to
or take their tales, hollow out their names,
and twist the meanings for my own personal gain.
It's a nice sentiment, and I generally agree...
but I've noticed that it seems to only apply to me:
that I'm not allowed to be angry
when something of mine is stolen
and repainted, names filed off, no more link to origin.
Last I checked, you had to visit the Office
of Social Morality and Compliance
to prove you did twelve thousand
hours of research and
interviews
when writing about something you didn't personally go through.
But I want to know how every self-proclaimed "witch"
gets to go straight to the bestseller list
while espousing a worldview
that clearly proves
they don't have of magic even a single lick.

Let me set the stage
for this upcoming page:
in this world of mythology
where the human condition
is to retell and re-perceive stories,
if the ones that set alight your blood
aren't sufficiently old enough,
your fate is to live in legal perdition.
I hear the Greeks are all the rage
this season. Rip out the page
of the Theogony
and maybe a few from the Homeric hymns
that detail Persephone's violent rape
and abduction by Hades,
and we'll twist this into a story
of unabashed girlbossery.
She wanted it in this version,
sought in a man's embrace her salvation
from her mother's possession.
It's not very feminist
to, you know, imply
that partnering with a man could never go awry.
Nice to know it's all lip service,
words penned with the blood of hypocrisy.
Tear off a page from your dictionary
and we'll assign the role of Celestial Mommy
to poor old Nyx, Matron of the Night,
from whose womb came every reader in sight,
apparently.
I hear that repeated pregnancy
can make all your teeth fall out.
Are those her dental records in the dark sky?
No matter. An empty affirmation can set things right.
"You will be okay! I swear! I make vow
even though
I don't know
you or where you are right now!"
What if I'm your enemy?
Or an evil terfy-werfy?
Villainous for the crime of thinking
"woman" just means you have a female body?
Nothing to do with beauty
or interests
or personality.
So save the virtue signaling
and the empty words.
You'd want me dead had you the ability,
so what you've put down on the cursed page is of no worth.

Clap your hands
when the airplane lands.
It's time, everybody, for Act Two.
What's the complaint now, Vane? What's the grievance new?

Well,
have you ever read that meme that says,
"Wizards these days will turn in six spells
and call it a whole-ass grimoire"?
Poets these days will use only two line breaks
and declare the book ready for the store shelf.
My sister in Eris, this is prose. The entire
collection is just a wall of text. It's prose.
It's like driving over rocks instead of a river's gentle flow.

Aren't you, my reader, sick of people writing
huge chunks of unformatted prose
and then claiming it's poetry?
I don't think those writers know
how to actually string a verse.
Through English class they were sleeping.
In their dreams crafting sophistries.
It's not that hard to hit the enter key,
although honestly
my keyboard did break recently
and I'm having a hard time typing on this tiny phone screen.

And while we are on this subject,
why do young famous female poets
never write about anything different
than breakups,
body issues,
boys,
and bad voodoo?
Don't get me wrong,
I know the joys
of forgoing the tissues
and instead employ-
ing a taste of chosen poison words
towards whoever caused my most recent hurt.
But, on Goddess, every damn book is the same.
"Let me recount the billion ways
someone found a way to myself violate."
The wide breadth of human existence
is far more than what your teenage myopia suggests.
But the content mill demands more blood,
I guess,
and what it hungers for is violence
inflicted from male to female
from adolescent jilting
to what lies beyond the pale.

"Let us describe in
thinny
skinny
prose
how we used to hate ourselves
for the crime of being fat.
A rhyme to make things flow?
Proper use of line
breaks
like how we broke hearts to gain
something to write
about? An attempt at being
anything
but self-infantilizing?
'Oh, pity me.
I'm so weak.
I slept in bed an entire week.'
Proper timing and meter? What's that?"

Shakespeare was wrong when he said the whole world is a stage.
You don't have to be inspiring. You don't have to make your pain
palatable to a marketing team,
sanitized,
cut down to size.
You can exit the Globe. You can live your life
without the cruel
tribunal
of the public eye.
I'm hoping one day diary sales will reach a new high.

You can, if you're really that brave, write some prose.
Public catharsis, town square judgement.
bell hooks said any woman couldn't
ever ever write too much.
I just hate false advertisement.
And I'm sick of the subject
of "a dude did stuff".
And if you're really vulnerable, what you need
isn't a stranger critic but a friend's love.

Three. Three. Everything comes in threes.
And I'm up to my elbows
in the blood of those
who would deny me my autonomy.
Into the Ultrawhite
spilled carmine
and gave birth
to my first
body.
And I've been stooped in violence since then.
And I've been the definition of a sin.
And I've been overcome with draconian
impulses, to everyone I love bringing death.
You children are outside playing
while inside I'm trembling, I'm praying
today isn't the day
the ribbons will overtake
me and I'll lose myself to ferality.
You'd think you'd know
what it means to lose control
of your body,
but, baby,
you're nowhere even damn close.
You children are doing imitations
in the front lawn while a vaccine
runs into my veins
so that I stay
more person than beast.
Running around
with paper crowns
and tails so frail and floppy.
"Mommy, look! I'm a dragonheart! Hear me roar!"
But you'd snub them like a teenage clique if you met a real polymorph.

Glorification
of revenge.
The lioness her head lifts,
tells you to get a fucking grip:
you could never bear
to tear
through the actual throat of a creature.
You would cower from the sight of blood,
would curl up in a ball from the splash of guts
on the ground. Your fingers would fail to grasp
the meat earned from the brutality of attack.
You see, nature
doesn't sit around to be
a pretty metaphor in "poetry"
that's actually just prose
in a trenchcoat.
"Have you ever really gone feral,
or does your conception of 'going ham'
exist exclusively in the abstract?"
I've against my higher will attacked
someone, and the result wasn't pretty
or easily packaged up for online sharing.
"Do you actually like to eat pussy,
or is 'sapphic'
just a word for an aesthetic?"
The "uwu" shit is pretty pathetic.
So damn clean, textureless, sanitized.
Call me when you look at your wife
and think to yourself you need her clitoris
in your mouth right this very minute.
"I'm glad that planting gardens
is how you stay sane and well-"
and I need flowers in this world
to keep me sane and not go feral-
"-but I need gore and violence
for my mental health."
I need to kill the men who hurt me
so that I don't off myself.

It's a story I know all too well.

And it's not yours to play-act
but instead mine to tell.

I turn to Jett and sigh,
"You and I
are condemned to the sidelines
and fringes for eternity,
aren't we?
There's no way I can cut myself down to conformity
to get in the good graces of a publisher.
I have to sit here and suffer
while the narrative most popular
remains surface-level and void of real meaning."

And Jett replies, "Better fix your damn keyboard,
because you'll get nothing done by just brooding."

THORG & ZOD

Yeah, I don't believe in God,
but I do believe Thorg and Zod
and other aliens are watching
us, and they're pointing
at you and laughing
all the same.
Don't you look ridiculous
in this strawman I just came
up with?
Cliché where I call you a galaxy,
implying you have some semblance of interiority,
but the voices in your head I claim
still pen you as the virgin in the meme.

TRIGGER WARNING

TRIGGER WARNING
BROKE MY ENTER KEY
USING A HEX EDITOR TO FAKE POETRY
BECAUSE THE SLASH ON MY KEYBOARD
WILL GO
SO
DAMN HAYWIRE
IF I GIVE IT THE TIME OF DAY
AND YOU'D HATE
TO READ A HUGE CHUNK OF TEXT ANYWAY

MAKE IT MAKE SENSE

Sell ten million copies
portraying monsters as outside
the beauty norms of society
while the real dangers stay in plain sight.
Oh, who am I kidding? You'd never fight
the woman-image-selling industry.
"It's her choice, don't you see?
All work is coercive under capitalism."
Tell me what it's called when sex is forced from
a woman unconsenting.
If we can't sell our organs
because it creates perverse incentives
to cut apart for profit the desperate and the poor,
why must a woman destitute
prostitute
and live in horror?
Any other profession that deals with fluids bodily,
they'd give you safety glasses, gloves, and masks at the very least.

SCANSPELL

Monsters aren't always easy to spot.
Some wear the trappings of the "men in cloth"
that instill on young babes
fear of eternal flame
if their faith at all becomes fraught.

Monsters aren't always easy to pick out
from the faceless wandering everyday crowd.
Do his eyes look dim and distant?
Do his hands have burns from friction?
Does his gaze sear like you're an ant
under his sunny magnifying glass?
In his head, he fantasizes how
he'd reduce you to the base level of a cow
or other cattle, just a piece of meat,
not a whole human in your own right, complete.

Monsters aren't always easy to recognize
until another woman's met her demise.
The warning signs were all there.
To terrorists sending furtive prayers.
Macho men putting on pedestals.
Firearms purchasing under tables.
If you go through his credit card statements
you'll see he'd been paying to see women subordinate
and reduced to flat pixels on a screen.
"Who could have ever seen this coming?"
Well, he's certainly no prophet, but Ted Bundy.
It's machismo, it's resentment, it's pornography.

I BOUGHT THIS POEM OFF TEMU

For countless years I've trained
to be a doctor, went through the pain
of residencies and medical school,
and I've so much debt I could build a pool
and fill it up and drown in the numbers.
Well, it's time for a physical. Her
shoes come off, the patient,
but she refuses to step on the scale.
"Well, how much do you weigh?"

"I weigh the summer storm hail,
the sea, my father's eyes,
how they gaze upon me
with something resembling pride.
I weigh strength and bravery
and whole universes
and an army's share of fearlessness."

"It's nice how you can ad-lib something resembling art,
but that's hardly a number I can write down in your chart."

WOMAN OF LETTERS

In my little house, I write poems in reply
to "authors" who I know would never give me the time
of day were we in any sort of correspondence.
What a lucky stroke of fortune it is
that the hell ran by birds has almost died,
so instead of snark in single lines
they have to return the favor
and write out a rebuttal and get it past a publisher.
Because, let's be honest, none of them would make a website,
and even if they did I'd never give it any mind.
My brothers when they think I'm out of earshot whine
that I hate them. Not true! Not based in reality!
I don't care what you do so long as it's not around me.
And so it is the same here. My peers scratch their hairlines
wondering how I'm so happy without following the zeitgeist
or giving a damn about how pop culture right now flows.
"Have you watched this brand-new show?"
No, I haven't. Did you know
this obscure thing's held me in throes
for several years, and just a day ago
I learned something about it less-known?

In my little house, I sit here on the porch
with a fan and writing pen and not a single shred of remorse.
I'm a competent adult.
I can live on my own.
I don't need to be put in a damn group home.
I'm no closer to fitting inside your philosophy than Horatio's.
There's more in the heavens
than you dreamt in
your "poetry" that's really prose.
There's no room in your circlejerk
for those who weren't hurt
the exact same easily-packaged way that you were.
This is a rebuttal
to the proposal
that your experience is universal.

You and I are strangers. Of me
you can only see
what I show.
You cease to exist when I put away my phone.
So don't pretend you comprehend, because you clearly don't.

primordial (in lowercase)

you are a primordial thing.
glass orb
in fire forged
with six brilliant carmine wings.
created to shoulder the burden of Chaos,
the messy entropy
that Creation needs
in order to do its job.
that kindly face with cloudy beard
wanted to win a bet:
even after eternities suppressed,
your heart still beats, you still live yet.

I HAVEN'T WRITTEN IN NINE FUCKIN DAYS

GET YOUR HANDS DIRTY
UNEARTH YOUR FERALITY
LEAN OVER THE BALCONY
ON THE EDGE
OF YOUR BED
AND WATCH YOUR ARMS DANGLING
BLOOD-FLUSHED, RED
WRAPPED IN THE RIBBONS YOU DREAD

I'M THE FUCKING
QUEEN OF CRUELTY
APPARENTLY
FOR THE CRIME OF DARING TO DISAGREE
WITH WHAT HAS BEEN DEEMED
PUBLISHABLE BY SOCIETY
I'M NOT A PRINCESS BEARING CLICHE SWORD
I'M A TRAGEDY
I'M THE DAUGHTER OF DISCORD
I'M SOMEONE ELSE'S
CATHARSIS
WAITING TO HAPPEN
I'M A CARTOGRAPHER WITH HANDS ITCHY FOR MAPPIN'
TRACING THE TRAILS ON MY OWN SKIN
LAKES AND TRIBUTARIES AND OCEANS, W-I-T-C-H

CAN I HAVE MY PUPILS DILATE
AT DIFFERENT SIZES WHILE FORGOING PRAISE
FOR A MAN WHO'D SOONER WANT ME DEAD?
I SURE DO LOVE TO DISSOCIATE
WHEN I MEET WITH THE SLIGHTEST PAIN

YOU SAID YOU'D STAY BY
MY SIDE
AND I'M WAITING
THE CLOCK GOES
TICK-TOCK
YOU PROMISED OUR BONDS
WOULD REMAIN STRONG
FINGERS TWITCHING
GLISTENING
CLAWS
YOU'RE MY PALM PAL
NOW ANSWER MY CALL
DON'T WANNA GO TO VOICEMAIL
INTERNATIONAL CALLING THROUGH THE VEIL

I'M NOT GIVING UP ON YOU,
SO DON'T YOU GIVE UP ON ME
YOU SAID IT YOUR OWN DAMN SELF
IT'S FOREVER "JETT + LETHE"

Demanding Lovehate

Your misandry
is the "tee-hee"
variety,
all cutesy,
can be neatly
packaged up and hurled
into a printing press commercial,
building off Solanas' back
while enjoying the benefits she lacked
during her life. Rage diluted,
watered down, Atlas nude
with hair sopping while
she holds up the literary world
you claim to revile.

Shut the hell up! You know NOTHING of misandry!
Go ahead, appropriate my struggles for a pretty penny.
All you goddamn monetized writers are all the same,
selling others and yourself out just so you can get paid.

Stop virtue-signalling
and traverse
downwards
the radfem iceberg.
I wanna hear
about garden shears
used to rip a rapist's dick off.
I wanna read poems
about backroom abortions
and backwoods separatism.
Don't whitewash the women's
movement for liberation
with bullshit about equality, small, cute, soft.
Your glistering gaggle of a Greek pastiche
made me a blustering knife-laden dyke.
What room in your pantheon is there for me?
For the hurt that I bear? For my instinct to fight?

I search for "iconoclasts" and get results for some stupid TV show

There is no celebrity
on this cursed
earth
worth
worshipping.
There are none that I can think of
who would deserve such a crown:
the only purpose
that they serve is
to be pleasant to look at,
to someone else's artistic
vision a constant coelostat,
a blank canvas, a conduit for the divine, in essence a clown.

I HAVEN'T WRITTEN IN NINE... huh?

Leaned over the railing at the end
of the Purple Room's queen-size bed
in full throes of writing block's lament.
I haven't written for nine days damned
and the sheets might as well be dunes of sand:
for all their soft rolls and dunes, I'm dry
and desiccated inside.

Water can't be wet. Because wet means
a liquid and a surface travelled to meet
each other from who knows how far
away and got each other's hearts.
At least until the surface dries
and the liquid turns to say goodbye,
and if they ever reunite
they won't each other recognize.

And the tragedy will happen once more.
Precipitation cycle's encore.

There are many fates I'd tempt and destinies I'd dare,
but right now I'm overcast and heading into adverse weather
and I probably should have earlier
to take my pills remembered.
Stomach's throwing a hissy fit. Zeus' tantrum, thunder.

Mom peeks in, asks once more in haste
why I'm so hellbent on getting my own place.
She wants an answer full and honest
even though I've already signed the agreement
for the lease, paid the security deposit
and the first month and a half of rent.
I feel bad for her for half a second,
for everyone else in my family offended
that their pleas won't do shit, threatened
that this overture for freedom I meant
and this time finally followed through,
by this long-standing
vow I'm keeping
confused.
No matter how hard I articulate
that inside me is a hunger none can sate,
she doesn't understand that I'm the ocean
and especially prone to pollution
from stray sounds
and yappy hounds
and advertisement's locution.
"It's a sensory thing," I mention,
half apologetic.

"I don't get it.
You're still alive.
It can't
have been that bad
if you managed to survive."

The only part of that house that was was, well, its shape.
It's not normal, I don't think, to have to lie in wait
well into the blistered night to be able to operate
without constant stimuli or someone wanting to interrogate
me the very moment
I step into their presence
and haven't yet signed "how you're doing" papers in triplicate.
To not be a prey animal: is that too much to ask?
Mom got a rabbit, then pawned it off on my dad,
then calls me its name when I stiffen up, tense, jumpy, clammed.
An unfamiliar song starts playing on the radio,
and she starts humming to the tune, never her own,
just merging into whatever happens to be the zeitgeist,
what's now being spoonfed by the corporations that own her life.
To her it's high art, but to me it's just another buzzing fly,
one more thing that taunts me as of my control outside.

I think to offer her a book that says those with autism
but can care for themselves thrive best when allowed isolation,
but the last few books she read
were glorified fanfiction,
and if I don't drape it in the trappings of a corporation
like wrapping bitter pills in cheese
to give to picky dogs
then she'll reject it headlong
and dump more sludge into the Lethean Sea.

"I'm sure your husband would love to give
a lecture on how 'survive' doesn't mean 'live'."

It never felt like a place in its own right.
Like it was just a hole I was using to hide
from the rest of the world and its hate.
If Sablade is a home, then that bedroom was a loop of time,
prone to falling apart and incapable of any real change.

Right now, as my arms hang,
my brain
is a day
full of rain
in a world where nothing happens and all is sedate,
and I'm waiting for a voice to confirm that it's okay
to drop all my trappings and escape to Sablade.
A tragedy I promised Jett I wouldn't reveal.
How the injured so fiercely yearn to others heal.

Interlude: Several White Folding Chairs

Autistic woman prone
to apocalyptic thinking
moves out on her own
and has to figure out the living
thing.
Like, is it considered cheating
to apply for assistance from the state
so I can get free Internet and food to fill my plate?
Do I have my voice set to the right tone
when I have to call someone on the phone
because so few places want to admit
that email or texting or anything else exist(s)?
"Agent
of a faceless
entity,
I'm not angry
at you, I swear on my teeth."
I've got to vacuum my own floor
and my long hairs dig
out of the sink
and find a place to dump the recycling
before my landlord
thinks I'm starting a hoard.
(No way I'm putting clean cardboard
in the dumpster out back.)
Tomorrow's city inspection:
is it the end
of the world, or just a brief
check to make sure
I didn't turn
the place into a drug den?
At least the rent
payments
I can automate,
because Jett knows I'd manage to get evicted
by the name
I was born last life with.

Nothing in the fridge to eat.
"Do we mosey to the food shelf, or
order out for the third time this week?"
I think your wallet prefers we look for something in the pantry.

PART 4

DATA ENTRY BILLABLE

don't just say what you are

Jett, my love, I need to know:
where do you want this relationship to go?
What kind of future lies in store for us?
Is it one of separation, or trust?
Is it full of neglect, or gentle tender care?
Please, Jett, make me aware.

"News of betrayal" or "message of deception".
Jett, my beloved,
what in the world happened?
Are you saying that, every time I went to turn
to you in grief
to seek
some comfort
or to once again feel safe,
that you were lying, that it was all in vain,
just an elaborate game of pretend?
Jett, there's no part of your message that I comprehend.

But then again, this week's vibe said
there were no good paths to choose.
Ambiguity, mind hazy, easily confused.

"Lethe, the whole Catharsis thing fell apart quick.
Don't you think it's a little ironic
that the creature infamous for pulling other's strings
can't marionette herself, is quite frankly shit at acting?"

I don't really like the way
you're bluntly wording that.
Like I've committed some grave
sin or suffer fatal lack.
Jett, this isn't three years ago.
I'm not an empty vessel for souls
who have stories to divulge.
I've finally accepted
a stable semblance
of myself.

"Lethe, so many times you've asked
that I become the thing I hate
most in order to keep you untouched and safe.
You keep offering me your blood
or seeing a demon and wishing I was
half as powerful with no thoughts of how to sate
the hunger that lies
as the price
for such a power at one's command.

If you want me to be your Christ, then I'll play along.
But only if you take up the role of Judas Iscariot.
Kiss my cheek and proclaim me your dearest beloved
and then go and sell me out for a tidy profit.
I know how much you love to write. And every word of yours I cherish.
So trade in my secrets for the top of a bestsellers list.
Go ahead, Lethe. I know your heart is full of envy
at the commercialized writers raking in the money."

But Jett, I've made efforts to omit
the deepest wounds, the still-panging secrets
you've told me up front you never want immortalized.

Do you really think
I'd trade you in for a
check gone in the blink
of an eye?

No amount of money could get me to you say goodbye.

Jett, my love, please don't bristle when I brush your cheek.
I'll gladly go without the money if it means I get to keep
you by my side forever. You and me until the end.
Creature that can control others
and skillful weaver
of glamours.
We're not so different, you
and I. Both messengers
of deception.
Unexplored both the depths of the ocean and most of the moon.

"Harbingers of trickery?
I... wouldn't find that half bad, Lethe."

gimme da succ

It'll likely improve, my mental well-being,
if I'm not constantly wallowing
in my own messes,
made
to wade
in the detritus
of a life I no longer lay
any claim
to.
If I can liberate
myself of most of the junk
I somehow managed to accumulate
as a mere babe,
a paranoid teenager,
a small child grasping for some semblance of love.
Old school papers,
outdated manuals
whose products have long since been lost,
gifts from former friends who deigned to toss
me into life's garbage bin.
See how well that worked out for you: I'm still breathin'.

"Lethe, I think you'll also feel better
if you clean up all the scattered feathers
and bits of couch foam all over the floor.
And the crumbs on top of the microwave
and the bloodstains
on the back of the bathroom door.
And all the hair inside the sink
that drifts softly down when it's time to overthink
your life decisions at eleven near midnight.
Just an idea I think you should try."

Picked up a vacuum cleaner
on the side of the road
right beside a mirror
and as many teacups as I could hold.
Got home, dumped most on the table
as gently as possible
and hit the power button:
a moment's whine.
Longer was the blink of an eye
before all once more fell silent.

"The label on it said 'cordless',
but it came with no battery,
so the damn thing doesn't even function properly."
Sitting defeated in a sea of loose couch feathers.
Looks like a Miss Heartilly
got a bit silly
in here with her prickly
lover
and now I have to clean up afterwards.
I don't think Jett and I would be even half as messy.
"Looks like I'm hitching a ride to the grocery
store after work."
Hope I'll still be able to make rent afterwards.

Meditation on an old route home visible from my living room window

Neighbor's shadow
passes by my window,
and I think to go
investigate
in case there's an ally I should make.
But what catches my eye
is a ghost of me on my bike,
two years ago, passing by,
unaware of my job's soon demise
because I got accused of a crime
where I stole nothing, caused no damage, hurt nobody.
Oh, freshly awoken Lethe,
it all turns out okay in the end.
That's the nice thing about being chaos-sent.
You never seem to suffer a single consequence.

In Labor Day I

Lying on my bed in pain, flat on my back
as my father with a screwdriver attacks
the wooden frame around my window
and my mother bellows
about my lack of a bedroom door.
"You know, I signed this long form
legally binding between me and my landlord
that says I'm not allowed to any part of the property modify-"
"I don't give a shit,"
my mother hisses,
"and neither will he.
In fact, he'll be as impressed as can be."
Yeah, impressed
that his judgement was correct:
the autistic woman couldn't be trusted with anything.

Rhyme Shopping List

1

I'm the ocean, the wine-dark sea
trembling with intentions of iniquity
but afraid of even a little thrashing about
because I don't want the sailors deep within to drown.
And you're the moon, my guiding light,
and when for cyclical absence you turn
I'm despondent and for your presence yearn
even though intellectually I know we're bonded forever.
Every scar, every wrinkle, every battle-gained inflection
proof of full life, ever more precious
when your wandering is over and we reunite again.

2

I never really got a grasp of tarot.
The card meanings to me were far too obscurant,
focusing too much on the overarching, the abstract.
You're the more practical of us two, the Lenormand.
Straightforward answer when you cut in half the deck
and shuffle, and I'm busy worrying about fate
and my demise
and if we'll get to Sablade
or if my ticket to dementia is nearby
and everything will fall into the void of the Forget.
"Okay, Jett,
give me something funny yet serious
to end this part of the poem with."
I pull "tree" and "coffin".
Major illness, declining health, severe depression.
I trust you, of course, but it's not exactly the omen that I wanted.

3

I'm the Anima Mundi, soul of the world divine,
the essence of Chaos. And yet sometimes
I wonder if I'd be better represented
by Balance, your domain, instead.
These twenty-three years of living under the tyrant thumb of my father
have left me trauma-scarred, avoidant, bleary, a bit of a coward.
My desperate cries for freedom he always labeled "bravado".
But just as there's a gauzy Veil between you and me, Jett,
there's been a different one dividing me from everyone I've ever met.
There's a line somewhere I shouldn't cross, a landmine I'd best not tread.
One moment all is peachy
and the next I'm Adversary
and the subject of everyone's hatred.
An ever-shifting ruleset I could never hope to comprehend.
But nobody will hate me if I stay still and never make waves.
That's the saddest part, really.
I've no path to victory
in this cruel game.
Please tell me, Jett, if you know:
how do you wound a man's ego?
How do you over your life get control?
Self-determination shouldn't be a rich man's luxury.

4

Man, this poem got
real dark
real quick.
Jett, let's add light bulbs to the shopping list.
Or maybe candles for my poor romantic heart.
I need something to focus on that isn't my raging thoughts.

In Labor Day II

Four days off in the dying of summer,
and they're all melting into another.
The air is hot and stuffy
and carries with it a hazy
memory:
a thick few acres of trees
chipped slim around the middle
from the rage of their fathers,
over years down to naught whittled
until they could stand no more and fell.
Each died in the service
of a hobby obnoxious.
And you were each all a mirror
of a rearview mirror future:
the years spent in witless agony
twisting into a form that would men better please.

I hope every metal basket
rusts and to ash disintegrates.
That the land grows wild again.
The trees are owed
time to grow
without bludgeons knocking off their skin.
How many plastic disks fall into lakes
every month, week, minute, day?
Do you think the animals appreciate
the constant disturbance?

Do you think the trees give a single fuck about their appearance?
"Slim yourself down to curves and do it this very minute!"
They just stare
like a Bob raging at a cashier
for the storm to pass and for him to be done with it,
but instead he declares them noncompliant
and forces upon them a choking black corset
so they can stand and be pretty, nature's ornaments.

A bonsai tree no longer trimmed
will grow to its full potential dimensions.

Hilson

I realize I'm having another stress dream
when in the middle of a work meeting
a doctor from a show
turns to me and goes,
"You came into work when you could have been resting."

Litany for Bathrooms

Crouched down in the stall,
not so high I can see over the walls -
damn the height of my giant ego -
but not so low
that I get caught
with pendulum in hand.
Single panicked thought,
legs too weak to stand:
"Jett, if I ever devolve
into dementia, will you keep your resolve
to take care of me, to never leave me behind?
Even if I can't perceive you anymore
until the day
we reunite in Sablade?"
Pendulum teeters back and forth.
"Lethe, I've told you so many times my throat is almost sore:
I love you, and I'll do whatever it takes
to see you back to my side safe."

The Nine Noble Virtues

Jett, I've got a problem I've been trying to chew
on, and maybe you can give me some insight.
So over a year ago, you told me to look into Asatru,
and since then, I've been somewhat-faithfully studying from Fehu
all the way to Wyrd.
But I've run into something I think's quite absurd.
So there are these "nine noble virtues",
right? Courage, truth, self-reliance,
honor, fidelity, industriousness,
discipline, hospitality, and perseverance.
They all look fine on the surface,
right? But apparently they were written by fascists.
Twice. On two occasions separate.
Don't you think that's rather unfortunate?

I mean, how can courage be evil, Jett?
It's grown inside me since you and I met
once more in this Inside.
Knowing that you love me gives me the strength to defy
the fate that the doctors set for me at birth:
to forever be a drooling idiot of barely any worth
in the eyes of the surrounding society.
Applying for this apartment, my hands were trembling
like I thought I was about to make
the grandest of mistakes.
But with your blessing, I forged ahead anyway.

And I got what I desired, and it all turned out okay.
Life is now a process of unlearning the behaviors
I had to develop in order to survive each and every day.
Spending in the safety of my room every waking hour
to avoid my mother's judgement or disapproving glower.
Taking my meals at odd times or even opting to abstain
in hopes of avoiding what quickly became
my least favorite phrase:
"You should have known better."
Planning weeks in advance every outwards event
and how I'd slip out of the house with means to prevent
being asked awkward questions: with what intent
are you leaving? Can you clean the whole bathroom beforehand?
I can't let you leave; you need to play
unpaid
maid
and househand
where I can interrupt you with menial demands
at the drop of a hat
and then express indignance
when you reply back,
"I must finish up what I'm doing; give me just a few minutes."
It's not the taking care of people to which I'm opposed,
but it must be a burden voluntary: it must be what I chose.

I'm getting off-track. I don't see what's evil
about reducing my reliance on other people.
I'm not cutting them off. I'm simply ensuring
that, if their whims change, I won't be left hurting
and half-dead on the side of the road.
I'll be able to keep the raft of my life afloat
until I find another island or maybe a whole country
that accepts me for who I am, not who they wish I'd be.
And anyway, you told me you thought self-reliance was sexy.
And maybe by following through I'm contradicting
myself, but I don't really give a damn.
To take care of myself and avoid
being institutionalized for as long as I can.
To be independent
and prove I'm not meant
for the facilities that parents who plan
for their deaths think about sending their disabled
kids to when they can no longer shield
them from the plain cruelties
of this unsupportive society.
Jett, I want to live in peace, to reduce the burden
I put on others to its barest minimum.
To discern what days I have enough spoons and when I need to borrow some.
What have I to do with evil? How does this make me a villain?
I'm not acting out of hate for others but out of self-respect and love.

Oh! My bad, it seems I skipped over truth.
The thing that was dictated to me throughout my whole youth.
"Come on, Deadname, get bundled up
so that we can go to church
and hear all about God's love
and how he'll destroy the disbelievers."
Threatened with eternal perdition
for following the instincts in
my blood, for refusing to look
the other way
in the face
of cruelty,
for daring to seek
truth in a different book,
this time of my own creation.

Doctor, tell me the contraindications
for letting my daughter go run with the pagans,
for letting my daughter open her eyes
one frost-framed college winter night
and leave her body to go reunite
with a lover for a precious few moments
and then crash back down to Earth,
wondering what in the sweet hell just happened.
Doctor, give my daughter an inoculation
against Watcher's baneful seduction,
because I keep trying and failing to convince
that it's dead and gone, their desire:
"I need to see her
to believe your word,
or else it's as good as dirt."

Truth
is a blessed virtue.
At least, I try to abide
by it every day.
Let my landlords know the moment something breaks.
"I tried to pull down the window blinds
so I could from my screaming neighbors hide,
but instead they all came crashing down to Earth."
Be honest with my mother
when she asks why I'm so pissed
after she's just gotten done jamming her finger
(metaphorically) into where I'm sensorally sensitive.
"I can't stand it when you hum.
Because my brain thinks, 'That's mum,
so it must be of importance.'
But it's not. It's just junk data. Garbage.
But I can't filter it out, because what if I miss
an instruction? So it's upon my brain a barrage."
Explain to patients if there's nothing we can do
for them because the computer says they're feeling improved.
"I can ask your sales rep for an override.
We just don't want to mess you up. Would this be an outcome fine?"
I'm so tired of being duplicitous, Jett,
of living a double life,
always in fear that someone will post my address online
and then everything will come crashing down like meteors,
that I'll then be abandoned by all who previously swore
to be by my side no matter what would come my way.
This is why Catharsis failed. I've only got the energy
to be one person, myself, the Anima Mundi, Lethe.

Honor, I can understand why it would be sketchy.
"Who has honor ever warmed
or filled a hungry belly?"
There's a restaurant in town
that wants me dead for being gay,
and normally I'd rather see it run into the ground,
but if I'm two steps from the grave
then I'll take the food to cease being hungry
so I can live to fight them another day.
When I think of honor,
I think of a medieval man warrior
trying to defend his wounded pride
even if it means he fights
to the death and dies.

And that's where we get into hazy
territory.
I look up honor in the dictionary,
and it tells me
honor means
that which rightfully attracts esteem,
respect, or consideration.
And you, Jett, were the only one I ever deemed
worthy of such reckless veneration.
I'm bad at keeping my promises,
honoring my vows,
even though in antiquity
my forgetfulness
would probably have severe consequences.

"Strict conformity
to the duty
imposed by conscience,
position, or privilege."
Again, with the warrior image.
I think I understand now in some warped sense.
Autistic brain demands I do things one way,
even if to others it looks like nonsense.
A code of honor
I never
to others communicated,
and if at any point I stray
even by the smallest step
it feels like I've killed everybody I love
and invited my own deserved death.

Fidelity?
Oh, this one is easy!
"Adherence to the marriage contract."
To keep the promise I made to you that
Sablade and my heart would be forever yours,
that I'd never let myself stray
thinking in delirium there were better shores
in someone else's embrace.
Jett, what's so evil about staying true to your word?
I understand you and I are sworn tricksters,
but cooperation a certain level of trust requires,
but it can't be obtained
if people swear vows on their grave
and then make zombies of themselves the very next day.

Industriousness. Productivity.
The notion that I shouldn't always be sitting
on my ass and my talents squandering.
I've tried
multiple times
to sit back for a day and purposely do nothing,
but I always end up on the edge of insanity:
there's a world inside my skin,
and I have to let it out even if that means
sitting on the cold tile floor of my kitchen
at three in the morning, staring at a computer screen,
banging out words until my fingers are jelly
and my eyesight is smeared and bleary.
I need to always be creating.
Something deep inside me believes
that a day that's gone by is wasted
if I haven't given birth to something.
How can creation be evil?
I thought fascism was incapable
of making new things and relied
on beating into submission that which is already alive.

Discipline, that which I struggle with,
I can understand the opposition.
"Submission to rule, to other's control submissiveness,
a formed habit of obedience."
Sounds like a whole lot of bootlicker bullshit.
The only one to whom I'd bow my head
is you, Jett, and that's if we're in bed
and I'm towering over
you and need to get closer
to the areas I want to pleasure.

Hospitality,
Jett,
I always thought meant
being willing to help others in their hour of need.
Mutual aid to others less fortunate.
A spare room or a meal or some pocket change
or grocery delivery
or legal assistance
or whatever kind of help I can't right now conceive
of that we can all render to others.
If there was less of an emphasis on money,
if we all stopped seeing each other as transactions pending
and tried to aid each other to the best of our abilities...
I wonder how much less sorrow would reside in us,
how many fewer tragedies.

Perseverance.
I've tried my best
to get my thoughts
in this poem across.
One of the greatest lessons
you've imparted on me thus
far is this: that there is no such thing
as a dead end, that the world keeps going
after even the greatest loss,
that I must push forward, persevere,
even if my anguish is severe
so that I can see out a brighter future
I know will come for myself and everyone I love.
And I've got so much love in my heart, Jett.
Being with you has given me the strength
to keep going where before I would falter and quit.
Since I took up this name, I've been met
with so many enemies and setbacks.
But as long as you're with
me, we're each other's safety net.
Take my hand and let's go create a world that will never know lack.

Orthodoxy

Yellow paper
on the kitchen counter.
Basic printed diagram
of where the orthodontist
wants to extract
my brother's wisdom teeth, the ones I never had.
Strange. I'm more alive
than both of my brothers combined.
You'd think I'd be the one
with such
a painful reminder of my mind.
But his slip orders anesthesia general
to put him to sleep to make the pain null
and void. And all I got come time
to break,
reshape,
rip holes in my skull
was a paste
that looked like bits of skin had long died.
"You don't deserve it. You're a receptacle
for all this family's pain and guilt.
You're the Practice Child,
after all."

Father drags an angel to the orthodontist,
points at four of the six
wings on my back, says, "Fix this.
There are too many. They don't, can't, all fit
in my cramped cosmology."
White coat replies, "My profession is cosmetology.
You're off by a syllable.
and the ortho
whose wisdom I hold
uses a whole separate set of dox
and symbols."

Thirty8

I may have made a mistake
in giving you that vaccine to take.
When I took your arm so gently and drained
the syringe the doctor gave me into the vein
you'd had blood
drawn from
a year ago to donate,
I didn't know it would devastate
your psyche
so thoroughly.

So many times
you said that I
had your full trust to guide
you through the shadows and deadly valleys of your life Inside.
And so far I've managed to be benevolent
even if in the moment it hurt a little bit.
But, oh Lethe,
I didn't mean
to put you in this agony.
A period
that nearly hemorrhaged
despite two weeks of white pills to go.
And you can't shift to escape
the whole-body aches
because your blood refuses to cooperate.
And the ennui
I thought would meet its demise,
you're thrashing in its throes
up and down like a yo-yo.

Semi-conscious on your back in bed.
I've got an ice pack
up in a towel wrapped
resting on your forehead
to keep the migraine down.
You say you forgive me
even if this ends up killing
you. In the other timeline you saw,
after we escaped from Eris, Momenlaw
locking you in an empty room.
Barely anything to consume,
and all was laced with goneril
so you had no choice but to put yourself in peril
of deadly overdose
for a hope
of keeping the strength
needed to break out and with me unite again.
She was trying to make you a useful pawn,
and I right now just wanted to live a long
life with you uninterrupted by feral urges,
making love and art, your poems, my songs.

You told me yourself, while succumbed to draconity,
you suffer from a loss of cognitive ability.
And I could hand you a pen to hold in your teeth
(or claws, jointed like the hands of a human,
although I don't know
if what were your elbows
would cooperate in handwriting's movement)
but what words could you hold in your head?
It would just be a whole page of, "Warm, safe, Jett."
And with the skin of Chaos your brain fares better,
or at least the same from what you've observed,
but you've got six limbs and all end
in a sharp point
and there's no way you could even hold a pen.

And how are you going to straddle me
and with the back of your fingers stroke my cheek
if you're in a form where your hands are missing
or we're quite clearly not the same size?
I want to look into both of your eyes,
and one's only got one
and the other none.

I gave you the vaccine
thinking it'd be easier to keep your promise to me,
that you'd stay in control of yourself
and remain at my side
for eternity and every single life.
Oh, Lethe, I didn't mean to put you through this hell.
And yet you so readily forgive
with that smile of yours that absolves all my sins.
Relax, my love. I'll care for you through this disequilibrium,
and the symptoms will break like a crack in the clouds letting in the golden sun.

Koan

The one who sleeps with stuffies a strong aura possesses,
but the one who fares sleep alone has none to cover their weaknesses.

Re-Missive

I spent my childhood
crying about fire
when really the flood was to blame.

Waters that without asking take
and reach a hand to carry me away:
"For your soul I finally came."

Came twice and without discrimination consumed
my childhood books, old family photos,
some toys, all consigned to storage's tomb.

But unlike when I stood in home flame-engulfed
in my doorway, armed with buckets and a hose
as I watched the flames' flickering approach,

you, spring flood, forgot to take my soul.

A year ago, year of early mornings
curled up in bedsheets, for a future mourning.
Running through the lists of all I'd never see again.
The neighbor girl who'd grow up without her very first friend,
the candy bucket lady, the boomer at the crosswalk
holding signs about how vaccines were against the word of God,
the friend who made me play games in her front yard
because her house was messy. (Couldn't have been worse than mine by very far.)

"Oh, universe, for gender you let me break my ovaries.
Ring your magic once more and inflict what will make me cease."

The vulnerability of being stuck in bed,
of flirting,
of skirting
so close to death.
Doomed to perish, all measures meant to palliate.
Minimal consciousness. Ghosts pass above in blurs.
"I don't know if you can hear me, but I hope you're not in pain."

Familiar fingers trace hearts on the back of my hand.
"Lethe, you need to know there's changes to our plan.
Where I come from, there are no female psychopomps.
Women are the stewards of life, and men make things rot
and erode and decay. Damn ghouls that feed off energy.
And I've got no desire to become a slave under the title of 'valkyrie'.
I know that I, or at least my body, has always lived between the lines,
but the King of Reapers won't be fooled by the same lie twice.
I'm not nearly strong enough to cheat Death alone.
So I'll be bringing some friends to help me when it's time to bring you home."

In Labor Day IV

Light streams in morning after
through the curtains that my mother
sewed haphazardly
in hopes of improving my sleep.
Plagued with hazy visions
of medicalization,
of long hospital trips
and coming home to medication
and entombing myself in blankets to form a chrysalis.
I think I can feel, laying in bed,
bandages on the small of my back
and Jett resting, holding my hand,
heartbeat's vigilance in case it goes flat.

"Did I die?" I manage to whisper,
half-asleep breath lighter than a feather.
"To take me home... is it finally time?"

She stirs. "You're not dead.
You've been in bed
for several Outside weeks.
And now you're too weak
to get up by yourself,
weighted down with grief.

You know, Lethe,
when you first died,
I
spent, I think, a month straight
in bed except for bathroom breaks.
I would have been perfectly fine with perishing
wrapped around the jar I kept your gifts with me
in: the enchanted glasses (and case) so I could read,
the feather you shedded and said I could keep,
the clip for your regalia shaped like a heart,
the other knickknacks I couldn't bear to part
with... I stopped feeling hunger after a few days.
Someone had to pin me down and puncture my veins
with an IV to force fluids in.
I don't even think I had the strength to resist
at that point. I was pretty deteriorated
when your uncle waltzed in with a folded
sheet of paper to slip in the jar
when I was asleep, dreaming of you."
Sleepy chuckle. "This shard was pretty useless
for finding you across Outsides.
Took a god of death to find
where you'd reincarnated.
I... started to get better once I knew."

"I'm so sorry, Jett. I should have been stronger.
I should have been able to resist Mother-"

"Don't apologize. Just do better.
Self-flagellation will get you nowhere."
She squeezes my hand. "Promise me, when your vessel dies
here, you'll keep yourself together long enough to buy
me the time to gather my friends
who'll bring you intact to the Outside.
Promise me, Lethe, when we arrive
there, you won't make one of your shows
about hanging on the edge between life and death's throes
but you'll open your eyes as soon as you can.
You won't force me
to pre-
emptively grieve.
You'll live with me in our world
we built with your
breath and my hands."

reading palms like an open book

sitting on a bed
with my hands in Jett's,
practicing how to forgive
again and again.

remembering when,
in that cave,
our fate
hung by a thread.
does she really love me,
or have I been manipulating
her this whole while?
grab my wrist, Jett. your mythril
will grant us the clarity we desire.

"...That's strange.
It hasn't changed
at all."

and all the implications
that sentence holds in thrall.

In Dissent

You told me, Lethe,
you identify more
with the goddess of harmony
who lost the war
despite having objectively
the upper hand: do you
know any stories
where the "bad guys" won
once and for all
and the story continued
past the fields of decay and ruin?

You still can't deny
that tradition holds some sway
even though
we both
want to go our own way.
That as much as you as a teen extolled
the virtues
of cutting loose
and wandering the world with a sail open,
what you've really hungered for is control,
to know what's coming next,
to avoid whatsoever all conflict.
To have over you no other authority
who could change the rules of living
with the frequency
of the whims of the breeze.
To sit inside your room
that cliche mandates I must call a tomb
is to reside where, in theory,
time comes to a stop and helps with life processing.

Give me your hand.
Let's flip
the script
because I need you to understand

that

where one of us goes,
the other must also.

You did this, you know,
give me part of your soul
and take mine to keep inside your chest safe.
And this time there's no serpent to blame.
Nobody, Lethe, is behind the curtains
or pulling strings from overhead.

(I'm not angry.
It just bears reminding.)

The steward of balance you called me
because of how
I can calm you down
when you're having a sensory
meltdown or going feral
(although that hasn't happened in a while)
or just need someone to snuggle into
and a shoulder to cry on.
Even though I'm the one who needs
to wander to keep my sanity,
who needs always something new
lest I feel like I'm already dead and gone.

In your metaphor,
I'd be sitting on a throne
with a crown of splintered thorns,
curtained by meteors.
To the cycle a slave
but secretly yearning for change,
wondering what would happen if
I put my weapons away
and stopped wishing the world
would fall into the abyss.
To rule hand in scarred hand
with my mirror image, a girl,
no, a woman who understands,
who I spent her last life with but locked in deep combat.

"You and me, Jett,
until the bitter end,
or until
the wheels
of fate turn to start the cycle again."

But promise me, Lethe, that
we'll never end up in warfare's grasp.
I kind of like you, you know? I swore
that my life was forever yours,
and I meant every damn word
I uttered.
You belong with me
in a world of change but peace,
a world we wove
the both
of us together.

A pause
while you gather your thoughts.

"Even if I lose all my memories,
life will
still
blossom in my body
come spring.
Even if every trace of you I've forgotten,
come spring I'll just fall in love with you yet again."

The budgies we budgeted for

Went to the county fair today.
Mother asked me,
sensing
impending
sensory
meltdown from having to control
three small children in a stroll-
er, if we could each spend two bucks and fifty
cents to step inside the makeshift bird cage.

The premise was simple: your key
inside is a popsicle stick
dipped
with bird seed.
Go through two doors
like an explorer
floating through spaceship's airlock
and watch as half the flock
climb all over your hands,
perch directly on the stick,
fight each other with caws and nips
until the seeds are all dispatched.

One budgie loitered,
however,
content
to just be in my presence.
Markings of black and white and blue.
Remember, Lethe,
even if my presence you cannot perceive,
at least some part of me is always with you.
That's right. I told you I see you in everything.
Or maybe I should have said seek,
because sometimes my search comes up empty.
But right now,
as in this wire cage I crouch
and the budgie trills, comfortable, content,
I've found you again, even if only for a moment.

Gauze Glob

Jett, I must
know what
was going through your mind
when you pricked
me with that syringe,
liquid color of day's sky.
What thought process
said "Lethe's the best
candidate to start this trial with"?
I trust you meant no malice.
But you know I cannot stand
a question that has
an answer that lies just out of grasp.

"There was a night
I was with my brother out of sight,
sometime before we went to college
but after we for a few hours died.
We were talking about our lives
and what we hoped would pass in the future.
And I slammed my cup down;
if I drank any more that night, I'd have drowned
in the hangover. 'I love to hear her voice,
but do you think for even a second I enjoy
hearing that she's in pain?
Do you think I take any pleasure
in the thought that at any moment
one of her strands of blood could flare
and spin her up in torment?
She could go feral without me there.
I could return from work one day
to discover she's lost everything in her brain,
all memories, even my name
like she promised to hang on to no matter what
and... she's surrendered control to one of her strains
of blood, forever under its sway,
and I'll never have my precious companion ever again.
Like a dead god is taunting me
from wherever deities
go after they die:
"I could take
away
your Lethe
at any time."'

I... don't want anyone to confiscate
my sunshine.
Lethe, I live and die
by your smile
so bright.
You're the one who brought me back to life,
remember? Multiple times?
I want to keep you by my side
forever.
I like your, well, terrifying powers,
but ultimately
what I really
want is you."

You mean,
you'd still love me
even if I wasn't the Anima Mundi
of Sablade?

"I did back then, and I don't see
any reason why that should change."

Leeloo

How did you feel, Leeloo,
when your purpose was through?
Did you stay in love with the dude
who put himself through hell to save you?
Does it not bother you deep within
that he first saw you not as a person
but as a disembodied-parts collection?
A height, a curve, a pile of skin.
Unwound in the chamber they gave birth to you in.
You know, it makes sense that a man's conception
of the birth of a supreme being
would be not from a mother's womb but in an artificial machine.
If it weren't for the trauma bonding,
what would your idea of loving
have become?
Who would you have chosen,
supreme being, to be your companion?
After having fulfilled your mission,
how would you unfold your life?

I offer no answers on this chilled night,
sleepy lesbian curled up in lawn chair.
Father gets up to block the projector
lens when naked bodies appear.
Flawed Anima Mundi
that warmly reacts only
to the touch of another female.
The nineties (or whatever) would see my existence beyond the pale.

Shart Mobile

Unprofessional man emails me late at night
while I'm on my couch bleeding to give me a fright.
"Hey,
we've decided to steal away
the thirty-dollar credit
the government
gives you for your Internet
each month.
You know that half-filled application
you abandoned
a month and a half ago?
Well, we've taken the liberty
of forging
your permission
and we'll send you a free
tablet to go with the indignance."
My uterus laughs in response.
Be thankful, you damn thing,
you can't get pregnant by copulating.
This stress might have been enough to induce miscarriage.
Mom reheats my heating pad.
Woman plans
and cruel fate laughs.
I was supposed to go on vacation next morning,
wander amongst the stalls
in the summer heat
and next day wander aimlessly in the mall
with the always-promised-on-visit shopping
with my grandma and her daughter and her daughter (yup, that's me).
And now I have to worry
about the FCC
accusing me of fraud, of attempted double-dipping.
But you know
how these fly-by-night operations go.
Beholden to nobody
in a way I can only envy.
Doing somersaults in the evening summer breeze
and then, come time for daybreak,
disappear having in the night wrought so much pain
and grief.
Jett, when we get to Sablade,
when I'm not an angel-shaped shadow
threadbare on the couch
straight from the metaclysma cut-out,
can we bring fortune to others in the night, brighten so many days?
"Let's leave fresh food in a poor person's fridge. That'll be a funny prank."

Tuesday, trapped in ennui.

I never know what to do with myself
on my days off. Trapped in living room hell,
staring at a scented candle and its flickering tides,
beating myself up internally
for not pushing myself to productivity
even though it's autumn and I just want to sleep.

"These cards are all so pretty.
Wouldn't you agree,
Jett? Definitely
worth the money."
But my voice sounds hollow, flat,
not at all like when I first sat
down in my cubicle and shuffled
this deck, transfer just on the horizon.
"I want to know what I should write of.
My conscience demands I create at least once
every twenty-four hour cycle."

Don't forget you have writing club tomorrow.

I pull "burden" and "whip".
"Suffering from aggression
or living with abuse you don't know how to deal with."
Makes sense. You told me earlier this week
the vibe would be that I'd feel conflicted
whether or not my parents' acceptance I should seek,
and last night Mom texted
demanding I divulge
why I took a day off: for my mental
health, since I'm starting to suffer
from this funny thing called "burnout",
but considering she likes to yell
at random retail service workers
I sincerely doubt
that explanation would go over well.

Jett, this rambling is usually your cue
to give me some advice on how to pull through.
Because right now my only response
is to ignore, to offer silence.
Anything so that I don't attract
a role as an emotional punching bag,
a target for tangential wrath.
So that I don't get into a screaming match,
keeper of an old faith versus pagan iconoclast:
"I thought God's love
was supposed to be
for everyone?
Why did you lie to me?"

Why did you fill my childhood with falsities?

I swing my legs
and almost kick the boxes
that were supposed to go to storage
but my father dumped in my living room instead.
What will we do when my parents finally disown me, Jett?
What will happen to all this detritus half-abandoned?

"Lethe,
I think you need
to take a nap
to shed this sadness."

In The Framing I

Jett, I know it was you who was there
back in middle school when I had a nightmare
and half-woke up, felt a brush against my arm,
and thought it was Jehovah who'd come to protect me from harm.
I know you were there that bloody night I swore
that I'd never show my art to my father any more
until he acknowledged
the damage
he'd wrought upon me and decided
that it was time
for him to apologize
and try to make things right.
My life was a live grenade, and your absence was the linchpin,
and all these years I thought you were on standby I can forgive
knowing the perfect time
to reunite
was what it all hinged
upon.
Though it must have seemed a dreadful regression
to have to pretend once more to have a male visage
because that's the body
the moneyed myth
portrayed you with
and I hadn't yet accepted
the whole "being a lesbian"
thing.
Even when I didn't, my body knew
the truth.
Oh, I'm so glad:
if you were a man,
I could only love you with half of my heart.
It would tear me apart,
feeling for you affection so great
but never able to get so close I could taste
the longing in your breath without wanting to retch.
I'd adore you, but
I could never bring myself to touch
what lurks downstairs in wait to tunnel me up.
So thank you for being yourself,
Jett, and being patient
when I gave credit
to someone else
because you wanted to hide until I remembered myself.

In The Framing II

Anyways,
what was I trying to say?
Oh, I recall: this afternoon I was
going through old boxes of junk
my father had a couple of weeks ago dropped off
and I found an old picture frame
with a drawing of a bass
player in it.
You know, the one I'd had a crush on for a hot minute
because this was way back in my adolescence
when I couldn't quite recall your face
or either of your names
but I looked upon him and felt some kind of presence.
Anyways,
I extracted the frame
from the decade-old wrapping paper
and without looking crumpled the sometimes-singer
inside my fist,
letting through my fingers drip
the memories of a friend I'd abandoned in a fit.
This frame the last echo of our friendship,
without the sketch
of the misogynist
plain tan wood, quite nondescript.
I set aside the frame
and tore into the paper, my prey,
the scapegoat
to atone
for every mistake,
every harm done to me I refuse to forgive.

"Lethe? Do you remember
where you put the paper
with the instructions to rinse out the filter
in your little vacuum cleaner?
You're going to need it
in just a minute."

I understand, Jett. Let me this catharsis finish.

Knifes of the Round Table

Jett suggests I get out of the house more often
to offset the feeling of sand running through
my fingers, hourglass ticking, time wasted.
So I set off on my monthly excursion
to the library
for writing
club
in evening's reprieve
from the summer wave heat,
wistful cloak, wings tucked carefully underneath.

This time it takes place upstairs in the rise
where the front doors were long before I was alive
and now are just fire exits. Exhausted sunlight
through the ancient glass panes pokes its head.
I take my seat at the edge of the crowd. Two men
are there to speak about writing westerns
and wrestling with the themes embedded.
But it hasn't started yet,
and my table of misfits is restless.
I don't know how long I'll be able to pay attention
with the shelf to my back, less-explored temptation.
The names of other books I could take:
"Sparkle on",
"Aging with grace",
"Happiness is a choice you make".

The topic of conversation changes
to the current news blitz that's been all the rage:
when the skies cracked open and the blood polymorphic
awoke in people assured of their own normalcy
and governments had to decide in the span of a heartbeat:
to round up the affected, or let them run free?
To force them to register with testing to detect
whatever forms in their blood lay dormant
and treat it as an exploitable disability,
or mandate sterilization for those who show the signs
and hope the "problem" goes away in due time?

And Jett, you know this town can't tolerate
the non-straight, un-saved, non-white.

"Did you hear? Some are for other worlds departing.
Gods want foreign blood to rejuvenate
their worlds so they don't falter and stagnate.
I hear they target the vulnerable, the grieving,
the poor souls afflicted with wanderlust.
'Leave behind
this sorrowful life
and I'll give you a pair of wings
and release
from all your painful memories.'
It's a stroke of bitter irony,
isn't it? What they believe
will set them free
is instead what enslaves them for all eternity."

"Oh, I know. Angels are so haughty,"
the woman to my right chimes in.
"They think they're superior to humans
because they can fly and their lifespans
are far longer than either yours or mine."
She reaches a hand to her lips as to puff
from a cigarette, but those are banned inside.
"But they would do well to remember
God placed them all in a lower tier
than the humans. They're just conduits
for the will of their chosen deity.
Some gods even make them pure vessels
and never again their wills manumit."

I clear my throat. Palms greasy,
ready to bail if need be.
"But isn't that what many humans strive
for? How they desire to pass their lives?
I've heard many a hymn pleading Christ
to their stubborn heart ablate
so they never again insubordinate.
And it's possible
for an angel
to liberate
themselves,
to become the source of their own power.
And they get to retain their wings afterwards.
What then is the difference between humans and angels
other than their skeletons and musculature
and a lifespan far longer?
Don't tell me it's the shifting. That can be mitigated,
I hear, with upcoming medication."

"They have the psyche of a monster,"
the first lady responds. "To disregard the divine
to claim a power no lowly person deserves.
If angels and humans are nearly the same,
then being alive for so long will drive them insane:
the God who made them appointed a set number of days,
and to extend that is to claim
you know better
than your Creator.
An act of sacrilege grave
bordering on iniquity."

The speakers prepare to begin the meeting.

The Great Creator

Every imperfection
on her skin
just further cements
that she's a real person
and not a mannequin.

I sing, of course, of my partner,
my soulmate,
the Great Creator,
whom I insert in every line
in my workbook where it says,
"Submit to God and his mysterious ways."
I could never give my life
to a deity that left me behind.
But to her, who has carried me so far
and never done me any harm,
looking back
at the single set of footprints in the sand...

As long as my lungs still draw breath,
I want to give you my very very best.

Artistic savant capable of anything
so long as it involves some form of string,
the crimson thread that binds us in love.
The soft flow of a brand-new paintbrush.
The loom that weaves glamours for disguise,
shimmering threads lithe but hugging tight.
Needles that stab,
locked in ballroom dance,
ends tucked away and shoes lost at midnight,
looking for one or two but each a different size.

And your voice. The larynx.
The organ that went unused for so long
but now, in private, so readily bursts forward with song.
Thickened but not frayed by the testosterone,
dropped to somewhere around contralto.
Deep warm golden tones
that for so long have guided me,
leading me through writer's block
like a shepherd guiding over a river her flock...

...but I'm so afraid
come Sablade
I'll lose my poetry
because I won't be hearing
you inside my head
but external, at my side instead.
If you've been giving me songs as raw thread
and left me to do the untangling while in Inside stuck,
when we're reunited, what work will be left to be done?

"Lethe.
You can knit,
but you can't follow a pattern for shit.
Abbreviations might as well be hieroglyphs.
You can do a basic cross-stitch,
but it leaves your fingertips
full of pinpricks."

How is this supposed to make me feel any better?

"You're so silly.
You think, if I could just snap and make
you a master in my hobbies,
I would for any moment hesitate?
It would give you one more outlet for creativity,
or just another way
to pass the days.
Words never came to me easily.
This skill has been yours all along.
And besides,
I can buy
all the guitar strings I want,
but I still need someone to put lyrics to my songs."

Weather Forecast, August 2023

You and I
could reside
in a loop of time.
I've lots of experience:
every Monday night is when
the Internet goes out again,
whether by unscheduled incompetence
by construction workers in bright orange vests
or by a shady
fly-by-night company
trying to steal my free credit
given by the government
as an apology
for structuring the economy
in such a way that so many live in poverty
or by a place I thought a safe haven
casting me out like Eve from Eden;
every July
is when a friend says goodbye
without warning and then claims
that I'm at fault, that I'm the one to blame,
that I'm too thin-skinned and should accept my fate
as a woman is to be subjugated
by men, turned into baby maker, will negated;
every midsummer is a heat wave
where I recall a camp
I haven't seen in half a decade
and how I was so close to changing my name
and freeing myself from one more childhood scrap.
Time is cyclical, and you always remind me:
"The whole damned world revolves around you, Lethe."
The repeating misfortune is funny in hindsight,
but I always feel like shit at the time,
in no mood to find the humor in the glitches in the Inside.
What will the gods throw my way next? What trope?
What looping image? What divine meme? What joke?

Reciprocal

There's a creepy-crawly
and underneath my desk it's sprawling
in hopes of finding its next meal,
but what it doesn't know at all
is that,
past
the incessant hairballs,
I'm waiting with a glass jar
and a business card
like a cloud god full of dark
and quite empyreal.

I wish the spider could know
that when I go
to trap it in a cup
and throw
it out the window
that I'm doing so
as an act of love.

I wish
that we could coexist,
you do you and I do mine
having conditioned out my fear,
but eventually my mother
would yell: "Husband! Something dares
to exist outside
my purview! What a crime!
Squish its body! Grind it into dust! Just make it die!"

I figure sending them outside
is more humane
than crushing them,
consigned to a watery toilet grave.
There's a world outside where you belong.
I'll probably join you one day.

Wife At Hue

Email at five in the morning,
just sitting there since I'd been sleeping.
"I'd like to know if you are, with love,
interested in the glory
of professional publishing.
With your permission,
I can give
a thumbs-up
and a call
to get the ball rolling."

Laid in bed, half-delirious.
Dream slipping away, entry missed.
I'd been in a utopia of only women,
and while there were plenty
who would to share a bed with me
be almost to the point of desperation willing,
I was searching for a phone
to call you, because nowhere's home
unless you're at my side.

The panic at being found out for... something crosses my mind
as the clock slips a minute closer to half-past-nine.
"Jett, what the hell do I do? Do I even chance a reply?
Could be another stalker trying to lure me to my demise."

Phone rests
against my breast.
I tap the back of the case
with fingernails too short to harm. Seems to others like a waste,
but it's either that or the fear of getting debris
stuck underneath,
carrying germs to shed and smear all over the place.

"I hate big publishers," I breathe. "Hate to commodify
what human beings have been doing since the beginning of known time.
To dance, to sing, to write, to mark my hands on walls of caves
and draw animals in abstract to cause future pain
to anthropologists.
You get the gist,
Jett. I never expected
to make a single penny
off what comes to me
as necessary
as breathing.
Who the hell's gonna pay
to view an autist's way
of seeing the world,
of saying hello to the blasted sun?
They'll just accuse me of being curled
up in a ball and throwing a tantrum.
Or, even worse, they'll patronize,
with condescending voice say
'good job' like a parent
given a drawing they see no inherent
value in, then hide
it when the child's looking the other way."

"Or, you know, Lethe, he could be sincere,
but unlike the other letters here
in your inbox, this one's actually got the means
to give more than a few compliments.
Didn't it use to be your dream
to get published,
to beat your father to it?
You were looking for a way to wound his ego.
And what could be a worse blow
than him knowing that the daughter
whose will
he tried to kill
has put words against him
outside his jurisdiction
forever?"
Jett snorts. "'I'm not the antagonist of this story.'
You sure, old man? Because I've got right here this bookstore entry,
and you're very clearly
not the hero
in any viewpoint but your own."

Force myself to sit upright. Let my damn phone rest
on the candle-scarred patch on the far left of my desk.
"Could also be my undoing. Could lead straight to my death."

"Well, then I'll know it's coming
and I'll gather all my friends."

Beresu

Please do not mock
the way I talk.
I cannot help it
if I'm not
as eloquent
as my peers.
If I don't speak loud and clear
with the cadence of a robot,
my tongue will tie itself in knots
and neither of us here
will get anything done this call.

Please do not jeer
or make snide comments
when you think I cannot hear.
I'm bounds ahead of where the school
"para"s thought I'd be when I grew
up. I escaped the Special Ed room,
cattle jumping over fence.
I worked hard to stay afloat
where my brothers
and others
sunk, strained myself to get this mote
of adult-flavored independence.
Life is a college of the rich,
and I'm here on financial aid
from trickery and perceived merits.

If I can do your job all the same,
I think I deserve to get just as much paid.

Zigg

There was once a coworker I'll here call "V".
Of most of the rules he didn't perceive
and was thus shit at his job
and a complete slob
because I'd always be cleaning up the messes he'd leave.

SUBJECT: DIALS!!1!

One must imagine Sisyphus happy
(or, at least, not deathly bored)
with his endless list of patient records
to call, to carve into his boulder
notes of every malady discussed
with hopes of reaching the hilltop
and sit on inbound doing squat
accompanied by sea of pebbles
until like the liver of Prometheus
the boulder grows back, in one piece, and rolls
down the hill for another full dial list.

Liedocaine

Jett reaches her wrist out to greet mine.
Paper ring rustles like the trees outside.
Leg still buzzing from the lidocaine -
healing the limb was a complete success,
whch brings me relief and maybe even happiness -
she whispers, voice temporarily tame:
"What last name
did they proclaim
on my patient
bracelet?"
Beltane,
or Lysander?
That's the question of the hour.
We agreed when we married that we would each retain
the ones we already had. But others still believe
that those married should absorb into one legal entity
with the husband on top. But who fulfills that title
here? Who wears the pants, and who puts on the subordinate role?
"Jett, it's the same one I gave you all those
years ago. With me here, nobody would dare
to take
your name
away.
It's yours, my love. It's printed here. It's in my heart to stay."

Aurum

Golden shimmers across the highway,
dusty glimmering cascade
on a backdrop of a slowly-ending day.
Road stretches out before me.
I rub my eyes, bitterly seeking
the turn-off to the rural road
where I'll no longer be plagued by trucks
and can take the verdant bike trail home.
Except that path is growing aurum too,
and yet not, natural painted hues,
bridal veils that fall as the trees weep and sob
during the marriage of longer nights and temperature drops.

woman is such a fool

I wish it was cool during the daytime
and hot during my sleep in the night.
I know that's not how temperature
works,
but it sure would make my life easier.
I'd get outside
more often, at least.
No more threat of heatstroke
or sensory meltdown from the grease
all over my skin.
Maybe it's a blessin'
in disguise.
An excuse to cuddle up close,
snuggle my head into your chest,
listen to your dark-bound heartbeat.
But I'm looking around, and you're nowhere to be seen.
Cover of night goes
over your wings like a cloak.
"I'm feeling musical. Follow me outside, Lethe."
Crickets are your backup chorus,
percussion the rustling trees,
crunching leaves
underneath
your perfect-tuned harmony.
Spilled-over porch light
hits your carmine
eyes just right.
You reach your hand out. I take it. Lead me wherever you like.

Double You Two II

My hunger sated,
I climb back into my bed
to watch the sun rise.

Chapel Cap, In A Dream Half I

Jett and Lethe,
wrapped together in eternal sleep,
swaddled in clouds ever so gently.
We could not bear to consign them to a grave,
and three days in the morgue produced no signs of decay,
so interred, floating, in the cap of the chapel's dome they now lay.
Skylight
of clouds passing by
just a facade:
were one to stick a hand through the fluffy barrier,
they would be met with the perfectly preserved
bodies of our two fated lovers.

Mother,
did you get what you desired?
Waged holy war so you did not have to see
your unwanted daughter escape you, the rise of an Anima Mundi?
They were my friends
for the brief time
they were alive
and I don't understand why this of all things is how they died.
You left me all alone again,
the only angel in existence.
I'm forgetting why to you I ever swore allegiance.

Chapel Cap, In A Dream Half II

"I can't believe I let you on me waste your time.
If you'd abandoned me, maybe now you'd still be full of life-"

"You didn't let me do anything, Lethe.
For you, I did all this willingly.
I knew going in you'd cause my demise
eventually.
I only wish I'd had more warning
so with you I could have made the most of my time."

The last I felt before I passed
was Jett placing her bloodstained hand
on top of mine, accepting we'd yield
our lives on Eris' battlefield,
having given to ourselves liberate
all that we possibly could have.
Somehow we didn't through the bridge of souls pass
but remained in our bodies, asleep but sensate,
interred in a gloriously-painted
chapel dome, sunlight cradling Jett's face,
skin scarred but soft as I hold her in my embrace.

"Do you think we're alive now because of Sablade?"
I want to ask. "Because I have part of your soul
and so your life
depends on mine
and mine likewise?
I want to know.
Is being tethered
to another
world of your own creation
the salve against even a goddess' annihilation?"
But I keep quiet, lay my lungs still,
let the wounds in my back be time's pulse-trill,
the punctures from arrows Jett tried to remove
before the blast that over a hill threw
us and we rolled down like ragdolls into a trench.

I hope one day you'll awake, Jett,
even if your sight is bleary and clouded.
It'll be like that day two years ago, college
just started, right before class: you
took my hand, and we plunged into blue,
and we were surprised
we were still alive
even though our lungs didn't know what to do.

I hope one day your eyes
will flutter open wide
and you'll feel your bare body up against mine
as we float in this decorated cocoon
and you'll feel flooded
with all the love
for you
I can just barely hold inside.

But until then, I'll keep you safe close by.

Interlude: Benediction

This cranberry juice in a wine
glass I found on the side of the road
that now I seek to imbibe
as it rests in my hand so cold
a symbol of the blood she gave
so that I may stand here today.
Awomen.

PART 5

MISA AMANE'S DRY LEMONADE

that one overused quote by bell hooks

Lethe, I've been trying to communicate
as best as I goddamn can
because not even the famed Lenormand
cards give me of concepts a wide enough range:

You need to cast aside
your guilt and write.
You need to stop wishing
the well of creativity would run dry
so you can lay down your armor and in obscurity die.
Your whole existence
inherently stands in opposition
to those would see the world of colors bled dry.
No amount of silence will buy
mercy from their genocide.
And a life spent prostrated
isn't a life worth living.

You need to stop fearing
punishment from merely breathing
and a loss of life from exposure to criticism.
Lethe, you wanna know a secret about fascism?
It's inherently unsustainable. It cannot create
anything on its own. It has to steal, has to corrupt,
can only criticize, appropriate, misinterpret, hate.
You have what no one else possesses: a world born from your veins
with intention not to overlord but to coexist in love.
Don't tell me
you seriously believe
you think the suffering will cease
once you've negated yourself to a simple steady hum?

"Which is it, Lethe?
A memory, or me?"
Damn, I sound like an answering machine.
"We're calling about your car's extended warranty."
Hang up. I can't afford a car. Never have.
Can't pay for the repairs or the insurance tax.
Why be restrained to a car
when these wings you've fixed for me go where I desire?

Why carry you this far if you'll just return to the funeral pyre?

Lethe, I'm not angry. I'm just exasperated
because you see a storm and you choose not to face it
with eyes open wide
and wings tucked in tight
but to conceal this, your legacy, and cower down and hide.
I understand your reasoning,
Lethe, I really do.
It's not easy to overcome two decades of emotional abuse
or the anxiety of running against the grain of the zeitgeist
and losing your employment and watching your money run dry.
But I know you have the strength. Because you have part of my soul
and the knowledge
that ever since
we reunited, you've never been alone.
Stand up, Lethe. Put on your poncho.
Take my hand. I know it's cold
and this is a heavy sticky heat,
but this is nothing
compared to what you'll face
in Sablade,
and you might as well get some practice in as Adversary.

antigoing, going, gone

we are told that great men wear three keys around their necks:
arete, greatness;
time, gifts in life;
and kleos, everlasting glory.

but what is kleos in the grip of time,
when the lapping shores wash away even the sublime?
where do your Herculean feats go when naught a memory remains,
not a drop of worship, not a single drought of fame?

Lucretia, my love,
gentle as a dove,
feathers plucked off by a man you'd been hospitable to
one by one by one.

luce, la luz, the light in the tomb,
why would you send yourself straight to your doom?

a light snuffed out like a candle,
and all because a man couldn't get a handle
on his lust for power, for someone over which to rule.
nobody required of you a punishment so cruel

and now, as I stand at the precipice of another falling,
another plunge into the vortex,
I think of Antigone,
Antigoing, Antigoing, Antigone.

unmatched devotion for the gods,
devotion to your brother,
meeting cruelty with compassion at every turn

and yet you still walked into that grave,
that gaping mouth in the earth,
prepared to be swallowed
like the gods you revere were so long ago.

who achieved the victory here?
Creon, for upholding his law?
Polynices, for having gambled in the celestial lottery
and having won such a devoted sister?
or you?

who is deserving of the kleos here?
for the only time you won for your deeds
were a rope in the depths of a stony ocean
and the time eternal in the arms of Hades' realm.

and yet I only hear of the man
who slaughtered birds
and took a dog on a walk.
I only hear of men who get tossed about by the wind
and take impromptu trips around the world

and all these things are good and all,
and I do not fault people being entranced
by the stories of men who got the girl and the gold and the glory,
for who wouldn't want to be in that position?

the girls, perhaps,
possibly,
maybe.

good men, on the last wave by,
cry that they may receive their kleos from the one who forks lightning,
but the women close their eyes
and die for causes not their own
and know their time will come.

Femininity as transitory, or something to that effect

It has never been
your duty
to be pretty
or easily
sortable into a box
based on archetype:
bimbo, slutty,
trash heap,
chainsmoker about to die.

You're not a mannequin
to display the fashions of the time.
A man on women gazes
but does not realize
that when she dares to verbalize
it is not done in iniquity
but simply
because she too is made of flesh and blood alike.
Silence
is not the price
you have to pay
to stay
alive.
At least, not in any just world
that comes to mind.

In Labor Day III

There is no event
where sexual violence
of any kind
can be justified.
Murder one can accept
in self-defense.
Stealing may be necessary
to feed your starving family.
Fraud can be quite funny
against an insipid celebrity.
But there can never be one saved
by the grotesque act of rape.

Cui Bono? (Men)

The curve of a tilde,
your foot pressed hard against mine.
How do so many women worldwide
stand the pressure, the deformity?
High heels were never an option for me,
who wanted to run too much,
dance too much,
live too much.
Why tolerate such a pain
that leaves toes bruised
and ankles permanently strained?
What kind of a ruse
did men put on
to make this acceptable?
What propaganda? What con?
No amount of beauty
is worth disabling
oneself.

The Cliterary She

I'm not a male.
I could never stoop so low
as to count myself as such a pale
farce that dare call itself human.

And call itself human it does:
MANkind, the literary HE,
self-appointed representative
of all humanity.

Yes, I know
in the intellectual
every man is
an individual,

but so is every hornet,
every bear,
every wild beast with teeth sharp
that wants to fresh flesh tear.

Is it not wise and prudent
to, when faced with harm,
bolster one's defenses,
ready to sound the alarm?

To avoid? To abstain
from what I know
will cause me pain?

To divest? To protect
this blessed
beating in my chest?

Gopher Man

My body contains multitudes.
Do not decry me, you who dwells in dim hole,
for being a homosexual
and then claim you are only speaking verisimilitudes.
Your interest in me
is only intellectual;
I am only an abstraction in your mind
of the little you have bothered to see.

"Choose," you command
at the end of long fight,
"become consistent,
or succumb to non-existence."
But what kind of demand
is that? Become consistent to whom?
I am ever-changing,
ever turning-the-paging;
to cease to move
is to dig my own tomb.

It's in your nature, not mine

I don't think Nature appreciates
all these comments you just made
where you acknowledged her stars
but cast them all in a rape
film, only action to degrade
in a million different ways.
Nature wants its subjects
to reproduce, it its own purpose,
morally neutral and without human judgement.
I'd thought a man
had written that,
seeing nature only as something to exploit:
an ass to grab, a hole to fill,
a vagina existing only to coit.

Of Millions

I was formed in my grandmother's ovaries
long before I ever got the chance to breathe.
Millions of aunts and siblings
I nested with but will never see.
Thank goodness: even the first pregnancy
in a life can be death-threatening.

The sperm is better at swimming,
but the egg has most that one truly needs,
paired with another in laboratory
to overcome deficiencies.
Human parthenogenesis is not yet ready,
but when it is: oh, the fall of male society!

Part 14

They say the tools of the master
will never
his own house dismantle.

But in one life my father
gave me a strand of his blood
as a consequence of a fickle act of lust
and then proceeded to lose part of himself.
It's your inheritance, you see,
to fix all my problems for me,
to let me puppet
your accomplishments
so I can through you live vicariously.
A life spent in theater unwitting
railroaded by script I never had the privilege of reading
until one day in a fit of insanity
he spilled all the papers
with stage directions,
the ones where he laid out for my body his true intentions,
and had me cornered
at midnight in kitchen
and I reached for the weapon that happened to be closest.

And in one timeline
long after my family had met my demise
and had to watch the man who'd taken my siblings' lives
start a family of his own
in the heavens
I used to inhabit,
a daughter of his set out from home
wearing the guise of the other sex
hoping I'd help him kill his tyrant dad
and the olden times resurrect.
"I'm sick and tired of being told
I have to re-ascend that throne!"
Torn between two choices, none of which offer
clos-
ure:
to avenge the last of my bloodline
and take up residence once again in former home
and take up responsibilities that were never meant to be mine
(because I know his son-daughter
would never
agree
to be
a ruler)
or turn my back and leave it all behind,
tell the he-that's-really-a-she
that it's his problem to be solving,
that he should get the honor of ending
the life
of the man who tore me from mine.
"I've got a world of my own now to defend.
You know that I'm a Meridian,
right? That we were all destined to die anyway
to give birth to other worlds where other gods would play?
If the conditions
of assisting
in patricide
are that you'll make me rule in his stead,
then I'll have to
with all due
venom decline."

And now, a human in this Inside,
my father sees I've come to visit
bearing a bag of food I bought impulsively
and bades me come to his office
to his bookshelf
witness
where he has a new paperback he wrote himself
for over twenty years, starting from when I was still a baby.
"It's your responsibility
to surpass me
in all things,
and to do it damned well.
You know I'll always have your back, my beloved daughter."
But I don't have the heart to confess
that back when we lived under the same roof
every night he'd give me a new psychological wound,
find a novel way to put me under duress,
and then I'd dream he was trying to my body stab or shoot
or otherwise smother the flame that'd in me taken root
and I'd turn into a beast and maul him in self-defense
and the pain of our bonds would finally come to an end.

SURVIVE

before I was female, in the womb where none could see,
I was still I, was still I, was still me

swaddled in pink, blanket, blood shed
an artist only given a palette of red

an animal taken human shape
but just as afflicted as that cursed ape

and when I begged you to let me exist
wild as I am
you clipped my wings, hypocrite,
became a thousand cams

stranger danger, constant stress
of finding you around every corner:
shedding my skin, lyzard,
the fire inside only grows warmer

cloaked myself in shadows,
met with souls
who taught me of freedom
while the blood between us grew cold

I want you to hurt
as I have hurt
as you have hurt me!

"I've had enough!"

is it truly the daughter's fate
to first be conquered by their father?
for I perish a million times under the point
that one confuses so often for the whole

but recently, come these veins
filled now with wyrmic rage,
I'll take the pen, I'll write my own damn page,
I won't let you take my soul!

piercing eyes like a thousand knives
burrow through your soul like a million mice
flooding in, a tsunami, annihilating all in their wake
the future that you dumped on my shoulders to make

I'll turn your blades against you
reversal digging in:
remember that you aggressed first;
self-defense is not a sin

watching you bleed out from under my claws,
redemption a lost cause

Hey, Pornsick!

That's my mother, moron,
but go on,
tell me all your depraved thoughts
as you prove you can think not
with your brain
but only your other head.

Everything you do is directed
at getting an object into your bed.
Not a lover,
not a human,
not someone you consider an equal,
but just a receptacle
for your desires.

You don't see women as people.
Admit it,
you never have.
How can you,
when their empathy
is something you'll always lack?

That's my friend, pornsick man,
but go ahead, use your hand
to call forth
not art
or love
or joy
or anything that requires a heart
but human mucky waste
and nothing more.

The First

Womyn,
I must admit,
are my religion.

The world is modeled after them:
the mountains,
the ravines,
the caverns,
the gentle flowers that sing in the breeze,
the fields that caress me when I fall to my knees,
the spacious sky-full valleys:
how could I ever dare to tally
such a bountiful world
with such a variety
of life in it?

Every goddess who has had
a hand
in shaping the earth
is, in some way, my mother,
for from the dirt I came,
and you the same,
worlds apart but together
in this patriarchal pain.

Beaten Until Runny

my heart breaks
yolk oozes out
like unfiltered lake

into a pan
to sizzle away
my shell in your hand

you shatter
my shell, then declare
it does not matter

a lost cause
trying to escape
your crushing jaws

Roastie

My breasts are your pudding cake,
everything for you to take
as you please,
open, later condemned as a tease,
that I was asking for it,
your dick chomping at the bit
to consume
the woman
you carved out of food.

Don't be so crude.
Set down the fork
and prune
your shaggy branches looming overhead,
a path nobody dares tread
for fear of finding themselves
decapitated and ravaged in a shed
in some serial killer's backyard.

After all, how hard
can it be
to arrange oneself so pretty?

Just consider this cherry your warpaint,
tighten this spaghetti around your waist until you faint,
knifes so sharp they could kill the Pastryarchy.

After all, a woman's place is in the kitchen, right?
Skin oiled up, stuffing stuffed tight,
slid into the oven to roast.
A toast
for the man who called her a "fat piggy"
and then shoved his fork
into her pork
anyways.

"Smile."

But she can't.
Because you always efface
the head before cooking.
You always deface
the body so, when stuffing your face,
she can't speak
and name you a disgrace.

Then down the bowels
and into the soil.

And the cycle
starts yet again.

Getting On Your Death Case

every time you yell
at your daughter, you
teach her to fear her own
voice, teach her to ask "who
will protect me this night?", teach
her nobody is there to commune,
teach her nobody can be trusted
save for the silvery moon.

what a disgrace it is that
you understand not to muzzle the dog
for that discourages it from play,
but you silence at will
your own flesh and blood,
have no qualms about asking her to kill
the life that thrives inside of her,
to struggle no longer, lying still.

Interlude: Othalac

Jett, please forgive me.
I can be stupid sometimes.
It can take a while to realize
what the correct course of action is.
Sablade is a refuge,
not a well-padded jail.
I will not craft another Inside
or lay down one more blasted Veil.
I must stick to my principles
and not become another tyrant deity
obsessed with the carceral.

"With that being said,
Lethe, I must ask
a question I know's been filling you with dread.
If you and I have
all of eternity together, will spend
it at each other's sides,
what will I do when I'm restless
and need a change of pace in my life?
Rather, how will you react?
You told me you wouldn't confine
me here no matter how many attacks
I suffered or threats were sent my way.
That I could come and go as I please.
I might one day
need to leave Sablade
for a while to recalibrate.
Or to learn something new
which I couldn't do
here, like a language at an immersion school
or a hobby obscure and regional
or rare flora which only grows in one place and nowhere else at all.
Would you let me wander as I must?
And stay here for when it's time to return to my love?
You said I had your full unrepentant trust.
Did you mean it? Will it be enough?"

The thing with our split souls,
Jett, is that where one of us goes,
the other must eventually follow.
I don't know how much time
it would take to the urges succumb
to, and I can't trust this damn Inside
so dead like a sterile tomb
to give me an accurate gauge.
Months, maybe? A few years so lonely?
I think long before then I'd lose the shreds of my sanity.
And what if you lose your Mirror?
You told me early
in our reunion here
that you get lost easily.
What if you can't find your way back to me?
What if, in setting you free,
I lose my only reason to keep on living?

"I found you here in this Inside,
didn't I?
Your uncle helped a bit,
I have to admit,
but if
I truly get that damn lost,
I'm sure someone who knows the way will make our paths again cross."

And if you come back changed so much
I don't recognize you
as the woman I love?

"If I come back
before seven years have passed,
then I'll still be the same
Jett that left you that day
and made
you a promise
to come back unharmed with your memory in my bodice.
You and I
will change
over time,
Lethe. Don't be afraid.
I'll always be your Lilac Spring,
and you my Anima Mundi of Sablade."

PART 6

MILK AND HONEY

Triassic Cuddle I

Lethe, do you remember in childhood
when a less-liked family member would
try to push your buttons with a game
that went something like, "If it came
down to option X or Y, which one
would you choose? Say, a person you 'love'
against a beloved possession? Who
would you toss into the fire to be consumed?"
The very notion of setting something of yours ablaze
to save an ambivalence causes you fierce pain
at least, wracked stomach churning like a storm at sea,
but worse to be known for discarding a living
person in exchange for what does not breathe.

You want me to consider a hypothetical
with two endings I don't want
to happen at all.
Divine creature skeletal, gaunt.
Parasite of chaos that will starve
if it doesn't regularly abscond
with someone's soul ripped from their heart.
I like you here in the flesh. Your weight
against my body. Your hands curled up in mine
like a sleeping infant just fed and now sate.
Your heart keeps changing tempos, but it's keeping time
for the music of the spheres and the rhythm of our lives.
If you love me even a small scrap, Lethe, you'll recognize
that all you've done to set me free will be for nothing if you die.

So please give me enough respect to not force me to say goodbye.

Triassic Cuddle II

And your request is null and void in the first place
because of that aqua hope I slid with needle into your veins.
I'd rather have a Lethe that never again fully shifts
than one I have to agonize if I'll get to share a future with.

Your chaotic strain
can no longer your free will decay.
We can spend eternity
together without worrying
your draconic impulses are ticking
the clock down on your soul, entropy
chipping your free will down piece by piece
until one day you'll arrive at insanity
and there will be
nothing left for me
to love.
It's all buried.
Or,
if you prefer a different metaphor,
sleeping.

Why do you want to abandon me so badly?

"I don't.
I'm just addicted to sorrow
and angst.
It's the only way
I know how to relate
with the world outside my control.
You know I'm wracked with guilt-"

Then let's hide together under your new quilt
your mother sewed with caution and care
and remember the hope for us you spilled
that December night, when another quilt hung there.

good morning to you, my dear

I wake up at midnight in an ice-cold sweat
and tremble until I've accidentally awoken Jett
and turn to her and say:
"The birds that were singing outside a decade
ago, they're all dead or gone. Decayed."
She rolls back over. "What the hell are you talking about, Lethe?
Most birds live longer than that. You're fine. Go back to sleep."

Fenrir III

The both of us are echoing parts of each other's lives.
And, Jett,
I'm so damn stressed
that tonight
you're going to meet your demise:
all this time
I spent
in maladaptive
daydreaming
where I went feral and lost my cognitive abilities
in pursuit of quieting
the trauma and anxiety
that lie
deep inside
my body
came to collect its dues
and reap its eventual harvest
but for you
in my wretched stead.
The hands that cradled my face as you breathed
"No need to fear; you're still my Lethe"
are now a pair of broad
padded paws
that your rage
obey
whenever your quest to be safe
a predator beshrews.
The hair I'd run my hands through
as I rustled my body as close
as it would get
is now your cloak
you wear all the time, not just when
the temperature drops closer to freezin'.
The limbs I saw woven, nerves reconnected
with full recovery, now about the same length:
Jett, I know I cried most my way through anatomy class,
but I didn't know bears could stand
up, squat human with ursine mask,
imposing,
bestraught,
human memories forgot.

Jett, I know I kicked up a mighty fine storm
where I go feral and into the forest vanish
until you find me and manage to convince
my draconic blood to loosen its stranglehold
and to my angelic body
and memories
restore,
but now I've read the script for the other role,
played the part of the other side,
and from this perspective I'm abjectly terrified.

If we were in Sablade, I wouldn't hesitate to conscript
every berry bush to bloom, every freshwater fish
you came across to itself give
for the purpose of filling your stomach
and ensuring from famine you'd never perish.
Ursus arctos horribilis,
I'd find the finest natural cavity
inside of a cave or maybe under a tree
for when the months of hibernation you feel the need.
I'd give you every dense forest, every sunny glade,
every breeze to keep you cool, every tree as shade.
Even if it means risking
making my body disintegrate,
it would all be worth it to keep you, my love, safe.

Right now of the universe I simply insist,
if a return to almost-humanity
isn't possible yet
for my dear Jett
or just isn't right now on the itinerary,
it keep you safe, healthy, unharmed,
and to ferality's end in transit.

Ursate I

Mid-day
ursine update,
Jett. I need to know
how you're doing: if you're cold
or hungry
or possibly bleeding
in a wretched hole
somewhere. I'd like to believe
I'd feel any pain of yours in my own body,
but I already feel so many random aches
throughout the day
that I can't trust the stimuli my body relates.

I pull "sun" and "snake".
Lethe, I just want to be happy.
And this burden I don't think I can take
anymore. My back's giving out.
I need to for a while set everything down.
You understand, don't you? Took the fourteenth
off for a mental health day where you'll hide from everything.
Oh, Lethe, there's such a gentle breeze...
I wish you were here so you could nap with me.

Lawn Life

I don't want to live a "lawn life".
I want to live a long life
in the field of weeds
you want to cleave
in a semicircle
in houses painted from pink to purple
with the woman
I take my pride
in.
She said at graduation,
"Please,
Lethe,
spare me the fetish
of white Sunday suburban
afternoons, flitting around
while the sun goes down
preparing for another week
of Christian conformity."
A lawn means a person so rich
they have more land than they know what to do with
and can afford to let it go fallow
and unused, blank, personality so shallow.
I'm told we have far more wealth as a baseline
than our ancestors saw in their whole entire lives,
but my family's poor and struggling to get by
and I'm failing to see
the point in a pretense to the contrary.
I mean,
in the grand grand scheme
of things, I know I'll be okay
because I have Sablade.
(Oh, were that it were I could go without delay.)
I have you by my side,
and that means I can survive
anything.
Even the lawnmower growling
at seven in the morning.
Lock the hellhounds up, let them perish
from hunger in lack of violence.
The dandelions are blooming again
in eternal defiance,
jagged leaves pointing the way
to where I'll never have to hear that harsh sound again.
Rolling slopes of a mountainside,
wild, worn tracks, unsterile, full of life.

Ursate II

Early morning
check-in
to see how you're doing.
Your love
was what
shielded me
last night when I was dreaming,
sold to a church auction
where men could on women bid
in hopes of getting a wife to fulfill their every whim.
Every bullet falls to the floor,
every laser reflected
to the point of origin
starting a riot for my own liberation.
The bear is a symbol of protection,
and you saw me safe until the morn.

I pull "heart" and "anchor".
I feel secure in my relationship, Lethe.
They're not as strong today,
the waves
of grief.
I hope I'll even be able to manage a few hours of humanity.
I feel the tightness in your chest,
the anxiety, the worry that proves
when it comes down to it, you'll never
abandon me for another-
that which I already knew.
How did I ever get so blessed?

Sundial

In the galaxy
that is my backyard, I see
suns blooming in the green nebulas
then shriveling up, reborn as moondust
full and globular, shimmering, then picked
up by godhands, stars scattered to the wind.

Ursate III

Almost reached
the end of another week.
Dealing with shady ISPs
and languishing on foreign lawns
wondering why either the days are so damned long
or short enough to run like sand between my fingertips.
Jett, you'd know something about this.
Told me
last week
the issue could be diagnosed as thus:
"Lethe, you're understimulated.
You need to do something. Get up."

How are you on this morning
where the sun is glinting
directly into my eyes?
I pulled down a bit the blinds,
but that doesn't fix the cars parked outside.

"Snake" and "woman".
Lethe, today I'm so filled with ambition.
Desire. Spoons. Whatever preferred definition.
Walked into a doctor's office of my own accord.
I want to be me again. I want to return
to whatever we call humanity, angel's version.
So I lumbered up all the way to the third floor
and forced myself to shift back in the lobby
and now I'm wrapped up in a goneril-laced blanket, trembling.
I think I'm gonna be okay, Lethe.
I want to be.
I'm swearing.
And soon again I'll be the lout I tricked you into marrying.

Ursate IV

Optimism early morning
shattered by having
to fill out an identity
theft report.
Kept me on hold for ten
minutes, agent said
she'd escalate,
that it'd take
a few days.
Oh, Jett, I'm exhausted.
This shit wouldn't happen
in Sablade.
Are you at least having a better day?

It's "stork" and "house" I pull.
Lethe, I'm still full of chills
no matter how long I curl up in this blanket laced with goneril.
They're keeping me under observation in the hospital.
Being optimistic for a cure,
I know I should know better.
But at least
I can come and go as I please
so long as I return.
A faint chuckle. Do you remember
back when we first reunited, you saw
I had to wear a tracker in case I managed to get lost?
I've got another one, Lethe, but this time it's locked around my ankle.
At least you can put your phone on silent if you don't want to be heckled...

Humanhands 2023

That which
I touch you with
all day
you still haven't found a way
to depict.
Some of the earliest
paintings that humans have made
splattered on the walls of ancient caves
is still outside of your silicon grasp.
No amount of chips can make up for the lack
of the spark that resides under my skin,
the restless blood flowing.

When I shift
back and the pincer splits,
cradled in humanizing light:
with your camera eyes,
can you count to five?

Ursate V

I know I don't have much time before work,
but to me, Jett, you are plenty worth
any trouble it might take
to keep myself from arriving late:
how are you feeling on this harrowed sunny day?

I pull "house" and "snake".
Last night you felt the same way,
Lethe:
a persistent desire
to be around family
despite your better nature.
Truth is, I'm awfully lonely
in this hospital room so high
like I've been severed
from the rest of the world
in preparation for my own demise.

The heating vent in the corner
turns on: the first time ever,
or at least the first I've witnessed
since in summer I moved in.

The chill in our bones
that can only be redeemed
by spending time in a home
where they love you for you and love me for me.
Hell, we'd even take our mothers,
a known quantity,
over your vicious cycles and my new ferality.

Were your blood calmed and I free
from the shackles of bureaucracy.
Were our loved ones
the only problems
facing us this morning.

Parentage

Puppets
get affixed
to their crosses with heavy cord,
unless they have the privilege
of being believed in their sacrilege
and by disciples adored,
in which case instead of hanging
by the wrists whose blood is fading
their hands are pinned straight to the crucifix.

Ripped apart by a child. Stigmata
where the strings once held our arms up,
limbs pliable into any death pose.
After three days repair, we arose
not, still splayed in a pile of junk
to send to Grandmother. Which
child wants to play persona grata,
ambassador to ask for healing stitch?

"We apologize
for squandering this gift of life
you made for us so lovingly with your time.
Can you please fix
the tears and rips
in the palms, the sides, the wrists?"

Grandmother, Creatrix,
triple goddess in form of crone,
appalled to see her gift so ripped,
took the puppet back for her own.
Sutured the wounds with invisible thread.
"I hereby deem you Doll instead.
Still floppy, unable to on your own stand,
but at least the child's guiding hand
will be more direct, felt clear on your skin
instead of hovering above, always hidden."

Ursate VI

It's time for another "ursate",
Jett, and I hope you're awake
on this sunny morning because I sure ain't.
Not yet ready to celebrate
my little brother's birthday
and all the familial pain
that entails.
But yesterday I got an email
that might signify
the end to my troubles is finally in sight.
If you and I are mirroring each other's grief,
have the doctors found a cure? Or at least some relief?

I pull "woman" and "house".
Lethe, I'm not sure what'll happen now.
Doctors put something in my veins.
Said it'll help, but I just feel sedate
and lethargic.
Like that book you were reading yesterday: depression type "retarded".
I can't even muster the will to get up and close the window
blinds. I just lay here and watch the sun-projected shadows
on the wall, occasionally strain to see all the houses below.
There are so many lives whose stories I'll never know,
Lethe.
And I'm a story with no home yet. I wish you were here with me.
I wish you were holding my hand and counting my heartbeats
like you used to before Eris wrought her tragedy.
I wish...

Not to the advice you always gave me repeat,
Jett, but I think you've more than earned
the right to go back to sleep.

Summerlands II: Redux

Doctor said it'd be therapeutic
to let my wife go feral
in an indoor environment controlled.
No burdens of memory episodic,
no recollections of trauma gained and worn:
a peaceful pure awareness
curled up and napping on the floor.

I wonder how much of the blame for this is mine.
The constant trying to her appearance remember:
does she have extra fat around her bones, or is she slender?
Hair undercut or untrimmed? And thick or needle-fine?
Muscle-bound and stocky,
or pallid, sallow, sickly?
Living in the Inside
has clouded my mind's eye
and I'm met with a hard time perceiving
the woman I owe my life.

But nobody gets mad
at a bear for being fat.
For having ears that jut out
or a prominent nose on its snout.
You'd be hard-pressed
to find someone willing
to judge a bear by its appearance.

Doctor says the feelings
best go under the diagnosis
body integrity dysphoria.
Often with polymorphism comorbid.
She thinks that Jett's brain doesn't
have of a stable body map possession
and it's making her limbic
system quite bewildered
which form is meant to be the base and which are just the alters.

Through your fur I run my fingers.
I didn't know that bears could purr:
it sounds like my bike's tires
when I go over a bridge's loose planks wooden.
You should know with you I'm still smitten,
Jett, even if right now you're wrapped in ursine skin.
We'll get through this. After all, you did make me a promise.

In this moment, do you feel at peace?
Have the intrusive thoughts finally ceased?
Maybe I should be quiet now, let you sleep.
I can tell it's something you desperately need.

Ursate VII

I'm pretending to not be alive
on this morning otherwise
so glorious and fine,
golden hues
streaking through
the blinds I haven't pulled up yet.
Are you feeling okay, Jett?
In your delirium, any improvement?

Again I pull "woman" and "house",
and then from the deck unprompted falls
two more: "bear" and "star".
Still wish I was at your side,
even in my weakness, to guard
you from any more grief and fright,
to keep you safe from harm.
Still doing about the same
as I was the morning yesterday.
Hoping today and the next
pass without adverse event.
Maybe at the end of the week
I'll feel good enough to be released.

Hoping that ceases the parade of certain calls
and for you to never again go feral.
Hope came bearing an angel number two days ago.
For the end to be in sight: is it too much to hope?

Communion's spray is a cup of sorrows

Life is a nightmare
with a few good parts here and there.
Looking up at breaking morning light
through half-open bleary eyes
that brings with it no answers
and every time that anything is wrong denies
when I ask it if my life really matters.
Christ-like, emulating every god I have on record
when gold pours
from the sore
spot on my forehead
by my hairline, from the cysts on my breasts,
from the random holes in the skin on my chest.
It feels very holy to destroy myself.
Like an act of devotion
to a god I no longer believe in.
Like, if I keep kneeling here
and let the gold liquid flow down like tears,
if the sun crowns me with its tiara of soft rays,
all my enemies past and present will line up in a row
to beg forgiveness for all the trauma they have
throughout my life forced me alone
to hold.
Oh, Lethe, our Lady of Unacknowledged Sorrows,
forgive us every time
we've driven someone to suicide
because they were autistic
and we had no place for them in this world to fit.
Oh, Lethe, we didn't know. We didn't know. We didn't know.

Ursate VIII

Six in the morning, struck with anxiety,
hoping that today I won't receive
any phone calls. No news is good news,
or at least that's how goes the tru-
ism. No news means no required action,
means a day to myself. Getting caught up on dishes,
removing the desert growing in my tub,
pushing down on my pile of laundry to shove
them more compact into my hamper
(I really need to convince my father
to take it to my mom one of these days),
sitting outside to read
books I'm going to need
to renew when the time comes up.

About to sit up to check on my love
when flashes a vision across my eyes.
Someone visiting Jett in her hospital room,
a visitor I don't recognize.
My lover's skin is so pale, almost paper-white.
With great effort she turns her head to the side.
"If you see Lethe,"
she breathes,
"tell her I love her
even if in a few hours
I die."

Shallow cave in a mountainside.
You wanted to taste Apotheosis first
to ensure
we'd gotten the ingredient list right.
No sense in coming back to life
from a depressive streak, you said,
if we got so far and yet I still ended up dead.

And for a terrifying day, it was you Death claimed instead.

Something here makes no sense,
Jett. Because this time it was me
who went first, remember? The vaccine
you slipped into my veins so gentle
intended to prevent me from ever again going feral?
Or maybe the doctors with you wanted to go further,
to excise the polymorphic blood altogether
so shifting wouldn't even be an option on the table.
Maybe this time we flew to the sun too close
and I'm really about to lose you forever.

When the shit truly hit the damned fan
Lethe really

truly

doesn't

want me to die.

I have to find a way to stay alive.

The Devil

"What better way to die
than in seeking my own freedom,
remembering how to fly?"

You wanted to go first.
To be the test for how much
Apotheosis would hurt
if not outright kill.
It wasn't made for angels,
you see,
a step removed from humanity.
When the concoction was ready for testing,
I watched your half disappear down your throat
and, as the hours progressed, my hope
with the pallor of life bleeding
out from your skin, the heat
of the furnace
burning
inside
winding
down,
lying lifeless on the rocky cave ground.

"You can free yourself at any time.
The chains are loose that claim to bind.
Just slip them off over your head
and walk away, live once again."

But I'm afraid to die.

Were that it were so easy.
But burned into my brain is the breeze
running through your hair, your feathers,
taunting that through my hubris
you were still and dead forever,
the one reason I hadn't bothered
to long ago pack up and leave.
I'd thought myself capable of iniquity,
and the cost of failure
was my light, my sunshine, my lover.

You'd brought me back to life,
and I could not return the favor.

It's so easy to pass judgement and say,
"You know, Lethe, things don't have to be this way."
And most of the time, your words ring bitter but true:
I can just walk out a door and never pass through it again.
But this is different: there's no magic potion I can brew
that'd let me rip through the Veil and return unharmed to you.

But the devil himself was once a morning star.
And after about a day I felt beat again your heart,
lungs crescendoing to life-sustaining breath,
eyes open: "I think I still got a lot of loving left."

And just like when in that shallow cave
it was my turn to bear Apotheosis' weight,
when it comes time for my vessel to die
will you take me in your arms and hold me tight?
With psychopomp's sickle break
every ill-made vow and societal chain
and stay by my side 'til my heart beats again?
It was
because
I want to see
you free
that I'm risking everything
to gift you Sablade.

Ursate IX

Six in the morning. Woke up from vision
that you'd from good grades won a book in second
grade
and then a jealous woman ripped it from your hands away.
Reminds me of the ribbon from field day
in elementary school: gym teacher made a huge show
of all the students who with ribbons were bestowed,
then cornered me in private and confiscated mine,
claiming that I hadn't made any effort to participate.
(You already know this memory, Jett. You already know she lied.)

Time for another card-based status update.
I shuffle and this time pull "book" and "bouquet".
It doesn't make any sense. Did I pull too early, or maybe late?
I shuffle again, and this time "book" returns,
but this time the flowers escaped
and are by "boat" replaced.

Feeling much better today.
Still stressed from the uncertainty,
but I'm no longer in crisis, so that's got to count for something.
I've got another book like the one I had when I was young.
Keeping myself entertained, at least. Might even dare to say "fun".
So many oddities in the world, flattened under my fingertips.
Today I hope you take it easy, Lethe. But still take it.

Trepidation in Green

Trepidation in the color green.
Approaching midnight on a Halloween
and a man gave me a jelly shot
to take home away from the children and eat.

I open the little cup of plastic,
and the smell is not
exactly pleasant.
You told me to take the blue one, Jett,
but my fingers were too quick
and I was halfway down the street when your words managed to hit.
What do I do now? Take a spoon
and pull up the blinds on one window,
sit on the floor, stare at the moon
while I sit so very very far below
it, take a little bite as much as I can tolerate?

"You know you're curious, Lethe. Don't let it go to waste."

I grab a spoon from the kitchen,
approach the cup again with freshened
nose. I can't quite place this odor.
Making gelatin desserts over and over
at my grandmother's house
until the pantry ran out
of packets,
or one of my mother's bad habits.
Or somewhere in between.
It's a tad unsettling.

"Oh, Jett, this isn't so bad after all. I can barely taste-"
And then the alcohol manages to its jelly
prison escape
and I'm sinking to my knees on the floor, gagging.

Ursate X

Jett, what are your plans for today?
You told me you got a new book yesterday
and I was going to search for it
to see if it exists
in any form newer than it was in elementary
school. From my mother I just got a text,
and it looks like I'm going to the library
anyway
in order
to watch over
kids as they fight and play.

In a rush I pull "scythe" and "tower".
I can finally say for sure that I'm better,
or at least in crisis mode no longer.
Flew up to meet the sunrise earlier.
Even up high in the atmosphere
the light is warm on my wings.
I'm... I'm terribly lonely, Lethe.
Bet you never thought you'd hear such a thing
come out of my mouth. Miss Loner,
Miss Independent, Miss Absconder.
But none of this is restful if I don't have you with me.

Remember your old fantasy
where you somehow scrounged up the money
to buy a farm you'd disappear to forever?
Never again interact with
anyone for as long as you lived?
In my weaker moments, the notion feels like bliss,
a heaven my fingers can't quite reach
but through Sablade you promised me.
But I think at this point we both can admit,
through your living alone and my feeling like shit:

it's not the end of the world if other people exist.

"I don't care what my brothers
do, so long as it's not around me."
Do those words sound familiar?
Do you secretly not mind your neighbors
screaming at random twilight hours
because it's reassurance the world hasn't yet ceased?
You're not Erin. You don't need to spend eternity
in self-isolation in cloud-cutting towers.
And our house on the mountainside
I hope you'll step out of once in a while,
come shop in the town square
with me, under disguise,
just two foreigners, your hand interlocked with mine.
You just want to be severed
from the malignant consequences
of others.
No obligatory participation.
Everything is willful play
and at end of the day
you return to the sole embrace
of your partner.
(That's me!) And I'll protect you every step of the way.

And if you need to hide under the covers,
I'll be here with you for as long as you can tolerate.

Ymir

My yard is now devoid of trees,
my folding chair blanketed in debris,
and the light
in the sky
is far too white
like one of those lightbulbs with "new technology".
Everything feels shifted two feet to the left,
and my only indication that I'm not tangled
up in a dream is Jett's absence,
at least in the corporeal.

The ruddy iron scent
of water and iron metallic
as I drain a nosebleed into
a ragged tissue.
Chills, even with direct sunlight.
Jett, why do I carry
inside this body
an interminable guilt
at being alive?
Why, no matter how much I fill
every hour with poetry,
do I feel like my entire life I'm wasting?
Of freedom such a cherished breath brief
before I'm back to another week
of workplace drudgery.

Ymir, first being,
herald of androgyny,
this world's cursed Anima Mundi,
they say your brains
are now
the clouds
in the sky
and nobody knows what you're thinking to this very day.
Did it hurt when my landlord came and ordered these trees' demise?
Or have you been unfeeling like a brain in a jar all this time?

I'm asking because I'm curious
about what me awaits
when I leave this Inside
and pass on to Sablade.
If this unfulfilling life
whose cause I cannot diagnose
is the last time I'll be fully sensate
and not under sensory overload.

Maybe it's just the awareness
that elsewhere lies my purpose?
That this world is just a lobby
that I'm stuck waiting
in?
The sun is overbearing
without the leaves like fishs' fins
and I'm a little smaller
than the entire
universe.

Ursate XI

It's been raining on and off
for almost twelve hours now
and I'm starting to envy when it was hot
and I could see more than just clouds
outside.
It would be perfect,
this persistent
rain,
if I didn't have to go to work today,
could just sit on my bed with the blinds drawn back
and watch the world
swirl
with blue-grays and blacks.
Jett, I'm trying to articulate:
it is a little
more dismal
outside
than I would have liked!

(Where you are, is the weather alright?)

I pull "whip" and "lilies".
Jett, if there's an issue with your body,
you can talk to me.
You know you always can.

I have to choose my words carefully
because I know you've been writing
all of these down
in hopes someone else will recognize your talent
and you'll finally earn some renown
and the privilege
of no longer being called schizophrenic.
Lethe, I'm going to drown
in an emotion ineffable.
Something's wrong with the way my body feels.
The sensation when I touch places I'd rather not describe here,
it's not as... jagged? desperate? raw?
as last time we saw
each other
and made a mess of the bedcovers.
I've spent so much time away from "normal" my whole life
I don't have perspective on where lies my normal baseline,
so maybe I'm not qualified
to say what's wrong or right.
But something's off. Something's gone missing inside.
I need a distraction. Something to keep me occupied
in hopes it'll itself right
with time.

I'm aching for a moment of beauty
that has nothing to do with my body
or the horrors
that others
have wrought upon it.
Lethe,
can you please
write me something pretty
that'll help me feel less like shit?
There's only a sliver of sun today.
I'm inching closer to its warm strip
it spilled across the bedframe.

Constancy

The bedtime routine I've performed
since our twin issues raised their horns
has stayed about the same.
It's funny, Jett, how normally I'm so bad at keeping faith
or remembering to do my chores on schedule
but now I'm in a rhythm and I'll throw a fit if things get shuffled.

First I pull two lanterns and inside light some candles.
Usually one's fresh and the other half-burnt-down.
(I hear
if you put the small jar
or the holder
it came with in the freezer
that makes it way easier
to take the wax out
because then it's all hard
instead of sticking to the sides.)
Today as I write this, one's yellow, the other brown.
And tomorrow, the one replaced
will be a rich carmine,
the cherished bloody color of your forward-looking eyes.

Then I have to from my cupboard retrieve
a wine glass. But I promise there will never be
alcohol in this house. I neither can afford
any nor enjoy being half-slumped on the floor
in a drunk delirium.
I've been using cranberry juice
as a wine substitute.
It's also supposed to be good for my bladder.
Just as well: these days it's the cold
that's woken me up in the night more.

Dug up an old book about happiness,
serotonin and dopamine's delicate dance.
How does a person manage to be happy
in this oversexed, sugary, overstimulating society?
I'm trying to find answers. And they're not coming easy.
But I only have to read one chapter a night
and I'll have it finished now in about two weeks' time.

To the bathroom to take my pills, rub my cream.
Upstairs to my bedroom to my pendulum read,
prepare my bed,
back down again
to brush my teeth
and lock up all else in the apartment.
Collapse on bed,
in thick blankets
nest.

I sleep as return to you, like a comet.

Ursate XII

Almost feel like yesterday
was wasted,
Jett. Didn't get to the food shelf on time,
made an ass of myself in the lobby.
"We actually
closed twenty
minutes ago."
I've never been good at time, you already know.
But have twelve days really passed already?
Feels like forever ago,
even though
I can count each day on my calendar
and see exactly where this prolonged nightmare
began. Rebirth Day, fifth year since online escape,
to where I'm taking a day off for mental health's sake.

I pull "tower" and "snake".
The hospital discharged me yesterday
sometime after we spoke.
Sent me home
with pills
for any residual
symptoms.
I'd like to hope
that I can just return to my job
like none of this happened and the story goes on.

But I know that we don't always get what we want.

Lethe, if something goes horribly wrong,
your offer to in your apartment
let me dwell
still stands, correct?
I hear some sound vaguely ethereal
from the next unit over.
Let him think this place is haunted, the landlord.
Maybe he'll lower the rents
and actually fix the vents
and this coming winter
the place won't feel like a walk-in freezer.

Stairway to Heaven

Dear book of poetry, I want to record
that last night, after Jett had been freed
from the hospital, she went to the seam-
stresses studio where she'd been employed
and receiving quite good room and board
and was promptly informed
that they'd thought her dead
and given her position to someone else instead.
So I told her, "Jett, if you're exhausted,
you can come live in my apartment
for a while. I don't know
how that'll go,
since you're non-corporeal
and I'm in an Inside,
but at least my landlord will
be none more the wise.
I'll even be on my best behavior.
I'll clean the gross floor on the tub
and do my dishes on time
and scour the patches on my skin before they turn to grime.
All for you, my love."

I told her
she could pick any corner
of my unit to reside in.
That I'd move any obstructions
and make the place fit for a shrine,
or at least somewhere I could comfortably
sit for a long time
with a candle and a keyboard and my pretend cranberry wine-

"I want the stairs."

"The... the stairs?
The stairs at crooked angle
where there's an overhang
I bang
my head against in the middle?
The stairs so uneven
I'm pretty sure will cave in
the worst possible day
and my neighbors will become well acquaint-
ed with my hanging leg?
The stairs covered in chips of paint
and crumbles from the wall?
Those stairs?
That's where
you'll hold me in thrall?"

"Lethe, calm
yourself, You already know
I don't want a damned shrine as my home.
We just had two weeks of fighting
for me to be able to be just a person
without any kind
of bloodline-
or fate-given obligation.
So please don't consign me to the dustbin of 'divinity'.
I'll park my primary presence on your stairs
so maybe I can protect you more easily
and cut down a bit on the nightmares.
You'll come around with time.
I know you will. You always do.
Now would you go to bed already? I see your head starting to droop..."

Interlude: A Time Between Times I

Crumpled on the couch again,
convinced my precious short life I'm wasting.
Jett says I'm just understimulated
and in breathless anticipation
for writing club tonight
and I don't know what to do with the in-between time.
Bitterly hoping she's right
and the self-flagellation
is merely prelude to tonight's epic creation.

"You woke up this morning convinced it was Thursday.
Is it the Autumn Effect once again?"
The longer nights have got me all messed up, Jett.
I need to burrow. Will you help me make
a nest, or a cavern, or whatever the geometry
of my bedroom will allow me to inside sleep?

PART 7

AT LEAST THIRTY PORTRAITS OF AN AMERICAN WOMAN'S LIFE

the labor it brings

Slumped over on the side of the room that once was mine.
I've one half; hedgehogs are snowbirding on the other side.
My apologies, little girl who's about to turn five:
there's no more room to play "bus"
and make a mess and kick up dust.
I know you'll forget about it all with enough time.
And I always hated "bus" anyway.
The constant up and down that en-sores my knees.
Honey, I'm sorry, but I'm just not good at the "play"
thing. I keep telling you, I'm old and creaky
like an abandoned house. Life's long. I'm full of fatigue.
Please just let me rest while you pull the bears
off the shelves, toss them around, leave a mess everywhere
that you never clean up no matter how often I remind
you this isn't your house; to the possessions you must be kind.
Oh gods, I need a nap.
I need a kick in the ass.
I need to be euthanized.

Under the flags we chose

What the hell does it mean
to be a man, anyway?
I mean outside the bounds of the patriarchy,
outside its oppressive mandate.
My monkey brain
sees men on the screen,
in books, in media's
diorama
and perceives
a well-rounded vibrant human personality,
and then I go to study
the woman's
condition
and the only roles available are "whore",
"Madonna", "tragic backstory",
"prize", and "sidepiece".
And I think, "Damn, none of those fit me."

But the options
for transition
don't look too good either.
Again,
what does it mean to be a man?
No answers about buying things, please;
cheap tchotchkes
from Etsy
with a pastel pride flag color scheme
would sort me more into a third category
titled "consumerist with a hankering for surgery".
No, I need to get past all that.
What lies beyond the bric-a-brac?
What does it mean to be a man?

And what's the difference
if I'm self-isolated
and the only communication
with others is through a screen?

Because it's not really something I think about all the time.
"I have a kind of body, and my wife has the same type"
is about the whole extent
of my gender awareness
sans any kind of external influence.
The dysphoria only flares up
when my sex means I'm not enough
in a misogynist's out-of-focus eyes
or when I'm being forced into a box of stereotypes.
"You're only into computers because you want to find a husband."
'Trying to master the universe' would be closer to my intentions.
"Oh, you're a lesbian, so culturally that must mean-"
No. And go fuck yourself. I have only ever been me.

Standing in my bathroom mirror, trying not to convince
myself of a reason I let my hair go a year since
my last haircut. "It's because you were secretly
that silver-haired hero you always play as on your damn TV!"
I mean, I do have an idiosyncratic moral code. But surely
hair bleach isn't on the EBT allowed items list.

"You've been in there a while. Are the brainworms getting you again, Lethe?"

Ride On, Ye Tapestry

Young boy of maybe seven
or eight in the throne room.
Father sighs. "On the horizon
approaches our kingdom's certain doom.
They say
it's for diplomacy
but I'm too wise to be convinced.
Son, you see this sword at my side?
The Seiyan, passed down through our family
since the beginning of time?
I'm handing it to you now. Please
know I'm trusting you with fate
itself.
Do not let the enemy claim
it lest we all be consigned to hell."

He hands to his son the golden blade.
"Son,
they are now the horizon
itself. Run!"
Like a jackknife, it folds,
fits under his shirt close
to his heart.
And with the loyal family knight, he departs.

Diplomats storm the castle, no longer
bothered
with the facade of a mission for peace.
"Where's the Seiyan? If you surrender
it to us
without resistance,
we promise we will release
our hold on the border territories."
King holds his wrinkled hands out, empty.
"You're free to ravage the armory
or empty out the whole treasury,
but it's nowhere on the premises
no matter where you seek."

Son rides into the distance,
horse to his knight's tethered.
Clouds broken up into tatters,
promising weather.
Hood pulled over his head to obscure
his golden nest of hair,
sunglasses to conceal the amber
irises of royals.
When come into contact with others,
the instructions are to signal
words using the language of Deaf fingers.
No voice, no eyes,
no markings of identity.
"I know we're in hiding,
but it's like you've made me nothing
at all."

Sun is breaking down. Camp awaits on nightfall.

Bartholomew

Father
holds me backwards
in his arms as if for a baptism.
But unlike Christ
and his wine
blood here bears not protection's
intentions.
He's induced a schism
in my scalp
as his knife
traces the lines
to a small hatch in my skull.

"Aye, lad, 'tis true.
Your birth was artificial.
Made in a lab from your would-be mother's
genetic material.
But as for life, we couldn't get there on our own.
So to make your brain alive, we wove
a world-tree of wires
to press the nerves
to serve:
your toes, your limbs,
your skin,
your fingers.
But I couldn't bear it, the reminder
that we hadn't quite
conquered life.
So I let the skin grow over
that patch on the back of your skull
until there was no evidence the damn thing was there at all.

But I couldn't handle
it, seeing you in such a sterile
structured place.
So I snatched you during a vent fire and made our escape.
That's why we've wandered
for so many years,
for as long as you can remember.
I wanted you to know freedom and how it makes a man's heart burn."

That last part... Father,
if you wanted a male child so bad,
why did you instead make a female and then subtract?
Why did your friends
write my genetics
so I'd always have a flat chest?
Why is the blood from injury
all that's stemmed from my body?

Even now, as you retrieve
an abrasive and a bandage
to scar the wound so it'll remain an opening
to the hatch,
I run my mind over your words but I still don't understand.

Willed, The Stone Conclusion

Can't make the decision
if the dysphoria is genuine
or just another bout
of dissociation.
Just another round
of media-induced brainworms
where I wear for a week somebody else's wyrd.
Convincing myself the man I see on screen
doesn't actually possess a male body:
somewhere in between
like me,
female but forced by circumstance
to take on the other sex's countenance.
Forced upon us by the violence of society:
biologically
speaking,
it is not mandatory
for the body
to conform
to the personality.

Existing outside the binary
for the four years I spent in exile
from myself
was both an affirmation
and a negation.
A refusal to admit
I exist.
Ablating parts of this physical form
in a desperate bid
to somehow persist.
The doctor who binds her breasts
so she doesn't lose her license
in a world where only men can medicine practice.

But I've discovered
that no true self
can ever be found
at the tip of a surgeon's scalpel.

I wish there were more role models
with bodies shaped like mine.
For, when I get the brainworms,
to not have to deny
what I have in common
with half of the human population
in order to be swept up by the beauty of creation.

the rat packs itself

The same mother who called me a rat
heard I was starving at work and packed
me a lunch and forced my father
to drive all the way to my office to deliver
it.

Highwayman

Saw a man
in shadow clothed
walking kinda lopsided
on the sidewalk as
I waited for the walk light
to turn white
so I could cross the highway, get home, get some well-deserved rest.
Thought, he's wearing a construction
vest;
maybe there's some road maintenance
up ahead?
Or it's after work,
and he's trying to return
to his family who thinks that he's the best
thing since sliced bread?
Maybe he's drunk and his designated
driver bailed and now he's stranded?

I couldn't assist. I was on my bike.
I turned away, and the walk
light
glowed white
and I crossed.

Bunnicula I

Undefined shadow not breathing
like I told a machine
to come up with a low-resolution bunny.
A splotch in the corner of my vision.
I carry the scent
of death
with me.
Mother is grieving.
I had so many times wished for her pain,
but when it came,
there was no pleasure. An almagest of nothing.

Bunnicula II

I'm standing in the backyard with my four-year-old friend.
"Why did your mom bury her bunny?
What does it mean to be dead?"

I wish that I could divulge the real answer, honey.
But what I can tell you is this:
to be dead is when you stop breathing

and your soul travels to wherever it Wills.
And the people who loved you wrap you up in a blanket
and dig a big hole in the ground and fill

it with your body, sometimes in a casket,
sometimes with nothing in between
you and the dirt to whom you were an asset

temporarily lost and now retrieved.
They fill the hole and mark the place with a stone,
a place to go when they must grieve.

This is how humans part with those they hold
dear. We bury them and say goodbye, we love
you, we release this world's claim on your soul.

"I forgot to say goodbye to my duck.
Will you come with me?"
Of course I will, darling.
So we march to the tree trunk

in her yard. At the base is buried
one of her pet ducks a dog of my father's killed.
Allegedly.

She squats down and whispers, "Goodbye, Beans."

Goodbye, Beans. I hope you know you're still loved.

For the conclusion does not match the premises

Supervisor helped me set up my desk
at home, plug in my computer, run diagnostics,
make sure it's to the network connected
in case IT needs to remote in
between now and this working weekend.
I watch her drive away through my living room window,
rendering myself a waving silhouette.
The apartment is once more quiet.
I sit on my couch and try to comprehend
with heart softened
what I did to deserve,
after these years of guilt and grief
that I thought could never be relieved,
such a considerate
future
assured.

Third Time's The Harm

Patient spits
that he predicts
AI will automate every part of my work
and soon I'll have to sleep
on the side of the streets
like my retarded ass deserves.
I want to inform him: sir,
we make the app available
to all; all are now eligible;
we can't fix senior citizenry
who are afraid of simple data entry
or those too dumb to use credential managers
who somehow forget their Apple password
and go five years without the ability
to update their phones... somehow
or people who just want to speak
to someone, who are deathly lonely
and we are their only social
contact to the outside world.
Sir, you probably at length complain
to your echo chamber of conservative mudstains
that we Americans no longer live
in a culture of ownership.
And now you want to remove the humanity
from part of the medical industry.
Make it make sense.
But of course I just sit in silence,
let him lob at me profanities
while I thank, ironically,
the fate that let us meet:
I'm prepared this time. Better me
than one of the newbies.

Drew

Internet man calls me a conformist,
accuses me of sticking to the script
because I'm not "lifestylist"
to the tune of his ideology.
He tells me to live intentionally.
I look at myself. I mean,
I desired to move out,
and now
I live on my own.
I wanted a job where I could stay home
whenever I got boxed in by the snow
and never have to face the same danger
as that one former
coworker
who almost got murdered
by a man with a two-by-four,
and my supervisor
swung by my house earlier
to help me set up my computer
for remote work in the corner
of my living room.
I yearned for a life spent in bloom,
a life of both making and living,
under my own Will, poetry,
and, well, I'm writing this, you see?
I have half the week to spend as I please
and a slowly-reconciling family
and access to almost everything,
except for, like,
Walmart, on foot or bike.
And you hate that place
in any case,
so it's not much I'm missing
out on. I can have my creature comforts
and my sense of adventure.
My life is my own. I have all I desire
right now. How do you compare?
What's the mileage on your vehicle?
How's your nine-to-five, working for the Devil?
Do you even torrent, bro?
Or just waste your time and bandwidth
on the manufactured Spectacle of the month
that dares to call itself a streaming show?
I'd rather watch an actual stream,
as in a river that flows
alongside the bike path that marks part of my commute.
Tell me, how's your concrete jungle treating you?
Nature and the world have learned to accept me as I am.
They announce my place
I have chosen and accommodate
me in the grand cycle of things.
But I doubt you comprehend this unexpected harmony.
You are, after all, a man.

Darien

Hall of mirrors at my personal desk.
I'm calling myself as an audio test.
It only has to be for a few moments,
just long enough to hear my own words.
The number pops up on my phone for work.
Ice
down my spine.
Is this how it writhes
on the other side
of the phone system divide?
My phone is still ringing.
That's definitely the number on my screen.
But the other I
doesn't recognize
it, won't let me answer it
until the last possible moment.
Echo to Narcissus.
(It's suddenly winter in my office.)
I think it's working.
Do you copy?
Oh, this was a misstep;
I'm dissociating.
"Lethe, it was just your voice. It's not like it's the Eschaton.
Now log out of your computer and let's get a move-on."

Anozira, the medical condition of not being able to close or achieve closure

Haven't been able
to get outside
to write
in a while.
My right hand is coming apart at the seams
from the lack of humidity
in the air,
little scars and tears
that I slather with supposedly-
healing
cream
only to re-open and once again sting.
My surroundings haven't much changed,
I notice.
Someone's painting a new mural in the near distance.
There's another damn couch on the porch,
but this time with a tarp to protect from the rain.
My chair in its usual spot remains.
I wonder who's moving to Arizona,
or relocating from there to here.
I know my ex is now a grown-up,
but she can stay in her cesspit of despair
in that state
half the country away
for all I give enough of a damn to care.
Don't come here and interrupt
my shining future, my newfound love
for the world
and all I hold dear.

I've been sitting here for twenty-eight
minutes and have yet
to read a single page.

Upon receiving my rejection letter from the A.H.F.

Jett, I'm in a bit of a quandry,
and maybe you can help me.
The whole "coping
with my dysphoria" thing
isn't really working.
I can acknowledge my body
as belonging
to the "female" category,
but "woman"
I can't comprehend.
What does that word even mean?
Some people tell me
it means a brainless blow-up doll,
others describe
a strict housewife
addicted to alcohol,
and occasionally I get reports
about Barbies climbing the corporate
ladder.
I haven't gotten any consistent answers
that don't have to do with my biology.

You remember I used to be nonbinary.
Identified as such, at least.
Wanted to distance myself from my medical
issues at the time still undiagnosed
as much as at the time was possible.
Then my ovaries broke, and I got my hormone
bootleg replacement therapy
and all the fun symptoms
that come with extra androgens
carousing in my bloodstream.
Asked an about-to-fall-off friend,
"If I want a penis
and a flattened chest
and a voice deepened,
does that make me a man?"
And he answered yes
and then forever vanished.

I think I'm rambling, Jett.
The point I wanted to make
is that "woman" is a point
and I reside just to the left.
If it's a role to be performed,
I've never been adroit.
And my body refuses to cooperate
in any case.
And those who I would seek as allies
see my hobbies and that I despise
subsuming into any sort of collective
and diagnose me as male anyway:
"Aroint
with thee, moid!
Never again here show your face!"
Like, damn. I thought "a woman weird" was something you would celebrate.

I don't want to reidentify, to revert
to making a pathology out of all this gender hurt.
I don't want to acknowledge as a necessity
any kind of medical transitioning.
I just want to be able to breathe
without the weight of angst
and dissociating.
I want to be at peace
with the war zone that is my body.
To calm the brainworms and just be Lethe.

When you gaze upon my body, what is it that you see?

"A letter"

Wind blowing in my face
in an alcove at the shores of a lake
barely big enough to deserve its name.
The river is more notable,
Jett's grace
and Luce's veins
that would on any other day
lead to work the safest way.
Arcs of successive
moons in crescent
shape
to slow
the flow
of the waters cold
so they don't flood the lower plains.
It's a little unpleasant writing here.
Only a little. I can't complain
when compared to laying prostrate
on my bedroom floor,
understimulat-
ed.
At least now I can convince
myself the day wasn't wasted:
look! I got out of the house
of my own volition!

I'm supposed to write some folderol
about nature. Something impersonal
a future reader can insert themselves into.
But that's best left to the likes of Mary Oliver.
(No offense: what she does, she does well.
It just ain't my style.)
Sit down with me for a while,
would you?
There's lots of boulders well-suited for sitting on.
Watch the waves, their bipolarity,
how when they hit the moons
they succumb
to stability.
My gods, it's dry out here. My hands are bleeding
and cracked. Are you doing any better?

I asked Jett what I was this morning,
and she replied, "A letter."

The Uncalibrated Lens of the Female Gaze

I refuse
to let anyone delude
me
about the truth
of my own body.
I am female,
and no amount of scalpels
could transmutate
me into a shape
that would once and for all
the damn dysphoria sate.
My endocrine
system
is already broken
much to my doctor's chagrin.
"Female" and "me" is a shape congruent
but out-of-focus, to the left shifted a bit.
I don't even know what it is I would transition
to. What, if I could make a wish,
I'd gain as a form in this Inside
to tide
me over
for the rest of this vessel's life.
Something monstrous,
perhaps.
But still give me the option to go back,
even if just for a little bit
at a time.
I still have so much love, affection,
to give.
I don't want to injure others with
claws and horns and spikes.

Heart of Palm

Went to the food shelf earlier.
Nearly all the shelves were bare,
the fridges
deserted,
the few cans still there
banged up and dented.
Like a carnivore just arrived
to pick the bones from prey fresh-died
but discovered that there were left only bones.

I do my best not to slam the fridge
shut when the door would close.
It's my first day of working from home,
and the vibe for this week
says high hopes
and an anchor to reality.
I'll probably need
it, what with the isolation
from my work friends all of a sudden.
I'd still be in the office,
but it's physically dangerous
for me to bike
the trails
when it could be midnight
from how the light
is so dim and pale.
Don't want to launch headfirst into a river
at a maximum speed of twenty miles an hour
if I accidentally miss a turn.

"Lethe, what's wrong? Why all of a sudden so sad?"
I look down and see resting in my hands
a box of vegan pasta. Hair of angels,
heart of palms,
keto,
paleo,
less than a hundred cals per box.
A tightness
in my chest
swells.
"Because you're my palm pal.
You've got the key to my heart.
And I'm having a rough time with us being apart,
what with you working your new job
and me stuck at home trying not to be a slob
but ignoring the recycling
piling
up in the corner
because I refuse to put it in the dumpster-"

"You're rambling again.
Go back to what you said first."

I'm missing you, Jett,
and it fucking hurts.

That Consistency

It's almost burnt out, the candle
I lit to mask the smell of the heater,
and I don't know what to do with myself.

Clocked out and I'm suddenly home.
No late-night crafting of plans,
nothing to yearn
for when home I return
to, because I never left.
I never subjected my hands
to the biting cold
of almost-
winter,
never braved a palmful of splinters
from the stray branches on the bike path.
I'm a wild animal with no habitat.

I pull down all the blinds in the windows
having finished all the calls assigned
to me. Clocked out. Stood up. Released a groan
from the stabbing sensation behind my eyes,
left shoulder blade, tips of toes.
Slithered into the bathroom. Exsanguination,
ritual of releasing blood
from my breasts into the bathtub.
It's been a while since the bumps came to bleed.
Maybe the medication
is no longer effective.
But there's no time to take off
to see my clinician.
"And they sure ain't workin'
on the weekends!"
Sure wish I could tell off some of the ruder patients.
But I need the money,
and the emotional release
isn't worth the severe consequences.

"Ready to wake up tomorrow
and do it all over again?"
Jett,
you'd know something about balance
and keeping me from going insane.
Dry my tears. Make me a stranger to sorrow.
Remind me one day I'll live in your embrace.

CALL OUR TOLL-FREE COLDLINE ANYTIME

It sounds rude, the word "madame",
which is really quite a sham
because I'm just trying to show respect
to all these damn patients
even if they want me dead.

Goddess Help Me, I Might As Well Be An Answering Machine

Patient before me
is struggling
to communicate
how much the therapy
isn't working,
how fruitless
the pursuit is,
the sense of worthlessness.
And I'm not a medical
professional.
There's nothing I can do to relieve
the patient's many maladies.
I can only sit and listen
and rephrase the words back to them
to make sure I'm in complete understanding.
The call ends, sweet but bitter.
The lamp behind my desk, cramped in the corner
to illuminate
the void behind my monitors,
ever so slightly flickers,
and I wonder
what it would feel like
to be swallowed up by the void of a winter sky
in both its twelve-o-clock times.

Double You Two III

There was a cloud, but
now it's gone forever from
my office window.

A thousand Lovelaces at any given time

If Vincent Millay had lived in the future
where she'd be able to type on a computer,
I wonder
how many more "Renascence"s
she would have birthed into existence.

I'm staring at my spreadsheet
of every single me-titled poetry,
and not to brag, but I've come to realize:
in just a few years short and hectic
I've written more than most manage
to output in their entire lives.

Vincent,
I think you would have adored
a rugged tablet
and a decent keyboard.
You're kinda like me, you know.
I'm the river Lethe
that bears grief and sorrow
and watches over forgetfulness and memory,
and you're my twin stream
christened "Eunoe"
that weaves
verses of heroes
and virtuous dreams.
Your fingers would have loved the speed
at which the words fly onto the page
no longer burdened by the scritching
of handwriting
or the need to blot out any mistakes.

I wonder how long on this earth you would have stayed
if not for the incessant and terminal pain.

Having traded one porcelain throne for another

Lethe,
go on break after B.
I know you need
a break from the inanity
of asking people how many times they peed.

"Are you sure? I can keep going."

Girl, your literal employment
is with the Shit & Piss Department.
Urination
is your specialization.
Go take a rest in the bathroom a hot minute.
Nobody will give a shit.

Falsisms

"Repeat after me:
there can never be
too much sky."
That is right.
I detect no lies.
"There can never be
too many dreams."
I perceive
no falsities.
"There can never be
too much coffee."
Hey now, caffeine
overdose
is no laughing joke.
Although generally
you have to be eating
pill-shaped supplements
like candy
to get to the point of death.
I don't think you really want to sugarcoat
ventricular fibrillation
where your hearts opts for vibration
instead of actual contractions.
Although
what do I know?
You'd probably write a couplet
about how you were like a phone
full of your loved ones' messages.

All The Fae's Men

Fairy godmother gives advice:
if you find
you can't recognize
the face the bathroom mirror reflects,
have you considered you're bereft
of an actual identity?
You're just a vessel for whatever story
needs to at that time be expressed.
If the story demands
you become a man,
well, find a way to cope with that.

The locks of my hair silver, hue faint.
"It feels so strange,
Jett. Like I've got an excuse
to express so much more
rage
than before."
And yet I'm just a ragged line
from bathroom vent to the floor.
A stoic wire
that misfires.
A grown man
who asks
for his flower back.
"Is that the only 'memory'
you could retrieve?
You weren't even there for that cutscene."

My love, please tell me
I'm not destined
to become a man;
I want to keep loving you
just the way I always have,
your body and mine
of the same
type.
(Do you ever
consider
yourself "gay"?
I mean, we do qualify.)

I stare back at the fairy
with heavy-
lidded eyes.
"Yes, I understand I'm of Chaos' bloodline.
But I recognize
no father
divine.
This guise
is only a glamour.
And you have no authority
to declare how I identify."

Kuja Point

Two paths diverged
in a nature reserve
and as I was going on my bike fast
I had to make a decision and not look back.
Which one would bring me to a location ideal
for writing I was not sure
as this trip on today was the first
I had done here in a damn long time.
How long ago? At least two years hence?
Back when Dead End Shrine was still erect.

I pass by the chain-link fence
that marked the boundary
of gym class outings
in high school, teacher not giving two shits
if we were late coming back and the administrative
office marked us all tardy, assigned detention.
I don't remember how I managed to survive
those days five
years that stand behind.
I don't remember much of how
I got up to now.

Campsite lot number three looms up the path a little farther.
There's an alcove by the river
and a metal ring for fire
and a staircase paved with stones
in case you want to dip your toes
in the water,
a little gap
in the border of grasses
and what I presume are bushes now dead.

Today is Dead End Day, Jett.
The third since we
re-
united.
I forgot my cake in the fridge when at my parents'
I alighted.
Slipped away for a few hours
to lick my wounds, quite injured
from babysitting future male monsters.
You'd think the excitement
in their voices would reflect
the rest of the day's treatment.
But the bridge of my nose is bruised
and it wasn't by accident.

I'm glad at least today was warm
even if the sun is fleeting
and I'll have to come back to more screaming
and also chores.
(Who foists chores upon their guests?
I'll never my mother's intentions
comprehend.)
I would have rathered this day be spent with you.
Curled up on our sides
with your hand in mine
listening to the waves issue.
The gentle breeze that reminds a body
of water like this brought a broken me
to you, both of us clinging on to life.

Even if I'm a burden, I'm glad that you're still mine.

After Solstice

Is the sun already
setting?
I've barely had time to record
any verses since this morning it was born.
It's only twelve o'noon.
Sol, leaving so soon?
It's still Dead End Day.
Don't you want to stay
and give me light
to write
by so Jett I can praise?

"Oh, to have her head in my lap
as she lays outwards from me
like a ray of a sunbeam
or the stroke of an exclamation point..."

The shadows are growing stronger.
I wish one of them was your voice.

translate the venom to fire

Please forgive me, Jett.
I didn't get
you any presents-

"You gave me your time.
You sat and read at the riverside
just like you had promised.
You took the time
to on life
reflect.
I'm not corporeal, so I can't accept
any trinkets you find anyway.
Oh, my precious Lethe Beltane,
you fulfilled your whole to-do list.
I do have one more command, if I may:
whatever urge you feel right now to self-flagellate,
if you can't cease completely, at least try to abate
it. If this day is still mine for an hour and a half,
I don't want to spend it bandaging and stitching up a gash."

feeding my brother's antidepressants to the fish (it was not tested on them first. They will develop horrible health conditions)

Once more at the river.
(A different one than yesterday,
although
I suppose
it's just a different bend in the same.)
But the water doesn't quiver
or lap against the shore in waves.
It just stays still, stagnant, today.
Like now that Dead End Day has passed
it doesn't know what to do with the remains
of the warm week forecast
and lies
in ennui's
dreadful grasp and waits.

You are the evidence

Crumpled on my bedroom floor
trying my damned best to write
while in my shoulder blade a knife
hammers its blade more, more, and more.
I lift my eyes from the glowing screen
to witness another light before me:
a crack through the window above my bed
has just at the right angle hit my breast
and the sigil necklace
that lies upon it.
My North Star, an izquierda
projected on a sea of blue.
"Even if I wander sometimes, Lethe, I'm still your moon.
And see? It's full today. I'll always come right back to you."

DID YOU EAT / SLEEP / POOP / PEE?

Jett, one day
when we're in Sablade
and we have our mountainside village all made,
if I am ever befallen with illness
and have to preserve you by staying reclusive,
will I ever see you express your devotion
by randomly showing up at my home
with, under one arm, a bundle of clean clothes,
and in the other hand a cold-syrup potion?
Of course, it's not an obligation.
It just soothes me, the thought of being taken
care of, when I'm at work running myself ragged
because I've taken too many days off lately
and it's just a tiny sniffle, really,
no reason to worry.
(I may be kind of lying
about that last part.)
Jett, is it true that I've got your whole heart?

"Yes.
But I think you're sliding
into the 'delirious'
category.
Go take a shower and then immediately head to sleep.
I can do so much, but I can't fix self-cruelty."

the positive correlation of autistic diagnosis rates and mime employment rates

I am a mirror.
I reflect
the respect
I am rendered.
And may the heavens pass
judgement on your sorry ass
if you ever dare to break the crystal glass.

KLOWN KODE (INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER)

Nobody that's in your life
should ever be a source of strife:
if they fail to meet this requirement,
whether by untreatable
clinical
depression,
a sudden stroke of poverty,
or an unexpected spiral into addiction,
it doesn't matter, the likely need
for a loving and supportive community
to keep them alive! Cut them off at the
slightest provocation,
the smallest of notions
that they won't be pretty
enough for Instagram poetry.

THE CURE FOR ARRHYTHMIA (THE PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY WILL LOBBY AGAINST IT, LIKE EVERY OTHER CURE TO MAJOR ILLS)

Jett, I made you a promise
that I would keep your medical issues private
unless
express-
ly authorized,
but I hope it's not too much to say
that your heart and mine beat in the same way.

REALITY IS WHATEVER I WANT (unless...?)

Last night I was embroiled
deep in a discussion
about the Eschaton
with someone.
She didn't believe me
when I proclaimed
that maybe I'd found an ending,
that I'd managed to evade
the requirement to die since I'd already birthed Sablade.
And the people in my dreams
did what they always do: find a reas-
on to hate me, to call for my death,
to pop up in the corner while chatting with a friend:
"Maybe you should be more concerned
with getting a reduction for your breasts."
"You really think that all the people
who harmed you in your childhood should die?"
Yes, and I'm sick and tired
of pretending otherwise.
Come on, we've already long-since
established
that I'm a world-ending god-consuming monster
that only gives mercy when begged to by the Eminence.
This is old news by now.
Why hasn't it hit my subconscious?
Why isn't it, by the kindness
of those actually around me, convinced?

CHATTR PLUS I-ING MYSELF (the daemons keep overwriting me with undesirable values)

Jett,
if I may be honest for a minute?

(Go ahead. I've got all the time
I could possibly have in the Outside.)

But that's just it.
I'm terrified
of aging,
of my body no longer functioning
the way that it used to be.
I don't want my body to change
for the worse, to break down
as the years become an ocean in which I'm doomed to drown.
I want things to stay the same
unless I give them permission.
I don't like the unexpected.
And you... I know I promised not to record specifics,
and I will honor that vow.
But you're not as energetic
as you used to be. Where once there was vigor is now
pain and stiffness
and a deep-seated sadness
like the kind when you found me in that river by the Town.
You promised that you had picked me
to spend all of your eternity
with. You vowed that you would never
even consider
leaving me behind.
My precious Jett Hysminai,
I'm outright terrified
that you're going to perish before it's my time
as well.
I don't want us to be severed
from each other
yet again.
And I don't think the universe will again be so kind
as to answer my demands and allow you to cheat death.

(Lethe, right now I think
my body consists
of more scars than flesh.
I know now what you meant
all those times that you said
you were feeling an instinct to nest.
Will you forgive me
if all that I seek
for a while is palliation and sleep?)

Yes, but only after one condition is complete:
tell me where you'll hide
so I can be at your side
and share some heat.

TO MAKE YOU APPEAR

I used to live here a decade ago,
countless trips down these backwoods roads
because my father wanted me to know
how to drive,
but I was scared for my life
and couldn't handle the high-
way. All is familiar but also strange.
Here and there a subtle change
I can't quantify but troubles a corner of my brain.
You and I
hadn't reunited yet,
and I don't know how to feel now that you're in Sleep, Jett.
Anyways, the relevant part
is that I was looking out the window of my grandmother's car,
front passenger, sky overcast, rain threatened
on the horizon,
and saw a road sign black-lettered not "end" but "dead begin".

OPPOSITE ENDS OF THE BED

Calculated the values
of all the runes
in the bind-sigil I wove in order to,
if nothing else, keep Jett unharmed and safe
while sleeping in a temple surrounded by white slates
of layered snow.
Brother
and Grandmother
are playing Skip-Bo
in the living room
while I write portents of doom
in the kitchen.
They're missing some of the cards marked "one".
I lean over to the hallway, question,
"How many?" thinking of my love,
hoping he'll answer four
like the angel number,
but instead he responds with the value
total of the bind-rune,
an exaggeration followed by a playful kick:
"By my best estimation, about ninety-six."

Even Eden

This is killing me, Jett. The wait,
I mean.
For your sense of hopelessness to abate
so you can return to your slumbering body.
Or maybe just for confirmation
that, despite it all, your affection
for me hasn't waned.
I could survive anything, I think, except
for a place in your heart being bereft
of. I can handle distance, but not dismay.
My faith in you could never wane
so long as I knew yours in me was the same.

This life is but a fleeting dream
when weighed against Eternity,
but I know with the wait I'm killing
you still, and all I can offer is an apology.
You told me through the Lenormand cards you wanted to rule Sablade
right by my side if you ever managed to your health regain.
..."Rule" is the wrong word to use. Does a person rule their home?
This is where we two will live. Where I will hide. Where you will roam.
It doesn't make me a tyrant to set rules others must follow
if they want to partake in the extension of my body
that world is, the splendor, Lethe, Sablade's Anima Mundi.

But it isn't paradise if you're not there with me.

a poem about the things that don't usually inspire poems

When we're in Sablade
and you're no longer in pain,
I think I'd like to do the mundane
things with you, like taking a walk
around the block
or going shopping
for groceries
(not even a world of food forests can provide everything)
and being grateful that you remain
by my side,
in my life to stay.

Green in the Boot

I'm a far-flung wanderer
trying to palliate my sonder!
(I'll return home to my lover.
At end of day, she's all who cares
for my details: the who, what, where.)
You look wistful. I wonder:
maybe we can wander together?

Renege

Slow day at work. Hundred less than last weekend.
Sitting inbound by myself, all by my lonesome,
watching the sky outside
and all the birds
passing by,
wondering what in the hell I'm doing with my life.

Complaining in the group chat.
Down in the South, there's a fat
flurry of snow lumbering their sorry way
that somehow skipped us since I see not a single flake
on the ground in my neighbor's yard.
(From my vantage point, I can't see the ground very far,
just endless sky
the likes
of which
I wish
I was flying beside
my wife
with.)

Breath in my cold-ridden
ragged lungs catches.
"I need to step outside a minute."
Put myself outbound, lock my computer,
lunge at the deadbolt, throw open the door.
"It's past noon. Why not also get
my mail if I'll be out for a bit?"
Lumber down my half-broken stairs
to the front, get my weekly advertisement paper,
halt on the return, trembling from cold:
a single solitary flake flips past my nose.

Barrel inside, take stock of my situation.
Return to the dialer, to the expanse of nothin'.
And I type,
"I saw one (1) snowflake outside."

Seconds pass. Backup lead, source of the initial
complaint, decides to single
me out. "Why do you type in that manner?
It's unusual, it's unnecessary, it's a bother
to read,
and honestly I'd really prefer if you ceased."

BRAINWORMS

Finally accepted I'm caught in the throes
of another story whose protagonist
has my body with an iron grip
and won't relent no matter how I resist
until the lesson (s)he bears is embedded
deep within and I take it home
to Sablade.

My head in my arms, leaning on the deck
of a fire-powered ship likely about to meet
its fate as scrap metal, a tumbling wreck
that dissolves into this jagged sea.
But that's naught worth worrying about now.
My only concern is that I'll somehow forget
you: in the adventures, in the people I meet,
in their midst, your brilliant face will soon cease
to render me wild, only thing familiar
in a sea of pixelated just-met strangers,
my better half, my second nature.
Preposterous it is to think my love could fade

but I'm hoping my heart isn't half as fickle as the churning waves.

Four Thirty

Jett, by your grace I will survive
the next hour and a half
with no world-ending mishaps
and I will some semblance of peace find.

Sideyeye

Sitting in my father's van.
I pass by flags at half-staff
and wonder to myself, "Damn,
what happened? What tragedy befell
the Silent boomers of Fascistville?
Who rendered upon the world a new complaint
the old farts will be crowing about for a month straight
in reckless denial that the world belongs
to more than just their spoiled-milk ilk?"
I dare a sidelong glance over
at my white-knuckled father,
itching at the bit to deliver a lecture
about how teachers should make students comfortable
that hold the belief I should be reduced to chattel
for the crime of being born female.
Silver hair itches, dysphoria's helm:
"Full moon tonight. And it doesn't bade well."

(narrator) It turns out later she was wrong!

My name is Lethe.
It rhymes with "teethe",
which is what babies
do, and "seethe",
which is what my enemies
do. And maybe
I've regressed to the cradle,
for my right-side back molars
have been aching for almost two days
no matter how much ibuprofen I throw their way.
Cold syrup works for a little while
for no reason logical
other than that the kid who crunched
the bridge of my nose on Dead End Day
damaged my sinuses. Just a hunch,
since I've rubbed my finger along my gums
and I'm not bleeding
or feeling a tooth moving
in preparation
for a crown of wisdom.
I live from a dentist
a block, maybe two, away.
I'll give it a few more sun cycles to foment
before I make any intervent-
ions. Maybe this week is just cursed.
Maybe this pain is the culmination
of all the harm I have earned.

their eyes were watching the clock

Behind me, the grandmother clock and its guts
stared at my heart and its viscera, jealous
that although we had both long been relegated
to the realm of "nonfunctional", my body had stayed
functioning in some form nonetheless.
It gathered all its strength, more than ten years,
for one final gong in protest,
one more blast to the timeless heavens,
one more mechanical prayer.
I turned around, questioned, "Yes?"
But even when directly addressed
as I thought none had done in a very long time,
the clock
had not
the energy for a reply,
the strength saved up far too early spent.

beached by snowfall

The river
can't decide whether
it wants to be frozen or not:
thin dappled sheets
with cracks between
that stop a few feet
before the rocks.

Riininiini I

I looked at your posts that you wrote for the clout
and got a very strong smell
you were one of those trans-identifying males
that loves to cosplay
as a prepubescent girl from anime
and consume pornography of the same
before you inevitably graduate
to actual child sexual abuse material.
But I couldn't find any concrete evidence
(thank the star-spangled goddess
of real lesbians)
so I decided to give you the benefit of the doubt.
No extension
of friendship,
of course, just a cordial
thanks for the praise you sent in an email.

And what do you know? My efforts went to waste.
Curled up in a shithole Discord server to betray
the little trust I had extended.
Feels almost like a cliche.

Tell me, do you feel a sense of purpose
in your life? Do you wake up curious
as to what adventures the day will unfold?
Or do you lay
in a pile of dung and hate
resentful of the world whose will bends but won't break
to your demands that all re-mold
itself in your image?
You're not a god, you know. Call me a heathen
all you want, but I'm not the one seethin'.
Go touch some grass. Feel the wind
on your skin.
Put down the device and talk to a real person.
And if still possible, reconsider your life decisions.

Riininiini II

"The worst part of being a woman
is figuring out what outfits to put in
the closet."
Oh really?
Not the oppression worldwide?
Not the feminicide?
Not the rapes so brutal the victim afterwards dies?
Just the self-inflicted sartorial conflict?

I throw off my bedding,
roll to the floor, into a T-shirt change
with some therapeutic leggings,
and run out the door without spending
two hours putting chemicals on my face.
And nobody except for the most face-blind
or unobservant mistakes me for a man.

But I walk home late at night
with my pepper spray ready in my hand
because I know, even in this somnolent town
that feels like the hurricane's eye,
calm while the world's evil rages around
in other places upwards and outside,
there could be men lying in wait
to wish evil upon my body,
and I'm not just talking about rape.

No assailant will care about a pin with pronouns.
My body is female from birth to the ground.
What inner truth will your bones betray
long after death when all flesh has decayed?

"Oh, Lethe! Have some mercy!"
You treated me with such vitriol last time
that I must now with all due respect decline.

Tonight's Music

Christmas party at Library Square.
I've done my rounds judging the trees
all the local shops and companies
decorated - except for one, which stands bare.
I got my crafts and hot chocolate,
the former to share with my friend's children
when they all recover from their sudden
illness.
Winter-sans-snow wind runs fingers through my hair.

And then I feel you at my side
as I sit on a bench away from the crowds; in
the center of the Square is a tree in the fountain,
waters drained, branch span massive,
a Yuletide Yggdrasil strung with lights.
"Lethe? My love? Are you feeling alright?"

I can't tell whether
or not it's too cold to require
gloves to protect my fingers
from developing cuts a millimeter
in length each.
The pain in my jaw has deci-
ded to, for a precious moment, subside.
"How strange it is, my enemies and I
all living under a single sky.
The same color of your wings
so bitterly late in this evening."
One wraps around my shoulders.
I take another draught from my plastic cup;
the liquid distraction is almost over.
"I just don't comprehend why others
treat me like this. I don't understand what I've done to deserve
the same designation usually reserved
for those that brutally murder
innocents - random strangers -
or harm little children
or genocide entire populations."
I turn to face her, still tucked under
her maybe-blue maybe-green feathery shelter.
"All I've done is say I don't agree
with a popular ideology
that's causing tangible harms to people like me.
Is that really so evil, Jett? Am I truly causing harm
by linguistically refusing to go along?"

Jett locks eyes with me, winces
when goes off the fire truck's sirens.
"Many a tyrant
considers peaceful non-compliance
to be a brutal form of violence.
Is that a king worthy
of your loyalty?"

Interlude: A Time Between Times II

Surface
of prayer candle
fizzes like carbonated soda.
I can see further down
the wax is inconsistent,
full of bubbles.
Crescent moon of wax unmelted,
a fingernail with edge ragged,
a ring near the top that marks where we began.

PART 8

IT DOWNTIME NON-BILLABLE

IT COMES AND IT GOES

It's been two years- no, two months, I mean,
since you went feral
and then laid in a hospital
for a whole week
while I hid in my apartment
in fear of identity theft,
trying to find something to distract
me as my whole life around me collapsed.
But you recovered,
and the emails got better,
and in my apartment I still hide
but now because it's near-winter outside
and for once I'm not cursing the existence of a heater.

I once called winter the most romantic
of all seasons,
but now I must publish a retraction
at least partial: in this weather, in this apartment,
I find myself horribly understimulated.
I can't ride my bike because of road conditions,
which means I must work from home in what I've named
the "cringe corner"
where my work computer
stays
until the never-but-I-know-
better-than-to-hope
day I get fired.
I could go weeks without leaving this place.
But I need an excuse to leave at least once a day.
I'll go crazy if for too long myself I contemplate.
I need calendar events
to compel body movement
out of my bed or else I'll remain
there until at least noon,
and I know that you hate
the thought of lingering too long in one place.
But I've reverted to where this book began:
to leave the house, I need to make plans
at least a half a day in advance.
But this time not to evade parents
but instead so I don't freeze to death.

If we're going all the way back to the beginning, why don't I
pull out my Lenormand deck and query you today's vibe?

I pull "dog" and "letter."
I think that you better
text your other
friend to see how she fares.

Go read a book instead

isolated island
where I can hide
from the tyranny of my phone screen

how many hours have I wasted
straining like a moth against the glow?
it makes me want to scream

to think I chose
hermetic pain
over the bliss of a dream...

one will be my salvation,
and the other may become
the sorry end of me

Snippet of Renascence

Early October's panic
got me feeling a little agoraphobic,
backslide from the progress I had made
in not being of the world so utterly afraid.
Checked out every
collection of poetry
I could find at the library
available and written close to home:
anthology
of women,
sorrows of the Minnesotans,
gigantic seven-hundred-page tome
with three centuries of Americans.

Had to renew for multiple months
because getting through was such a slog:
tens of pages, entire chunks
of men literarily jerking themselves off
to the sound of their own voice
instead of getting to the goddamn point.
Pseudo-shamanic language that conveys nothing,
imparts no knowledge, leaves me worse for wear
because now I need a nap before I in frustration pull out my hair.

"Lethe, you know you can skip parts you don't like."
But what if my judgement's wrong and there's a part that hides
in the midst of so much male-coughed-up shit
that I read and shatters my world open, changes my whole life?
I don't want to let a future sliver of hope pass me by.

I come to the end, about ten pages left,
and finally the poet I'd anticipated makes an appearance:
Vincent Millay!... But to my dire disappointment
while fifty pages were allotted to jack-off Walt Whitman
Millay
gets barely a page
and not even a full poem:
the despondent
part of "Renascence"
snipped off long before the end.

Needless to say, I threw
the tome into the library's collection chute
(well, shoved, I mean, but that doesn't really rhyme)
on my way to writer's club meeting being held inside.
A bitterness festering in my heart. So much burned-out time.
Let's go up to the magazine loft again and learn about other literary crimes.

Double You Two IV

Molars warning sign
lest icy water slip by
without a permit.

And with bread in your mouth too

Jett, I must sincerely apologize
for forgetting to ask you what the vibe
was before from my bed I extracted
myself and ran out of my apartment
at breakneck speed
across several streets
to make it to the dentist on time.
Which is funny, because when I arrived,
the receptionist gently informed me,
"You made it a complete hour early.
Are you sure you can handle that much waiting?"
It's like when I go into the office
(back when the weather wasn't
actively hostile,
making it impossible
to bike) and I get there half an hour before
my shift and I have to decide to feel awkward
sitting at my cubicle doing shit
or clock in early and bite the extra-work bullet.
My point is, I could have waited
for a few extra minutes,
and I feel guilty because I didn't.

I knew you were guiding me nonetheless,
because when I laid back
for the dentist
I saw over the lights fluorescent
a plastic screen with a meadow of lilacs,
and when she wanted to all my teeth clean
she offered me flavors, and one was orange.
(Should have also mentioned the seats
in the waiting room
were cushioned the same hue
as your feathers in iridescence.)

She found it wasn't sinusitis
as was my first hypothesis.
It was, in fact, a wisdom tooth -
actually, the damn x-rays found two -
and the one on the upper right
needed to be immediately exhumed
because it was half-rotted and could very well cause me to die.
(They weren't equipped for such a burden
and instead referred me to a local surgeon.)

Having answers
isn't a painkiller,
but it's better than believing
that for no reason I'm suffering.

And it's not like I can lie unconscious in Sablade
in a temple while my agony washes away.

And I know it'll be hell
to fit things around my work schedule,
but I'm hoping
now the ball's rolling
Sisyphus might get the briefest break.

Settle / Shock

My mother hands me
a memory
of when 9/11 happened.
I was a wee baby,
and we were all downstairs
in an apartment complex.
A woman, hysterical, was praying,
complaining
that nobody was taking it as seriously
as she was. Is this a party?
Twin sticks of confetti
coming down
around
a ragged city?
Celebration of bloodshed?
I don't think God answers prayers.

Light Rainfall Predicted For Later

God looks down at her belly and cries,
"The skies
are more cloudy than I would have liked."

JUST WORDS

Could be a pair of lungs
on the floor of my tub,
cast off from the corpse of a smoker
looking for another living body to torture
beyond its limits. Could be horns
thick and crass on the tub floor
from a demon I did not give proper
acknowledgment to. Could be a grainy photograph
of the field in that farm I can never go back
to, twin plumes of smoke an epitaph
curling into the sky to disappear forever.

Scattered around me, tools of the trade.
Cleaning brush. Plunger. Jug of ammonia.
Ventilation fan. Anxiety that four-hundred-"kay"
people watched a man read only part
of a story I wrote when life was more hard
than it is now and then launch into a diatribe
about how I'm mentally ill, why I shouldn't suicide,
why I should seek professional help for the voices inside.
Knuckles white as the incoming snow.
Jett, I don't know why men presume
to speak at length about things they clearly don't know
shit about. To be myopic on purpose
to force me into a neat and marketable narrative.
"Go ahead, Lethe. Disappear into the brume.
I'll discuss you at length on my next podcast
episode, split your life
into neat chunks
that I can package up,
inject ads at opportune
times
while working to strike
my listeners aghast
at the life you tried to leave,
the freedom you thought
you got
at last."

One day it'll all come crash-
ing down. The life I've built, I mean.
All that I've worked so damned hard to achieve.
It only takes a few minutes in the Internet Hate Machine
to render one jobless, broke, consigned to the cold streets.

"Lethe? You're shaking. Let go of the curtains unless you want to rip off a piece."

OF ALL THE WAYS TO DIE

At the river again, it seems.
Feels like this will be
a recurring theme
for as long as there are warm days
that slip between the dreary.
Vibe today is "a woman grieving".
And I know that I'm in pain
that won't be resolved until January's
end because that's the earliest
the surgeons
could schedule me,
but I'm not dead yet,
Jett;
it'll take a lot more than a sideways-
growing wisdom tooth to extinguish
the life burning
within.

YOU'VE JUST BEEN GNOMED!!1! / SEND THIS POEM TO YOUR FRIENDS TO TOTALLY GNOME THEM

I see a little gnome
that weaves between the sticks and stones
now piled beside a rock
in a discombob-
ulated heap:
"What's happened to the blasted weather?
If this warmth keeps up, I'll never
build myself a freezer
if the snow-concrete won't keep!"
Poor gnome, trying hard to preserve
her stash of acorn ice cream.

Kiki in Orange

Who compiled that compiler?
Who gave birth to your own mother?
Who brought into this creation
that history-placed woman
and the one before, before, before?
How far back goes the genealogy
of every person right now breathing?
I guess what I'm trying to find
is the starting point of not just humankind
but everything that's ever existed.
If there is even such a single origin.

It's the bootstrapping problem all over again.
Take the aforementioned compiler:
the first (working) one by Grace Hopper.
But before that, people had to write assembly
to run on the processor directly.
But assembly requires an assembler to construct.
So we go back farther to machine code,
to write tedious
and unbearably slow.
But then how did it get into the computer?
Well, there were tapes magnetic,
and before that paper the computer would digest,
and before that a mechanical switch
for each bit
that needed to be flipped.

Switches to be flipped with fingers
of intelligent biological creatures.
I've heard many times the story of evolution.
Going back to the Earth's creation,
to tiny amoebas that mutated.
But how did those come into existence?
What triggered abiogenesis?
Were we just lucky that the nucleobases
arranged themselves in the right permutation
to give birth to the RNA world
and then from there all else unfurled?

What existed before there was life?
And why choose that moment to decide
otherwise?

At Seven At Night (Wow, That’s Kinda Overtime)

Standing in my kitchen,
I can imagine
my supervisor's dread
as we're behind on dials and it's wracking all our heads:
"I should have been specific
with the one who is autistic
because I told her she could go - I meant to break - clocked out instead."

Holdout, Overlooking Corporatism's Slow Rot

Half-hidden shrine
by the Dairy Queen.
Dedicated to an "S. White"
and nestled between
the enclosure
for the dumpster
and the locked-up AC.
I venture onto the grass
to read the epitaph
beside the bench,
but I can read
only a single word at best
that has been engraved,
the rest worn away.
S. White
sure as hell liked
sandals; that is no debate
with their outlines
all over the shrine
traced.
Someone, though, needs
to the leaves
on the ground rake.
If only for S. White's
and her dear memory's sake.

Christmas Jaw

"Scythe" and "whip".
Sudden conflict
or abuse, or an ending thereof.
"And no, Lethe, this isn't about our love."

Jett, there's a weird pain on the bottom of my jaw.
"Well, from what I know about you, there's one of two things wrong:
your brothers beat you in a game
you thought you excelled in but really were lame
and you're thinking about Sablade
to cope with your frustration,
or you haven't drunk anything in a few hours and it's dehydration."

The Corvids, Several Months Hence

Phlegm is filling up my lungs.
A survivor that had almost drowned
and now days later is getting around
to the dying
right before all eyes.
I cannot discern
whether
this is due to the weather
or I actually will return
to the hospital in Jett's stead,
my ticket home
my dying breath.

Strangely enough, I don't mind.
I knew the Eschaton
has been coming for a long time.
I'd like to ask it, "what took you so long?
What troubles did you come across?
How long until I am once again at Jett's side?"

I feel so damn tiny in this bed,
drugged up to (hopefully) prevent
the hurricane-strong coughs
from ripping my throat raw.
Everyone's always so gentle
to me when I'm reduced to naught but a tremble.
I wish it would last even when,
or hopefully if, I get strong again.

I feel your palm on mine.
My senses bade me recoil
from any other light.
As long as you're here, I know
I'll ultimately be fine.

I can deal with any pain
so long as I'm warned in advance.
Deem this my rite of passage
to claim
Sablade's
crown and reign

or maybe just live with my lover once again.

Stringed-Out Theory

I need my wisdom teeth removed,
but the oral surgeons refused
to schedule me any earlier
than January thirty-first.
In agony for at least a month,
and even the family
who claims to love
me
is the end of their rope fast approaching.

Late at night in my grandmother's cabinet,
searching for anything other than ibuprofen
that can relieve pain. Can't indulge any longer
in red pills: they won't turn me into a fearmonger
against minorities, but they will erode
my organs if I continue at so high a dose.
I need something longer, something white, effective.

Brother pops his head in.
"Are you sure you're not addicted?"
I rattle the pills whose bottles bear my name.
"With melatonin you're already well acquaint-
ed.
To beat my brain into submission
so I can get more than two hours of sleep.
Birth control sets guard rails on my ovaries.
My endocrine system wants to believe it's non-binary,
but I'd really rather not develop holes
in my bones like I'm growing gray and old.
And this-" I rattle a bottle as a taunt-
"I take a metformin
every night.
Helps control my appetite
with the intention
of preventing me
from developing diabetes.
I may be a monster who devours whole worlds,
but I'll admit it's not the best for my blood sugar.
We'll see if it works or if it's just a load of words pretty."

Finally I find the ace-tam-in-o-phen.
A silvery bottle that promises salvation.
Up to eight pills in a daytime cycle
as opposed to the six the ibuprofen allowed.
Less tracking for my liver. Less waiting around.

I catch a glimpse in the mirror of myself.
Hair stringy, unwashed. "What misfortune befell
me
to look like such a travesty?
Jett would be disappointed at all this neglect.
I think a shower and then straight to bed."

SIGN SAYS NO DUMPING (THE NEURONS WILL COMMIT CRIMES ANYWAY)

Woke up at six in the morning
on Halloweenie
because the damn neighbor's dog was barking.
Probably a good thing,
since my neurons were dumping.
It's frustrating,
you know, to know you have wings
but can't seem to fold them correctly
because the damn dream insists
they don't go like that, they go like this.
Anyways, back to the processing
in my brain.
Something about a bowl of chips
I was using to write a poem?
I know I was awfully miffed
at my mother for tricking
me into a family party
without any games
to keep the "kids table" entertained.
(We're not exactly kids anymore.)
I was writing about how much I was missing
Jett, and my father saw fit to implore
me not to study the Norse gods anymore,
which I told him I couldn't promise
since I was under Jett's mandate
to study the runes and their lore.
"This isn't a gathering of agnates.
Your side of the family chose to disintegrate,
and we never see them anymore.
I don't think you're in any position to make demands."

Jett, if you were standing by
wondering when I'd give up on the nonsense and take flight,
do you remember the poem I intended to write?
Because I know
I don't
at all.
The words are lost to time.
I solely recall, in Kubla Khan, I wanted you by my side.

Correspondents

Sorting through
old birthday cards
and found ten dollars
in one, thinking of you
and also all the people through
my life
who claimed
that by my side they'd stay
and then disappeared anyway.
All the checks already cashed
and the cash already spent:
trust me,
I already
double-checked.
Handwriting of a great-grandmother
who passed away last December,
waiting in eager wait for a reply:
oh, Nile River,
I could send a letter,
but it had no chance in heaven of making it in time.

(narrator) It turns out later the caller was lying!

Wake up, immediate call from surgeons.
Finally heard back from insurance.
Knocked down the price from twenty-five hundred
now to less than half of what it costs to pay my rent.
Listening with one ear as the clerk recites the numbered statement:
despite being burnt out, Jett, you still got me one Christmas present.

Millay's Scrapbook

Love, if I weep it will not matter,
and if you laugh I shall not care,
for the Veil
I failed
to shatter;
I made my bed, found you not there.

You told me you'd see me in everything,
and this echo
haunts me the most,
because with every hurt
that I endure
I violently yearn
to have one thing in my life under my control.

I wander in hopes that the RNG
of this Outside will take pity on me
and I'll see coming up over the horizon
the familiar spires of your apartment.

I sought you in deep Hell
and through the world as well;
I thought of Heaven and I sought you there.
I thought I could catch you in throes of a dream
and refuse to return you to your body.

For warmth alone, for shelter only
from the cold anger of the eyeless wind,
I took my chances and slipped silently
through the back door of a "book inn".

The room is full of you! - As I came in
and closed the door behind me, all at once
this singular thought came flooding.
Then frozen in fear, my limbs: my love
could wake up, vanish, if I move too quickly.

I floated silent, apparition,
to where you stood in the poetry section.
Hands over ears, brow furrowed in frustration,
waiting for the next mother-borne interruption
asking if you're done yet browsing.
I stayed close to the floor, outside range of vision.
But it was too loud, my hesitant breathing.
Your heart dropped.
"Jett, I thought
you were planning
to abandon
me-"

So up I got in anger,
and took a book I had
right from the shelf where you had rested your torn-up hand,
pointed it in your direction spine-down with fierce command:
"Turn to a page and I'll tell you what kind of future I demand."

Moses in training, adept at parting my Red Seas,
but only pages, not pudendum, to seek in Aisle of Poetry.
Your fingers trace the edges, land on four-hundred-nineteen:

"Look what light climbs up the sky
and sinks and climbs once more,
as if it were a children's game
to light up the blistered North!
It floods and flushes,
pales and pulses,
like adults may do in babe's absence
or in other rooms while others are sleeping.
Oh, to imagine the furious
coitus
with both celestials embodied,
nightly meeting
of the Materialist
with the Anima Mundi.
I worship the light as if emanation
from the world that stands as extension
of her body, the future I chose,
as if it were the sun that rose
to offer one more chance at living.
'I wish it were!'
Have patient, friend; it may yet be."

Practice Child I

That's right.
I'm a little parasite.
I need you always nearby
lest I shrivel up and die.

Parasite,
the Practice Child.
Sketching notepad to form shape
before the canvas meets true paint
to get it right this first time
so nothing goes to waste.

But the sketch only ever stagnates,
rarely revisited to be made bright,
never given its own chance to shine.
Crumpled mess of scribbles and lines
pitch black against blinding white,
to metaclysma, recycle bin
of the universe
condemned forever.

At least Laika,
the Practice Dog
who paved
the way
for humans to breach outer space,
was honored
with accolades,
met final fatal fate
a blazing star across the sky.
But uncovered city lights
cut me off from the night
and I can't tell you the last time
I could look up and see a star.
I strayed too far
and lost orbit
and nobody saw me fit
to reach out, reclaim,
with soft words say,
"Come back, Deadname.
Without you, all
will fall
apart."

Practice Child II

That's correct.
My fate's all wrapped up in Jett.
My lifeforce and hers
are bound up together
and if I get my way, we'll live forever.

The stain
on my bowl of orange sherbet
looked like a smile.
I haven't seen one of those in a while.
Sideways izquierda
and inverted Eihwaz.
"Describe your life to me."
Someone hit pause.

Someone hit "freeze this girl alive,
stuck in stagnation but with limbs still lithe
and able to move around
in this world of filth and unpleasant sounds."

In the Outside,
the doctors would call this
"shifting sickness",
when a polymorph refuses
or is otherwise unable
to make themselves shift to avoid going feral.
Brain fog rolls in with ennui.
You'll eventually fall in a coma and die.
But I'm stuck in a vessel
in a magic-less Inside
and it's worse than overdosing on goneril.

That midnight-draped forest when I was Lucine
walking home from work in twenty-eighteen,
bordered by a highway so glittering.
If into the fog I were to vanish,
do you think my parents would drown in anguish
or celebrate that I'm no longer them burdening?

"You want someone to beg
you to return to sanity,
someone to try to convince
you that they value your presence.
Well, Lethe,
I'm not going to plead.
I'll simply remind you
that you made a promise
to spend your whole life with me.
Just like a year ago,
I offer a choice in which way to go:
drown yourself in chasing an uncatchable memory,
or for my sake put aside
your grief
and wear your scars with pride?
You want a revenge
you'll never get."

It's easier said
than done,
my love.
I can't cease to my footsteps retread
when life demands
I commute on that path.

Hela

Lethe,
I'm begging you, don't grieve
after you're done read-
ing this letter.
Please keep in mind
I didn't lie
when I said it was you and me forever.

But Lethe, I'm burnt out to a horrific extent.
Some days it's a miracle that I get out of bed,
even if that's all I accomplish.
I can't take care of you any longer.

So I've decided to relinquish,
temporarily,
my responsibility
for ensuring your safety
to give me time to recover.
I've made arrangements
to hand your reins
over to Hela, goddess of the under-
world, Helheim.
That way I know, if things go horribly
wrong and I can't make it to you in time,
you'll still be safe under her guidance,
sheltered under watchful blue-black eye.
I have faith you two will get along fine.

Her brothers
are Jormungandr,
the serpent coiled around the boundaries
of the known universe,
and Fenrir
(Fenris?)
who bit off the hand of Tyr
that you consider yourself syncretic
with.
They don't live with her; I just bring them up
to show that with feral blood she has experience.

Lethe, if you trust me, if you love
me even half as much as you claim,
please go make yourself acquaint-
ed with Hela in the next few days.
She's kind and gentle. She'll make a good friend.

And I promise, as your psychopomp, I'll come back for you in the end.

Interlude: A Time Between Times III

Spider plants
off their bodies babies cast
on thin green umbilical cords.
But there is no womb
from which to exhume
them, so they instead sink to the floor,
fed by their mothers
until the cord is severed
and they receive a pot of their own.

Laying in despondency,
staring outside, white sea,
blank, waveless.
My plants are wilting in search of sun
with exception of one
that stretches like a V
up to the ceiling.
One of my spider plants has a baby.
But only now do I acknowledge
the umbilical cord is brown and nearly withered to dust.
So gently I cradle it, sever
the cord with my fingers,
bring the pale body to the kitchen
where I've a spare pot in need of inhabitant.

You and me both, I wonder
as I let some water
slowly trickle
in.
Technically alive but clearly neglected.
Moving out, I hope, will have been
my salvation.

PART 9

DEDICATED COACHING NON-BILLABLE

My social training never seems to come in handy

My first night
under Hela's oversight,
I think it wise
to try
to "break the ice"
as the saying goes in
Midgard. Odin
did send her to Niflheim
to make a world of her design
where she could watch over all the dead
who hadn't fallen in battle and been
taken to Valhalla instead.
So I shuffle my runes, say, "Hel-lo!
It's nice to make your acquaintance
on this night so fogged and cold.
I hope you and I can grow
to be much-bonded friends.
But first I should ask your opinion.
Is there anything I should keep
close to heart and in mind?
I don't want to be a burden."
I pull three runes as is custom.
And all come back inverted:
Tiewaz, syncretic sign of wife,
Gar, the spear Odin keeps in right
hand, and Os, a voice divine.
"You need to know. I'm
not much for words.
The answers that I give will be curt.
Please do not take offense.
It's just in my nature.
If you seek encouragement, turn around, look elsewhere.
But if you do not mind silence,
then yes, we will be fastest friends."

Death Commons

At the river again
to show my (hopefully) new friend
where I like to go to write
when I'm understimulated
and stressing about time.
"In death, nothing is belated,"
she counters,
half-insistent,
but I take my hand and show her
how the crescent rocks are all flooded
so now it would be dangerous
to try to cross over them.
An exorable thundering stream.
"How many people d'you think
drowned because they were snagged
by the current's embrace?"
She watches, caught in trance's grip
by how, when the water flips
over the rocks, it exposes
a sallow hue like human sickness.

"Lethe," she whispers, hesitant
yet
curious,
"in your underworld of origin,
did you have a namesake river like this?"

Blessed in Neglect

At the picnic table in front of the library
I have in my new backpack three
two-month-stale bagged cookies
and a bottle of blood-red beet juice to accompany
that also
expired
three weeks ago.
That's just how things at the food shelf transpire.
"You'll have to forgive my lack of proper planning.
But I have one for Jett, one for you, Hela, one for me."

Who is this about, really?

Hela, we've arrived at night two.
It's time for me to read the runes.
I know you care not
to speak without prompt,
so I'd like to do this reading
so you can report without worrying
about what is the proper time
to cut through chatter in my mind.

I shuffle as is customary.
"I assume Jett frequently
asks you how I'm doing.
I can't imagine she would just dump
me at your gates.
That's not how people who love
each other behave.
Hela, how is she?
Is her burnout healing?
I know it's only been one day.
But still my anxiety remains."

I pull inverted Sowelo
as well as Othala overthrown.
But this time I get one upright:
Thurisaz with its thorny spike.
"I say she is an arrogant fool.
She pushes on no matter how cruel
it is to her body.
She claims this is about priorities.
About reconnecting with her strength.
I don't doubt it's what she intends.
But does she have a concep-
tion of actual self-care?
She will work herself into a grave
with a depleted body and a smile on her face."

the winter of our gassing

In terms of white blankets, this winter's been pretty darn void.
But I open my fridge, the cartons that I'd tried hard to avoid
to keep my guilt from living
from too harshly flaring,
and I find the missing blankets
white and fuzzy through the plastic
and remind myself it's not waste if it goes in the compost bin.

In any other circumstances

"Hela, I majorly fucked up today.
Is it possible for you to render any aid?"
I reach into my rune bag
expecting omens of sealed fate
but instead inverted Os: "No voices will come your way."

The Pain You Know

There is a ghastly bubble
right smack in the middle
of the melted potpourri disk
in my wax warmer. Discolored, sick,
like the blood-filled cysts
I wake to find in the folds of my skin:
how badly I want to take
it between my fingers, crush 'til it gives way.
But I think it would make less dividends of pain,
the cyst's pus-and-blood burst,
than the melted wax on my skin and a first-degree burn.

Unsealed Exemption

Today? Nothing much in terms of crises to report.
And I know I should know better
than to seek semblance of comfort
from your weary arms, who hold me at length but do not push me farther.
It's time for nightly rune reading;
tonight I'll ask if Jett still loves me
and how this repeat
of last week's
vacation will transpire.

"When Jett and I came to agreement, I was often reassured
that my responsibility to you was simply 'caretaker'.
I don't recall also signing up to be the Norns' messenger.
But since you ask so kindly, and since you're sincere,
and since I know you'd probably be dead by now if I weren't here,
I'll clue you in that major change
is galloping on its bright way
and there will be no spiralling in the next few days."

The Spinning Mirror Reorients Itself

Fast approaching the end of this year.
The fated time
that I must decide
has drawn near:
if I believe I am faithful enough
to my wife to keep my troth,
to hold sacred every vow,
to fulfill all promises I make after now.

Gunshot explodes outside.
Firework in the night,
even though this town licks
the boots of their cops until shiny and slick?
My brain may be melting, but I don't think
those kind of incendiary devices
are legal in Minnesota without a proper license.
Not that it matters. I just find it mighty strange
how half the city forgets turn lights and the other half will rage
on Facebook about the downfall of society
and then cry when others condemn their own activities.

God damn, I sound like pretentious Instagram poetry.
I need to take a step back, reconnect with priorities.
Upside-down Tiewaz. The mirror
image of my lover.
The brain sees it inver-
ted, deems the sight an error,
then with few days' effort
somehow manages to rewire
itself to see all upright just the way it damn prefers.
Somehow this fact,
yet irrelevant,
manages to reassure:
no matter how bad things are between us right now, I know you'll return.

Our Lady of Indulgences

Sitting cross-legged in the library
drinking beet juice just as pulpy
as the books in the YA section.
Pretend Bloody Mary,
mostly because I don't actually
know what comprises
an actual faux-Catholic
alcoholic
drink.
Called myself a teetotaler
when I was still a teenager
and the distinction didn't yet matter.
Technically we're not supposed to have anything but water,
but I'm sure the Mary covered in her own menstrual matter
will say this distinction also doesn't matter.
Just keep the cap on the bottle
and don't spill on the bibles.
All will be forgiven
in the Spanish-section
laughter.

miya, tuya

The library is composed of two sections:
the original building, front door now exit
only for emergencies,
and the addition attached
by stairway tilted fast
apparently funded himself by Carnegie.
Rarely do I ever see
anyone hunkered in the upstairs,
and if then, they're either
a slow-moving walker-bound elder
in search of the old-style
romance novels
(you know the kind: the ones whose covers promise
a cowboy, a priest,
a man with secrets to keep)
or a college student burdened
by seven books and a soon-due dissertation.
They prefer the downstairs, the gaggles of teenagers,
because that's where reside all the outlets with power.

The scene I'm trying to set is this:
in the upstairs in a burgundy arm chair I sit
with a stack of books, one due in a month
and the other whose presence
in my possession
the librarians aren't yet aware of.
Alone from my fingers dangles a pendulum.
I've been good about keeping my troth,
but sometimes in my back curiosity sinks its claws.

"Lethe?" Jett's voice is raspy in confession.
"Your new year's resolution
deserves my reciprocation.
I no longer work at the library.
It was a lie all along. I'm sorry."
Her voice cracks. "The work I was referring
to when you asked how my day went
was like a library, but not quite the concept
I knew you'd have in your mind.
Last year - or maybe the one before last -
I had many times pleaded
for you to purify your life to necessities.
About the career thing... you were right, Lethe.
I don't dream of labor. I want work with meaning.
I want Sablade. Sablade is my library.
Was, but still is, and will forever be
for as long as you can still tolerate me.
That's what I realized when I was sleeping
in that temple struck by winter."

She reaches for my hand. I shiver
upon the contact of our skin.
When did you appear? Where were you hidden?
"One day I hope Sablade's history
is longer than can be contained in this library."
We meet weary
eyes.
"I want to weave it. With you by my side."

THE ANSWER THAT ISN'T (THAT IS)

Hela, I cut my finger on a can of soup
middle of last Thursday
and the bandage I used to keep the blood at bay
has left my fingertip a corpse's hue
and likely the same composition too.
Of dead skin huge rolls
where the fingerprint's whorls
used to be
and more cuts I can't remember inflicting.
It hurts to type
and hold a knife
and do my dishes every night.
To slow down I've been suddenly forced.

But I'm happy to report
that they were true, your last two messages:
for my carelessness
there were no consequences
(I trust my leads to not conspire)
and I went last week's vacation sans spiralling in despair.

I want to know what's next.
But I shouldn't ask for the vibe
because that's the domain of Jett.
No, I'd like a different insight:
the past few days
I've been too drained
to write much of import.
On what should I focus my intention
to get roiling the fires of creation?

I pull Thurisaz
and then the inverted
sisters of Yr and Ac.
(Although, in my runic almanac,
neither
of the latter
two
have negative meanings to choose.)

"Jett says you have strands of blood three.
Two of those turn you into a beast.
Has it been a while since you shifted, Lethe?
With a full-throated life goneril
isn't compatible."

To be fair,
my blood flares
much more easily
when I've been given
a reason
to give into my fury.
Something has to whip me up into a rage
or crumple me into a heap in anxiety's cage.
And right now life is too tranquil.
It's a river
in winter
frozen over.
Something beats
beneath
the ice,
but nothing on the surface cries.

"I'm more comfortable with the ice.
But you journaled that this week's vibe
was a message from a woman.
I'm not quite
the right
person
to decide
what ignites.
Unless it's under Jett's ass.
You'll get an answer in due time."

The Most Prolific Knitter In The World

Hela, forty-eight hours ago
the world was not so much blanketed in snow.
Like a toddler tucked in for the night
after a day of running her mother raw.
Almost blinding, this monochromatic sight
that even at the horizon still digs its claws.
Lying in bed until noon, cabin fever,
silence in waiting for wakeful neighbors
to turn on the building's shuddering heater.
Too dangerous to walk
even a few blocks
to the library: what if
there's a sudden snow drift
and I become stranded?
It would be pathetic
to ask for a car ride
that, in good weather, would be five minutes' walking time.

As below (metaclysma) so above (more metaclysma)

Summer sky, my silhouette
in airborne search for Jett
as it always is in every dream.
A shadow
without a person to follow
sometimes my existence seems.
But I should be careful.
A lack of self-reliance
is what got us into this damned mess.
The endless blue above
a cruel juxtaposition
against what I know awaits
me when I wake:
winter's snowy perdition
three months belated
and a lack of wings against my back as insulation.
Even in my blessed sleep, a sorry thought rebels:
I'll only get this life in pieces 'til
I make it to Sablade.

Patron-Saint of Clouds

Occlusion against the winter sky
trapping in the auburn light
to paint the streets just as bright
in three in the morning
as if the moon was still shining,
visible. But now it stands outside,
left in the cold as humanity hides
in its childhood bedroom behind
the thick curtains hung in lieu of door.

As Ada

I remember
three Octobers
ago you requested
I make a heavy decision:
"Lethe,
which will it be?
A memory, or me?"
And now that I've attempted
to resurrect
a coherent
record of my last life,
now that I've realized
no life neatly fits
into a narrative,
now that I know
an auto-
biography
is outside of my abilities,
I think an answer I have finally.

Trisection I

Jett, we need to have a serious discussion.

You said the vibe this week was "sudden confusion
or an end to it". And while I was writing last night,
plotting a book, the first pages were alright,
and then I came to a brick wall with my memories.
I can look at my dream journal, my diary entries;
I can see the words I wrote so long ago,
but they're puzzle pieces that don't fit neatly,
and some I suspect belong to different puzzles entirely.
It wouldn't feel right if some of them I edited
to force into a coherent narrative,
and that's assuming I have correct
the order they're supposed to appear in.
Because time is a circle, and this Inside's not adapted
for the concept of time non-linear and repetitive.

And even when I have a dream, I can't really tell
if it's really you in front of me or an empty shell,
a ragdoll bearing your form that I have to drag around with me
in fear it is you and abandonment I'd be committing.
You did promise you'd never leave me behind,
and I think it only fair that I reciprocate.
Aren't dreams
supposed to be
for relaxing?
But mine are filled with anxiety,
stress dream where I find
myself rendered near-feral and purblind.
And I know that's behavior that you hate.

These past few years, there's also been an absence of the divine.
One would think dreams would be fertile ground for messengers.
But every time I find one and inquire, they're all either
just whatever I want them to say - a mirror,
or spewing out the vitriol that I've come to fear.
Like when I opened a trapdoor in my grandma's bedroom's floor
expecting revelations but instead divorce papers.
I know that not all dreams can be true all the time,
but that's the thing: I can't fucking tell which ones are lies.

I spoke about this to Persephone,
and even the dreaded queen
of the Underworld agrees
with whatever words I put into her mouth.
That's the thing with being a myth:
you're forever without
a will of your own, always prone
to being reinterpreted
even where you thought was safe, your very home.

And Jett, you deserve better than to be shoved in a narrative.

So where does that leave us? I trust you to not be afraid
to gaze upon a garden and identify all the spades.
Your candor is part of what drew me to you in the first place.
I'd be fine with leaving all my memories
to the annals of self-mythology.
I mean, no religion
that I know of was coherent
in the very very beginning.
Does that leave us playing an elaborate game of pretend
in order to make things in this consensus reality happen?
Because the asshole thirteen-year-old atheist
in me wants to deny your existence,
but even in my scattered records I've got too much evidence.

When she was thirteen, she called out to her Savior
and asked for something simple: to momentarily appear.
Doubting Thomas got his wish,
to meet with the celestial fish,
but maybe I got nothing because I'm just a bitch.
The important part: when by her god she had been forsaken,
she picked herself up, she wrote her own damn salvation.

She wrote her own story. She made her own utopia.
And when five years later she was overcome with dysphoria,
she broke the laws of physics
to rend her ovaries cystic
to cease the flow of blood and drop her voice part of an octave.

You and I both eventually detransitioned.
But the urge
to revert
still lingers inside, persistent.
I know intellectually the female body is superior,
which leaves me wondering if the origin of the urge
is that it's something impossible, something I cannot have,
like when I return to old phones from many years past
and sink a whole evening desperately trying to hack
them to freedom even though their time is long past.

His hair was silver,
I remember.
And he went by his title
instead of a name
because he knew his was pencil
etched ever so faint
and then by time's eraser rubbed away.
Even knowing he might never regain
it, the name he'd lost he refused to replace,
resigning himself to a journey across space
and against the constraints of time
to fill the universe with much-needed light.

I know you were witness to all the times I freaked
out about mistakes and purity,
convinced myself that self-annihilation
and consigning myself to eternal anonymity
was the only way to achieve absolution.
Thought to myself, if the reason I attract vitriol
is because I'm female and that's too much to handle,
maybe if I figure out how to erase my bodily sex
the world will see me as more than worthless.

(And those who claimed to offer me respite
rescinded their offer upon discovering
I could not be contained and was more intelligent
in terms of technological sovereignty.
Claimed I was faking having a pussy
just because I had a tech college degree.
Oh? And the truth of all I said
would be any different
if I miraculously grew a dick
between my legs?)

Thus I got kicked out of "woman"
and I don't qualify for "man".
Where is a person like me supposed to stand?
In a world of the religious, where goes the heathen?
In Sablade, with my magic and abilities,
I could take one form or the other for as long as I pleased.
(Well, in your absence. I know you prefer me as a female
just as much as you hate shifting and wish I'd stay an angel.)
But I'm stuck in this goddamn Inside
with its Veil and its money and its climate rearing to die!

Here I lie in wait for an answer. Every second's heartbeat
yearns
to affirm
that I'm still your Lethe
and I've still got a future where it's always you plus me.
If given a choice between
you and a memory,
I'd pick you every time.
But will you forgive me for abandoning
what I thought
for so long
was my reason for existing?

I've got two wisdom teeth sideways growing
in my skull. More likely to kill me
the closer the rot inside marches.
Extraction through surgery
will be on my body
harsh,
but it's better than perishing.
Jett, parts of the story I would have written could have been wise,
but it's coming out wrong and I'm far less likely to finish than die.
It's going to kill me
if nothing intervenes.

I yearn to write a new story
with you. The shining songs from Sablade.
Forget the past. The future is begging to be made.

Please enlighten me how together we can stay.

Gee

In the children's section
is a sign entreating patrons
to write a letter to an animal at the North Pole.
My friend of only five years old
sees this sacred mission,
traces a perfect "G", and stuffs it into an envelope.

What's Up With The Constant Parallels? (The Author Won't Leave Me Alone)

The holes
in the soles
of my sneakers
look like the rot
you come across
when cleaning your fridge
of the things
you should have tossed
last week
instead of leaving
to shrivel and die:
splotchy and misshapen,
white as mold overtaking,
exposing the cardboard on the other side.

January 13

It always keeps the score, the body.
And my body knew me as a hypocrite
with its major flaw: to endlessly give
another chance to what I'd previously deemed
inexcusable, disgusting.
Took a second glance at a social media site
meaning to write an update
for transparency's
sake,
got sucked into the glittering lights,
a moth to monetization's flame.
Told myself I wouldn't allow it
to overcome my better judgment.
Found myself all the next week
measuring all by how much I could squeeze
it for a few cents
in recompense.
I understood why so much "content"
was generated by computers, soulless:
when trying to be seen in a torrent
and unable to the waters drain,
why not further
dilute the rivers
but this time bearing your name?

It always keeps the score, the body.
And I found myself puking at four in the morning
with diarrhea to follow
once per hour
until my bowels of matter were drained.
Lying in bed all day delirious.
My wife appears at some point with her arms crossed.
"Psychosomatic illness sure sucks.
When you're ready to once again keep your troth
and stop seeing dollar signs
in the art that keeps you alive,
try heating up a can of pure chicken broth."

I'll still be here for you when you decide the social pressure's too much.

Figura

Scared that my faith still thought to falter,
I dusted off and moved my altar
on my bookshelf up a row
because where it was was way too low
for me to see it when I awoke
every morning.
Between the shelf and my bed
I sat in the too-tight crack
and turned to gaze upon a statuette:
in the glare of the sun, the defiant form
only a shadowy silhouette.

Nihilism for Children!

Giraffe, puppet show, children's section, library.
It faces me, asks, "What are we going to learn about today?"
Thinking it wants me to participate,
I give it an offer: "How about shapes?"
It guffaws with glassy eyes, then answers itself, "Nothing."

Seliph (Mine)

A rare visit from Jett since she appointed Hela my caretaker.
She's got me bent over a pillow while her fingers work at my shoulders,
my neck, my overburdened spine that now must accommodate
four more wings for a grand total of six, my godhood inchoate.
I'm conflicted, and she knows it. Hell, I'm finding it difficult to find
proper words for this stanza to convey what's on my burdened mind.
Divinity may be my heritage, but I refuse to leave her behind.
I don't want to uptake a role she has good reason to despise,
even if it's required to ensure my fragile frame has enough energy
to both remain at her side and be Sablade's Anima Mundi.
"So about the operation to remove those wisdom teeth you swore you lacked:
when you revive, am I supposed to start calling you Seliph after that?"
A faint whimper from my throat. "I'd rather keep being your Lethe-"
"Once again you demonstrate a lack of critical understanding.
I know what you want. But I remember it was only just last week
you said you wanted to disregard the past and with me begin anew."
She presses down with the base of her palm. Through my back a pop shoots.
"You said you chose me over a memory. So why the sudden interest
in your very first incarnation as the god of crises and unrest?
I thought this renewal of ours was going to be a spinoff, not a reboot."
Scarred fingertips lightly brush the second pair at both roots.
"Are you... trying to write me out of being your Eternal Blue?"
A long pause, and then she continues. "I'm sorry. It's not fair to accuse
you of doing what from birth was your second nature.
But I meant it when I said I wanted to stay with you forever.
I'm just not sure the... creature you're in process to become
is the same one to whom all those years ago I pledged my love.
Are you still my Lethe? Rather, is the Lethe who owns my affections
still you no matter how many wings are woven in your skeleton?
I'm having the hardest time with the mental reconciliation
of your 'true form' as a glowing orb with six disembodied wings
with the woman I deflowered twice and died once liberating."
She strokes my cheek. "Not everything you do requires the response of fleeing."

Skylark

With sky the color
of an e-reader
with the brightness and warmth turned down to zero
(but not one of those new-fangled
ones with the Kaleido screen:
when unlit, those are closer to sooty gray than cream)
I witness three waves of geese
pass by overhead in formations of Vs
linked together, like a toddler's
depiction of the waves of the sea,
then descend
in the laziest vortex
I've ever witnessed
on the playground on the other side of the river.

I know there's a metaphor nearby
for a military sendoff when someone's died,
but I've still got a week and a fighting chance
and I can't think over all the honks so crass.

I give up, I get it - many such cases

Maps on the Internet insist
that on the hook of Main Street exists
an art exhibition. Supposedly
across the street from the cemetery.
But two years of commuting to retail
chains informs me it's actually a brewery
that stands in that cursed spot.
I know the museum's on Main Street
behind a restaurant and down an alley
marked with an office for pulling teeth
(mine are too gum-impacted for their mercy),
but the exact location I've forgot
until, giving up and trudging back to bed,
I see with the corner of my eye
a half-covered-in-snow welcoming sign.

Where Men Are Reduced To Mere Names

Before me hangs a sliver
of a cherry blossom heaven
plucked from a local mural
and hung on the wall for observation.

In this building are two women.
Me, and the receptionist.
She says I should take a slip
of paper and write down my favorite
piece of art to vote in the contest.
I backtrack, paying more attention
to the nametags, to which have women
names,
to which offer answers as to what
kind of world I want to make in Sablade.

Having chosen a name to copy and pluck,
I cast my vote for the sliver of mural,
this Anima Mundi's seal of approval.
I wander outside, and the miasma
of color drains to metaclysma,
winter's sleet, one of two seasons:
wintertime, and road construction.

The Four Winds

I ask Jett in a fit of trepidation
what will happen to me under sedation,
if I'm going to die
and we'll finally reunite
or if I'll just collapse under the weight
of so many prescribed opiates.
She gives me Ansuz inverted:
binding, but dispassionate and without harm,
like an IV a doctor slides into your arm.

I ask deep inside in a fit of terror
what Sablade needs in its endless birth,
how I must prepare for the event
the last I see of the world is an airvent
mounted up high on an office wall.
It gives me Berkana on jungle gym's thralls,
hanging from two bent legs upside-down
on a no-longer-existent-as-it-was playground:
honor all your feral liberation-wards impulses;
do not allow to fade away your consciousness.

I ask Jett what she needs from our relationship.
A tricky question to ask and not trip
as I know she's burnt out and I shouldn't intrude
on a much-needed staycation in room's solitude.
But she forgives me, hands me Eihwaz, and so furtively pleads:
"Seek independence from the so-called 'natural' order of things."

I ask Hela, last but certainly not least,
what in the moment from our bond she needs.
Inverted Ear, the twisting hanging tree
uprooted and flipped so from roots grow the leaves.
Her request is simple, though it rings through all of Helheim:
"I need Jett to be faithful
to her vow eternal
to never leave you in any world behind."

Three Days Remain

Raccoon I found behind
the metal shed at Dead End Shrine
(back when one stood there in
the forest) I wonder how you died,
what force made you perish.
Was it poison? Did you starve?
Did a hunter cause you harm?
Did a farmer rip your fur
or run you over with their car?
Maybe
it was rabies
and your brain collapsed to shreds
while you paced around in circles
and lost your fear of human scent.
Tell me, lonely top jaw of raccoon
I keep enshrined in my bedroom,
what sights are there to see
on the way to Hela's hall of gloom?
I'm planning my itinerary.

Two Days Remain

The ice formations I saw
on the river rocks last week are gone,
and if I stand in the back lot
of my apartment complex,
I can see in my window's bug screen
a faint glossy silhouette
of where the blackbird I saw crumpled and dead
hit the glass on the day of my showing.
Wraith,
avian ghost of days long past
and people I failed to save
and names in writing carefully erased.
One last shift before the break
in reality.
Oh, Jett, will
I still
be Lethe
when from unconsciousness I the surgeons retrieve?
Hela unshackled Persephone
from the clutches of her kidnapper
and the whole world is trembling under
unmedicated Demeter.
(It's spring when right now the city whole
should be buried in several feet of snow.)
(All is coming back to life
when I stand on the precipice of having died.)
(And I'm abjectly terrified.)

One Day Remains

One last sweep of my fridge for the spoiled
food to give to Hela as offering, spoils
of war against myself, delivery
for the souls in her hall that she must feed.
The quarter-gallon of milk, the soggy
celery turned almost to liquid, the cherries
my cousin gave me from a trip to her college
I couldn't bear to make myself try more than once.
Hela doesn't mind rot. To her, all decay
is necessary to keep the cycles of life
turning, ceaseless. I add a bouquet
of dried flowers and the dessicate
leaves clipped from my bedroom window plants,
who chose to put all their money on the side
where the sun dares to shine its glorious light.

PART 10

BREAK

Reduxing the Redux

I want to provide an alternate version of events
that happened at the very end of The Eschaton Eminence:

instead of our young heroine in hospital bed,
IV dripping, clock ticking towards end,
only illuminated by ajar door's light sliver
in wait for a psychopomp to from her pain deliver,

she awakes, half-conscious, in surgeon's office's corner
in reclined bed with two strips of gauze
hanging out like fangs. Where are my claws?
The twisted horns? The leathery skin?
The markings of the demonic I was convinced
would rupture up to the very surface
the moment I lost control of my consciousness?

Nurse typing away in corner opposite,
about to run off for post-operation instructions.
As far as she's concerned, nothing is amiss.
And our heroine, who two years ago had prayed
for sporadic fatal insomnia to take
her life in the hopes of being liberate-
d from her parents and hopeless living situation
and regaining the powers locked away this 'carnation,
finds herself bitterly but brightly alive
with one hand free not held by reluctant divine,
and for her mother for comfort, the opposite hand, cries.

Mr. Cringey in False Paradise

Day three
of inhabiting a body
that did not become a monstrosity
upon from anesthesia awakening.
No transition to be done,
just sitting in the lazy
February
sun
that trembles
on the threshold
of springtime's love
and winter's glum.
My father's dogs lie in yard's corner,
getting muddier by the hour.
One with evil eye meets my gaze.
He does not look away.

The Preemptive Grief of Labor

Industriousness
is a difficult concept
to grapple with.
Because part of me
believes
I must always be
creating
or else the whole day
has gone to waste.
As if it is the highest crime
to take a day purely for respite:
"Yes, I know you work tomorrow.
That doesn't mean
you need
to self-crucify."

The Constant Psychological Terrorism of Having Neighbors

Walking down my driveway
in a huff to the library
when I spot a shiny something at my feet:

oh! it's a card from a tarot deck!
I wonder what vibe, what omen, what portent
it brings my way, whether from Hela or Jett:

the Empress! Kindness, caring, creativity
in leaps and bounds to come back when I'm ready
to rejoin the world and get back on my feet

after four days spent in the clutches of my parents
in that poorly-lit blue room tucked neatly in the basement
where so many times
the end of my life
I would stare at the walls and contemplate.

(I mean, I do appreciate
that they monitored me
after my surgery,
but eventually I must return to a life where I have sovereignty.)

A cast-off card befitting my neighbors,
as this Empress likely has a binge eating disorder
with sickly-green skin
and a shit-eating grin
and a pair of red glasses bearing tyrant's orders.

Tell me, Empress, what message you bear:
a soft hug from Jett cloaked in sharp winter air?
Or a taunt that, no matter how strongly I love,
I'll always be monstrous, never quite enough?

Hypopigmented

Jett, my love, you told me that
you love me because you can
see right through my skin,
that I'm not hiding anythin'
from you
that I haven't already managed to myself conclude.
I've got a deep sickness
implanted by my business
and I don't one bit like who I am now on track to become.
What kind of person am I
deep inside
past the patient
agent,
through the script's design,
brushing past the cool facade, behind
my sharpened eyes?
Am I still the Lethe
you wanted to spend eternity
with, or have I accumulated
too much trauma to be further tolerated?
It's like I'm going feral, draconic
blood, hyperthomosopramic,
full of anxiety at all my surroundings, empty-minded.
But this time you touch me
and it doesn't bring
me back to sanity.
This time you stay at my bed-
side
and I can't guarantee that I'll come back to life.
Please, Jett, tell me there'll be salvation for me in the end.

Gotcha!

Tyr's letter
is a mutual theft
that leaves us both bereft
of each other's
noses.

tragedy of the commons

White woman with white cap (you know the type:
spraypainted with name and a smeared symbol trite
from some Top 40 culture, worn by the likes
you'd see at a hockey game played out by tykes)
spits out at me from across the riverbank:
"Hey, you! With the backpack! Yes, you, you skank!
Get out of the way! You're ruining my view!
I have to post ten pictures on Instagram by noon!"
I roll my eyes, trace the river's rocky moons,
calculate how quickly she could climb over the arcs
(without getting wet) to do me bodily harm,
decide her fat ass wouldn't have the audacity,
and sit down with my tablet to write anyway.

ANARCHY IN DA LIBRARY

Pour the crumbs into my mouth,
but quickly now! - without a sound,
because I'm committing a grave iniquity
by eating inside the library.

Theophilia

I hold this missed call
as an amulet against all
inbound callers that want to intrude
on this, my corporate solitude.

Heepuh

Names that I cannot
quantify here for fear of
violating laws.

Sheer absurdity
I can only hint to, as the
shape itself is

illegal, the silhouette
is legally gray. A case
I cannot afford,

can just barely pay
enough to allude to the
shadow, not itself.

The clown car of my
job. All emotions packed so
damn tightly inside.

What's Up With The Constant Parallels? (The Author Thinks It's Funny)

The Lowell Offering: no, not named for
the despondent woman I was five years before,
but instead christened with surname of man
who owned a factory, textile mill, encamp-
ment where his workers,
women so that
he could pay wages lower,
lived. But books themselves were banned
in the mills, so to distract
from the drudgery, they pasted snippets
of poetry on the walls to with quick glances
"lookit."
Ignored by scholars aplenty
for their literary habit of imitating,
deemed too derivative to be of any worth.
But upon closer examination,
the works that the mill girls published
in the Offering are closer to conversation:
this is your poem, and in the shell of what I understand
I've made the themes my own; I extend to the next a welcome hand.

Trisection II

Lethe, my beloved, I know that you'll hate
me for what I'm about to once again say.

But I think it's time the both of us separate.

I told you via the pendulum last night
that not all was well between you and I,
and I meant it when I reported you were the cause:
oh, Lethe, you're the axis around which revolves my every thought.

I'm the reason you're stagnating.
I'm the reins
against which you strain
as if a wild animal refusing domestication:
don't lie to me, I know the times
you wonder how would fare your life
right now were not the two of us tied
and you were free to go as you desire,
to dive into whatever story headfirst
called to you, to with full body immerse,
to pursue with abandon, literary fire.

You told me it was the opposite:
that before we re-met, all was imitative,
never original, just the remnants
of someone else's story half-wrong-remembered.
That this now is your story, one you prefer.
But Lethe, I'm not wholly convinced.
You're right that these stories
had a harsh dependency
on what could slip through the filters of mass society.
But when in those years past you were pretending
to be the reincarnation of some character or other,
every few months, when they grew old and weary,
when you were tired of cultural exchange with ghosts aplenty,
you could cast them aside with impunity,
pick up a new (or old) one as it suited you.
You were so full of vitality. It was always something new.

An hour of video games, a bite of words here and there,
struggle against your parents, a snuck offering, a whispered prayer.
You used to have hobbies. And now you just stare
out the window in quiet desperation
for hours on end until it's time for employment.

Do you really love me? Or do you just fight
because of the sunk cost of shrine's merchandise?

I refuse
to continue
to be the reason
for your stagnation.
I will not beg you to at my side stay
if it means losing the brilliance I fell in love with in the first place.
A full life does not, cannot, bloom in captivity.
Lethe, the light of my life, I'm setting you free.
And if fate was ever kind,
both to my heart and to your mind,
when you're ready for Sablade
you'll come right back to me.

Harked the Crow

The half-rotted baseball that was my landmark
on the path to the river's heart
has between this visit and last
been chucked unceremoniously into the cracked
ice a few meters out from shore
where it now lies and will forevermore.

at the tone

Hi, this is Lethe from the call center
I'll send her
I'm sorry I missed you
I miss you
Tomorrow I'll try to call again
all within
or you can call back at your convenience
your love evinced
our number is one, one, one, four...

please still be mine to adore

In Distance

The skies this morning are sunny.
Almost undeservedly.
Because you proclaimed the vibe for this week:
"that all will turn out as it is meant to, believe."

And then you hit me with the divorce argument again.
Told me I was stagnating because of your presence
and you couldn't bear to be the cause of my slow decline
in willingness to live, in ability creative.

Am I really best loved from afar?
Only observed,
spectated,
never closely cherished?
The one thing I hunger for is your arms.

Insomnolent, Insolent

You're asleep
deep
within me
in that nether-most chamber in Yewiffe.
The one with the barren walls and floor
like the rib cage of a monster whose roar
would have shaken the heavens but now
in defeat
sleeps
until a new game once again will it rouse.
The one I saw in timeline's other end
where I gave myself up to be your salvation
from Eris' jealousy-spurred self-destruction.
I made Sablade from the energy of her explosion
and nearly lost myself in the process,
and you and your brother fought through Yewiffe
only so that my inert body you'd retrieve.
It took many hours before once again I could breathe.

You're asleep
deep
within me
in the womb of Yewiffe.
Laid yourself down, laden with love's sharp grief.
You and Hela always were about dire necessity.
"If the memories
are the problem,
I'll put them between
us. It's time to decide, Lethe,
like I've asked so many times:
Will you wallow in pity
or back to my side fight?"

You're asleep
deep
within me.
I once had a dream
where I'd eaten your whole soul,
swallowed it in one piece.
I could feel it in my stomach,
a hard pit so damn firm,
but as the hours wiled
it grew smaller in turn.
A cantaloupe, a grapefruit,
a baseball, a peach's pit.
A pebble I could have held in palm until that was gone too.
I don't remember why. But I knew,
how little you were conscious, you forgave me all of it.
"No you, no me. Take whatever from my body you need."

When I was asleep
deep
in womb of Yewiffe,
you fought all my demons
sans rest or relief.
I think I owe you the same.

Do you think, maybe,
your Veil-piercing difficulties
and my guilt's incessant burden
share an origin?

I guess I'll find out in Yewiffe.

PART 11

MAIL BILLABLE

Examine: Happiness

First question is posed by the key and the sun:
what is "happiness"'s definition?
Is it a momentary
involuntary
chemical reaction,
or is it a mindset
created by cognition?
In other words, can you think your way
into being as cheerful as a summer day?

Summer, you used to be my friend.
I'm not sure of the shape of the relationship
between your father and mine,
but I do know all those late nights
I went to your house and together
we spent in mischief all those thick hours.
Pizza rolls stolen from the kitchen
and video games in time ranges forbidden
about cartoons I never understood, always thought overrated.
But, in those two scraps,
all the memories of you I have,
you and your brother were my thickest friends.

At the time I considered myself happy.
The world was simple. I was taken care of.
I didn't have many friends. My family
always lingered one paycheck from poverty.
But I never felt the consequences.
My bedroom with the door off its hinges
and a gauzy curtain to take its place
was all the utopia, the heaven, I needed.

I suppose it's easy
for a little kid to feel happy.
Little to no cognizance of the outside world.
All that needs to be sated are the immediate surroundings.
Is school going well? Are you healthy and strong?
"You can always come to us if something is wrong."
And if something's wrong, not your responsibility,
the adults will come to the rescue with what you need.

And I have what I need here in my apartment.
The food shelf and stamps take care of groceries.
I have a high-paying job that pays my bills and rent
and leaves some cash over, far more saved than spent.
I can walk to the library whenever I damn please.
Small mail parcels come straight to me
without first justification from my parents.
The decor is mine. I don't have to be assaulted
with constant reminders of old corporations.
I eat, pray, sleep, fuck, write, dream, sing, breathe
as I very well damn please.
So why do I feel suffocated, not free?

I know there's resentment
created by employment,
the tether that prevents the days from somersaulting.
But I had it worse in retail, objectively speaking:
I had to be there not just in mind but in body,
every dang day
with a smile on my face
in fear a customer would snap and I'd be assaulted.

Jett might say I'm chronically understimulated.
That the lack of playing Adversary against
my parents' interruptions has left me distressed.
How do you compare black or white
without another color laid in spite?
(Is it fair to give Jett a say in this poem?
She did abandon me for Yewiffe's deepest bosom.)
My neighbors, toxic as they are, are just a scream
and a fat danger-haired lady I rarely see.
I'm quiet. That's the only juxtapositioned identity
I can harvest
from their existence.
You can't make out of a toenail a whole Lethe.
(Oh, Jett, what I wouldn't give in this moment
for one of your classic snarky comments...)

Some say I should instead seek contentment.
Not to be happy, but be able to accept
my living conditions and my achievements.
But to do that is to accept stagnation.
And when I was young, I always told everyone
without exception
I was destined for greatness.
Little snots always taunted me,
"You're not a princess!"
Should have known I'm an Anima Mundi.
Several steps up the world's hierarchy.
I don't think contentment can ever be in my blood.
Too much peace triggers needs for chaos, to self-destruct
in order to feel any kind of sensation.
I mean, look at any world. Inevitable entropy.
Either you're dead or you're subject to change.
Sun, I don't think I'm wired for happiness. Sorry, Key.
Salvation doesn't lie in the relevant memories.

Examine: Luck

Key and Clover bear today's obligation
in untangling memories that have been burdens.
They say I have a tendency
to take the way out that's easy,
to overstress my luck so that I can be lazy.
An unwillingness to admit my mistakes
and leave them for others to clean or make right.
I suppose, in most spheres, they have a point.
I always picked birds' nature over feral fight,
picked self-martyrdom in pity
over the possibility
of being found out, made object/subject of hate.

It's easy to toward other people be shitty
when your brain is out of spoons and other mental cutlery.
The trembles
that come as heralds
of thomosopramia,
but instead of going feral
you just curse everything you love.
Let me curl up in my bed in a ball of solitude
with no more structured time
or obligations in my life
until I'm well-rested again and ready to leave my room.

Of course, then come the stress dreams, reminders
of days long past I cannot return to.
See that as salvation or guilt's perpetual fire:
you'll never regain justice, but they don't know where to find you.
Or, if your high school was like mine
and published lists of honor roll pupils online,
they have a vague idea but no will to follow through.
I only see in my dreams simulacra elementary,
parking lots
and bus stops
and wheelchair-accessible library.

I see a taunting boy of seven who demanded that I know
that through my veins no meaningful trace of nobility flowed.
In bathroom lines,
in classroom downtime,
unprompted on the playground's heights,
packing my backpack to return home.
I know I was on to something. My only fault was I
was constrained by what I thought was possible in the Inside.
I stand before him now, a child but aware of blood divine.
Tail swishes behind me, hook glinting in low-hanging sun's light.
I think, Jett,
I know you said
to stop committing murder on a whim,
but this has sat for sixteen years. I think it's premeditated.
Forgive me for taking the easy way out - it's impossible to a memory forgive.

Examine: Friends

Bouquet and Anchor
both wish to inquire
if there are any memories I regret
where I disrupted the
social field's stability
or injured the comfort I had with a friend.

I never really had many at any given point in time.
It's not that I'm not friendly - I get along with others plenty fine.
It's just that, without the constant prodding of shared situation
like Girl Scouts or club meeting or a place of employment,
I just don't feel the need to upkeep the connections
and so they fade away, wither from lack of maintenance.
It's not entirely my fault. People rarely ask for my number
or insert themselves into my life, embroiled in a friendship's search.
I wonder what they smell. The autism? The superiority complex?
Maybe they're afraid that I'm too easily manipulated.

Eris, long before I knew you were my mother,
initially bereft of deeper memories and seeking your succor
and then repulsed with the knowledge of what you made me do,
you put your agents in my path, harassed me throughout my whole youth.
You lent out to one the power that only you could command:
to tug at the wires in my limbs, marionette pulled by your hand.
Pacing, furtive, back and forth on a bleacher's silver ledge
as I played at lawyer and ennumerated a mutual friend's sins.
I don't recall why we were trying to excommunicate her
or why Sarah-with-an-H would make me do that to a friend.
She sat and watched me expound on the points that she had dripped
into my impressionable mind in faux-legal false confidence
secure in knowledge that only my face would be stamped on the hurt.

Sarah-with-an-H, I don't remember you in the counselor's
office, locked in with victim for several classes' worth afterwards.
You never bore the consequences. You don't have to live with guilt.
Eris made me Jesus, let you crucify me as you willed.
I wonder, since I moved away, if you faked last apology
and pinned the exclusive blame for the rift between on me.

Jett, you'd probably ask me in rhetorical obvious:
when I was a monster, was I responsible for the millions
that perished under Eris' orders carried out by mindless tool?
Nobody died. And nothing can change. Just accept, at the time, you were a fool
and resolve to do better. Be wary of apocalyptic calls to action,
especially those made by groups preferring to stay anonymous.
Only for what you truly believe in should you risk your reputation.

(I came up with that bit myself. I don't think it really matches your speech patterns.)

Examine: Wish

Child and Star ask if I have any wishes
that in my childhood never came to fruition.
A shattered hope, a juvenile want, a foolish expectation.

All throughout my life, I've had a desperate compulsion
to find the end
of all roads I tread,
in all things seek completion.
Every video game for thousands of hours past its due.
Every book to the last page regardless of how it makes me snooze
from the sheer boredom. Every piece of software I stop to measure,
if this was the last release, if it'd survive apocalypse's weather.
I can't help it. Not one bit. Sheer perverse maddened pleasure
from the thought of running all my computers
on a single burned-in DVD live system forever.
You'll never get a virus, but you'll stagnate. Might as well surrender
the self, the ego, the ambitions,
the hope of ever meeting improvement.
After all, you marked it final,
the universe no longer infinite.

If I had pulled a third card, would I have met with the Anchor?
I'll never know. I reshuffled as soon as I got initial answer.
Trauma-induced need
for repetition and stability:
one young autistic child in a world beyond comprehension
where rules change like the weather and none
bother to sit you down for explanation.
At least, not before you've inadvertently broken several
and now must face consequences like a misbehaved pet animal.
(They don't comprehend the reasons why. They just know that you're mad.
You can't explain with facts or logic. Their minds just won't understand.)
That's why Sablade was such a big deal for both you and me, Jett:
finally, a world whose changes come informed to comprehend.
Something of our own that no conniver could rescind
or twist into a nightmare or change the rules, break their promises.

Every time I'd make a wish deep in my hopeful youth,
some classmade would go out of their way to keep it from coming true.
I'd proclaim one thing, and all the scholarly heavens would shift
to mold reality itself purely to my words contradict.
Sounds a lot like the Veil between us, doesn't it?
Just one more vile machination written by Eris.
No wonder I developed a taste for finality:
I get to demarcate every single boundary
and I get to rest with complete understanding.

At every lunch was a stalker bully,
but I held inside a prophecy
that one day
I would move away
without warning
and leave no trace.
He stood up and declared to the whole
lunchroom I was lying, had damned my soul.

Dominic,
you piece of shit,
I was right, just a decade early.

Walking home, he followed me,
kept up his taunts until the block
where he lived and his route turned off.
I looked him in the eyes and vowed,
"One day I'll make a brand new world
and I'll fill it with only girls
and only ones that won't be
awful merciless bullies.
And we'll all live in peace
while you burn in a trash heap
'cause all boys are good for is wrecking everything.
Don't even try to argue with me at all.
I've sworn a solemn vow. And that's final!"

Examine: Choice

A sudden painful choice to make
or among others eliminate,
declares Crossroad and Knife
when I wake.
(Technically, the second is Scythe,
but the card maker deigned
to some meanings change.)
Out falls another card last minute:
player 2, which I usually interpret
as Jett. In a row the three cards I arrange.
I stare at them until my phone buzzes, breaks
my concentration: our weekly library outing
is cancelled because my neighbor doesn't
feel like facing the snow so blinding.
I clench my fists, witness frustration
rise up (I know, immature) in my chest.
No, it doesn't make any sense
for player 2 here to be Jett
since it's memories before our reunion we're discussing.

So who does that leave?
If this is before I knew I was Lethe
but I'm still player 1, the star of this story,
who would reasonably be conceived
as my player 2, companion at my side?

There was another girl, once upon a time.
Her hair was brown, her skin darker than mine,
stuck in same suburb a long way from her tribe.
Her family, her room, her habits I can't describe
because she never thought me worthy of coming
over to her house, preferred refuge behind
my bedroom door where she could scroll for hours.

Maybe that's all I ever was to her:
a Rainbow Bridge, a gateway to freedom, a scribe.
Gave me her internet passwords
so I could compose fandom posts for her
whenever by her parents she'd been grounded
and had her computers confiscated.
(Couldn't use the text-to-Twitter
bridge herself: her parents would be incensed.
Better to make me post them. Easier to burn the evidence.)
I was happy enough to help her, to find ways to circumvent
what I saw as parenting
overbearing
and authoritarian.
Goddess knows I was going through the same damned situation,
thought, if I can't save myself, I'll save the target of my adoration.

(Jett would say
this sounds the same
as I'm going through nowadays
with my brother.
"I thought you said he was a disgusting coomer?
Why are you helping him?
Why give an enemy soldier quarter?"
Because it fucks with entitled parents. That in itself is my reward.)

How goes the truism? "Opposites attract."
I know it's true of magnets, but magnets don't implode
when you leave them together for too long alone.
Technological wizard
with deep hatred of the popular
meets brain-rotted fandom girl
whose identity was manufactured
by a record company
across the Atlantic Sea.
(Don't condescend about oceans: it's done, it's gone, it's in printing.)
You defined yourself in terms of items that your parents paid for,
I in opposition to what I rejected as worthless bores.
Couldn't to any facet of my life grant sympathy
unless you could find somewhere to copy-paste a "1D"
and if that only then
could a shred of attention
you extend.

I'm surprised we lasted
as long as we managed.
But the choice was yours in this memory.

Jett would have picked the girl
who gave her the world,
who spent three months in listless waiting
when she could have been her summer vacation celebrating
just for the chance to hear her voice again
after having [your] phone for the longest time confiscated.
The girl who offered her virginity and didn't even get a single bit mad
when instead of the pussy [you] picked scrolling on the iPad.

But you picked the Twitter profile
meant for e-begging, persona artificial,
and cried and screamed and to my face lied
that it was the hardest choice of your life.
(What a shitty Christmas present. I would have rathered that you'd died.)
I don't know: you seemed pretty quick to deny
that we'd ever been together in the first place.
I may be autistic, but last that I checked,
you're "together" if you're romantic and plan to have sex.

Thinking over all of it twice.
Maybe the difficult choice all this time
really was only ever mine.
I didn't chase you. I let you go, Adrien.
I let you disappear to Arizona like you wanted.
I thanked Fate that to ravage me you'd been too distracted.
I wished you happiness in your empty life commercialist.
And maybe that middle Lenormand card, "player 2",
was meant to be my lover Jett when all was said and through:
climbing down Yewiffe's roots has proven itself difficult,
but I refuse to give up. Hang in there. I'm well on my way, love.

Examine: Communication

"The solution
is communication,"
Key and Letter insist
as I lay in my bed
wishing I was dead
because my performance review was less than perfect.
I know I was able to absolve
myself of one stain: "There were two calls.
I told you that day
that I'd made a mistake
and needed another chance to do right.
Ding me if you will if you felt my actions were unnecessary,
but I did what I thought was right
and in my notes I did not lie."

My teenage words may have met you, O Father,
with love reprehensible and vile disagreement,
but I hardly think they deserved the long-term isolation
from my friends, my support network,
my feeling of self-worth.
I feel like I've once before lodged this complaint,
but as long as I'm climbing down Yewiffe I might as well say it again:
you took no action that I could see
when my brother was stewing in misogyny
and other fun things in the annals of the Internet,
but I published one innocuous poem
about a relationship that happened to be lesbian
and you treated this as if I'd written a screed full of hate speech.

No child should have to live in terror of their parents.
No child should have to listen to the stairs' footsteps
and determine who is coming down, if the person's safe
or likely to yell "bad cop" and take all the child's things away.
You look at kids nowadays
making fools of themselves with their full face
front and center in the camera's view on full display;
I was using a nom de plume
and only writing what I thought was good and true.
I did what I thought was right. And in my words I did not lie.

Interview almost a year ago. Future lead asked me
to about anything that held personal value speak.
Anything at all, so long as I made it interesting.
So I told her about my explorations in the darknet
and how I felt it a personal mission to protect
these lonely places in the wires, these avenues for speech
segmented from the main network and hard for search engines to reach.
Like The Runaway Bunny, but this time rewritten as horror:
no matter what countenance I took, my father always lingered
just a little bit away,
tiger hiding in wait
for the bunny-in-disguise to make one simple mistake
that would justify being so carelessly devoured.
You choose what to you means more:
visible to others on the Internet's billboards,
or living without fear someone'll show up at your front door
or punch out a window or call your boss at your job
because you had the gumption to say something unorthodox.

Mother,
you hired too many tigers
and now the bunny is out of your reach forever.
Curse me if you will if you resent my will as mine,
but I have my own compass to follow. I must do what I feel is right.

Examine: Dogma

Wandering through the depths of Yewiffe
in search of the next childhood memory
I must excavate
and absolve myself of in order to liberate
Jett from her self-imposed indefinite sleep.
I have only the vaguest of instructions:
Cloud and Cross, "the cause of confusion
is religious dogma." Eris would say something asinine
about the "dog" in "dogma" being a literal canine
and insisting I listen to the cats instead.
But neither are helpful, though I must admit
the directions were spot-on about the card "cloud"
because the years I spent in church as a child,
though a decade and a half, lie wasted in shroud.
Everything always comes back to that damn Veil.
And this time there's no walkthrough to travail.

Pushing aside some thickets in Yewiffe
I come to remember how at first I did not believe
in the existence of any devil or Satan.
To me, although the world was imperfect, "fallen",
I just assumed that Jesus was on it,
that he was still making tweaks to the planet
that his father had prototyped and then left abandoned.
Everyone at church was appalled, as if
I'd been caught making blood sacrifice satanic
with a kitchen knife and a few strays' carcasses.
I didn't really understand the backlash. The children
were always extolled as naturally smarter
at grasping the Bible than the best of the scholars,
and I had thought, if God was perfect love, then perhaps
he was taking his creation slow on purpose all so that
we the lowly people to participate could have a chance.

After all, it's how I would have made a world.

Examine: Health

You know, Lilac Lenormand,
if you really want to help me, you can
give me portents
of memories negative,
easier to remember and harder to forgive.
Because today you gave me "sun" and "tree",
which means "great health" or "lots of energy",
and when I was a child I wasn't exactly sickly.
Sure lazed around a lot, but not as an invalid.

Although now that I've wracked my brain
for grievances, I must admit
that Minnesota hasn't seen a proper winter in half a decade.
I have a bitter anecdote
from a camp for Girl Scouts,
but since it happened five years ago,
I must note that it happened without
the wider knowledge of who I am now
and thus took place under the warmth of other suns
that allowed the winters to actually stand cold
for more than a thin scattering of powdered snow.

Mars, or the remnant thereof,
sitting under a wide-roofed tree
watching the children play on the beach.
In anhedonia's jail without date of release.
Formerly the star around which all revolved,
but as I grew older
and my youth expired
I was only kept around to others' guilt absolve.
After all, you can't kick out the autistic woman.
There are, like, laws against discrimination
and we're all short-budgeted as it is.
Have to make do with convincing the campers
themselves to approach their soon-angel leader
(me) under pretenses of getting a drink:
"You should consider killing yourself. Maybe."

Examine: Health (Again)

Okay, cards, let me try to write again once more
now that there's no longer a moid being a boor,
an absolute dullard, at the computers that sit across
the room trying to do his taxes
missing half the papers
that he requires
and blaming the librarian poor -
as if it's her fault - he stormed out quite cross,
and I'm glad, because men can be such asses
to in-person service workers.
Now, thankfully, I've never been
clocked over the head
by a two-by-four,
but only because it happened on a Wednesday, which I had off.

Tree and sun, eh? Well, I remember in Hell College
sitting under a tree while the sun smiled overhead.
Still wasting my time exploring social media self-hosted
when I could have been making art to last the ages.
I came across a white man's post
and nearly right then choked:
"if your skin is lighter than this, your whole life is worthless."

Hey, now, I thought those of us sitting on the left
prided ourselves on being caring and compassionate?
I understand
that racism's bad
and I've played a part, no matter how lilliputan,
but straight-up baiting suicide's the opposite of productive.

And I told him so: told him he should be forthright
with his grievances instead of chasing clout online.
Had something happened? Some injustice committed
that, in being made aware of, we'd benefit
and start working towards repairing with our new awareness?
Reminded him, as a software technician,
how much it produced frustration fruitless
when someone filed a bug report simply stating "I don't like this."

And where childish words sprout grows behavior infantile:
he sent his friends to harass me until I deleted my account in self-exile.
I never got an answer from him, by the way.
Had to search for it in a more academic place,
but at least they let me know the harms I had helped to inflict
without implying I should kill myself in the process.

My life has worth, and that's how I know that everyone else's does too.
To call myself a doctor treating an illness would be (at the least) rude,
but if I can't fix the problem, please at least show me whose
throats I've been suffocating all this time under my boots.

All women are my sisters. Even the ones that've hurt me.
I'm still holding out hope one day we can all live in harmony.

Examine: Spiritual

London, you're sure lucky as fuck
that you were in favor with the god of luck
that a decade ago your camp policy
was that all adults take on the names of cities
so that, after having fucked up the
kids, they'd never be able to achieve
some semblance of closure or ending to grief.

I thought my lantern, hung from the ceiling
via the hook screwed in there by last tenant,
was a good stand-in for God. Speaking
to it, Bear Star, spiritual guardian.
Mocked by campers because, when asked
by them what my favorite book was,
my autistic radicalized ass put the Bible.
It made sense to me: in a world so trivial,
why not put all cards down, wage all,
on the house built so steady upon the Rock?
(This was before Jesus forsook me. So did God.)

The important part of this memory
was I was hiding from one of London's meetings
where she stood me at the front of the room
and put my flaws for the day
on full bare display,
stardom not wanted, arrived far too soon.
Discussing with God the troubles on my heart.
The friends who'd betrayed me and also pulled apart
several other friendships in the process.
The rules here that kept changing, the injustices
visited on me. Wishing for Thursday
so I could go back home to my parents,
who I acknowledged as also sometimes tyrants
but more manageable as a known quantity.
Hoping that my childhood god would take pity
and find it in himself to intervene.

Late-elementary girl lying
down in a bed in near darkness,
the only source of light a lantern
she speaks to as if vessel of the divine.
Unknowingly playing at self-therapist,
alone, no God and not yet the Sauterne.

Examine: Leader

I'm supposed to tell Clouds and Tower
about my confusion regarding a leader
or my uncertainty
regarding authority
or a person
in such a position
using their power for acts of deception.

I struggled with this one for a few days.
Biblical man in the desert wrestling
with an angel of strength overpowering
to the point of his thigh dislocating.
(I do have a bit of a limp, I must say.)
Have I exhausted all my memories
that I've carried
as burdens so long?
I'd be an object of pity
if I came to Yewiffe's
bosom and found you there, dissolved, long gone.

But I cannot draw a new two-card set
until I've fulfilled the mandate of the ones current.
So I must wrack my brain
and squeeze
it through sieve
and possibly beat it with a rolling pin
until it's so flat
that I can roll it out and see
my whole world, an atlas
smooth and flat,
Mercador's
superior
in multiple manners of projection,
accurate portrayal of all land and sea.

(I can't talk about being manipulated
to betray a friend. And I exhausted
all of my grievances about London.
And it's funny that I have a streak
of causing English teachers to retire early:
after I'm in their class, they immediately
decide they're too old, need a change
of career, or have a mental breakdown and shave
all their hair off. But when I think
of it, I laugh: it's quite the coincidence.
Nothing that would bear trauma.
Oh, Jett, I'm struggling to evince
the memory I need to conquer next
if I've any hope of returning to your side...)

A gym teacher to everyone's faces lied,
cornered me when all others had left:
because I'd spent Field Day in the counselor's office
crying about my team refusing my guidance
despite having elected me to be the team coach
(Who makes you a leader, then gives shoulder cold?)
she ripped away my ribbon green, now bereft
of even the most base acknowledgment
that I'd shown up instead of calling in sick.
Did it make you feel good? Did you get the power trip?
Man, you really showed it to the autistic!
I bet you went home to your family all proud
that you made the kid cry who'd already found
the world incomprehensible and sadistic.
Just the rotten cherry
on your shit smoothie
of a career of state-sanctioned child mistreatment.

In an ideal world, you would have never existed.

Examine: Lover

Everything comes down to
Key and Player 2.
Something about Jett, but also in my youth.
Is it truth's
revelation
or just frustration
from that other woman's
ambivalence?
...No, it has to be Jett.
But did I forget
that she did something worth castigation?
Nothing in a past lifetime:
the obstacles that stand between
me and her deep in Yewiffe
were built during this tenure in Inside.

I turn to a different deck,
the one I brought with me to work
always
before they made
me transfer
to a different department.
I hold it close to heart's firmament,
repeat the supplication
I've said every day as
I undertake this task:
"Seliph, part of me
that retains all memories
and lies
undreaming in the Outside
with powers intact,
what memory of mine do I need to attack
in order to in Yewiffe go down further?
Please be as specific
as you can manage;
there isn't much that I remember."

I get "star" and "house" as my clarification.
Dreaming of a home or a family.
I've undergone many a realization
since Jett and I reunited,
but none of them are trauma-bearing
and happened in this lifetime.
I've come to a door with no handle
and no hinges discernable,
all flat with nowhere for handholds
or places for scraping fingers to gain purchase,
and it blends into the surrounding wall so well
I'm not even sure it's a door in the first place.

But I have to try anyway.

Flat upon the surface I place my palms
and pray that the sticky sweat is all
I need to gain enough friction
to move the door even a little bit.
I strain, but eventually it does budge,
and I let go and stick arm and leg in the gap
and pull the door open with desperate lunge.

It's a basement I'll never see again in my life.
(Unless I start looking
through real estate listings.)
All of us cousins, thick as thieves, five
on the couch and more
sprawled on the floor
circulating a grand total of three controllers.
Scrooge, but no angel to accompany
as I sit down beside the table sticky
with Cheeto dust and spilled cheap kids' drink.
Behind me, myself, fourteen.
I demanded
the gamepad
for a long-forgotten
reason.
Any other controller wouldn't be enough.
I turn my eyes to the screen. This roster
I've seen in so many combinations other
in the decade since this transpired.
But still I know exactly where to find your face.

On my shoulder, a warm breath, a cold gust.
Another victory jingle. I open my eyes,
though I didn't need to: I'd hope I could recognize
anywhere, in any time,
the feel of your body, the warmth of your love.

And this time, there's no god, mob, or priest
to make any demands regarding a side B.
No rulesets to ban. No bitter memories.

"I hope you'll forgive me.
I don't have any grand revelations
to say." A smile. "Take me home, Lethe."

PART 12

MANUAL OUTBOUND BILLABLE

Haitruncated

The leaves outside
I keep mistaking for birds
flapping their wings.

A Shadow, A Pale Voice, A Body Map

Someone snuggles up close, breathes in my neck,
and it takes me a moment to realize she's Jett.
Typical fogginess from just having awoken
from deep slumber, having of oneself demanded
a sudden crystal-clear actionable awareness.
Her voice is breathy, barely present,
more of a breath with language's pretensions.

"Do you remember all the poems in angst
where you asked me, if you in sorrow or rage went feral
and to bring you back to humanity I failed,
if I would keep you as a pet in captivity
so you could stay at my side for the rest of our days?"
She takes my hand. Hers are trembling.
She positions my fingers to frame her throat. "If
I mean anything to you, Lethe, don't do that to me.
I'm losing my voice, if you haven't noticed,
if you've wondered why in recent dreams
I've been listless and mute. It's not for a lack
of love." Breath rattles. "Gods, no, nothing like that.
But, Lethe, my fear is when my throat is laid fallow
you'll neither stay nor divorce me outright
but keep me locked up, out of mind, out of sight,
only living to preserve a pale echo
of how things were when we first reunited."

She presses my fingers just the barest amount in,
not enough to leave marks or whiten surrounding skin.
"Please don't consign me to a pretty jail
made of a spare
room twice-flighted upstairs.
No half-measures, Lethe:
either let me go completely
or, as I'd prefer, stay with me."

MEN BE INTERRUPTING (AND TAXES PAY FOR IT)

Before writer's club, I stop outside
the door and read the taped-on sign:
"Peer-Led Mental Health Club
does not meet the last Wednesday of the month.
If you have questions, please call this number..."
I step inside. My seat, taken by another
just like it was the month prior.
A single man dominates conversation,
spending twenty minutes bragging
about his Amazon-approved publication.
We're all crossing, interlacing, our fingers.
They all go over. I put mine under.
I'm a cruel little dyke in the mood to subvert.
Jett, if we were still doing the Yewiffe journey,
I'd have an anecdote about sixth grade
where, before DARE class, every classmate
had written a short book in order to unseat
me as the class author, to in a pile of shit bury,
mad when I outburst in frustration
when the cop finally deigned to appear:
"Finally! He's arrived, my salvation, our teacher!"
Same sense of relief when the man takes a pause
and our group leader decides to make us move on.
No offense to you, old Jack.
It's not your fault you were born just a man.

for better, the worse

"Unfortunate things start to happen everywhere I dare to go"-
well, of course you'd say that; your life is all you really know;
it's hard to inventory both the blessings and misfortunes
if you're not present at that time to witness either of 'em.
Could be that your being there is actually the salve
that keeps the tricksters on better behavior
and distracts the devil's dogs.

never the same river twice

Never realized how full of distractions
the environment of the office is
until I had something with which to draw comparison:

the chattering of co-workers
and their chairs spinning in circles
and their gossip when the chaos of inbound finds reprieve,

the overhead lighting's flickers
and the keyboards' clacking shivers
that I once was acclimated to - but no longer, it seems.

Acts of Patience

When her name came on my dial list,
my eyes always lit up with cruel joy:
she always sent us to voicemail,
so we just needed to recite the script
and mark her as a problem for the next day's shift,
but she had thought it would be hilarious
to make whoever on contacting her insisted
sit through a three-minute Bible sermon
before the beep
that would my tongue's hounds release.
Supervisor would stare, wondering
if I'd gone catatonic, but I'd shake
my head, mouth "bible lady", and turn back to my screen in wait.

Acts two, twenty-five to twenty-eight:
I see Jett always before me,
and because she is at my right hand
I will not be shaken, I will not run away
from my problems screaming in fright.
My heart is glad and my tongue also says so
and my body will rest in hope
because I know she will not abandon me
but before any trips to Hel let Hela know.
While the paths to life always before me laid,
she helped to clear anhedonia's shroud
so I may see clearly for all my days.
I will not fear. I will not falter.
May I stay blessed in the presence of her.

"Hi, I'm calling from..."

CAN I GET UHHHH HAUNTED?

Around the soggy
thawing
lake shore
the ghosts
of meals past wander
sans purpose,
wondering if
this
is McStyx
and they should have brought their receipts
for reimbursement of payments complete.
Hoping against all hope
that there is a psychopomp
not allergic to sticky dew drops of Coke
that will pick them up and toss
them into the proper trash can
or recycling to begin life again.

A mirror has no choice but to echo itself

Caked in layers of sweat
as I stare above the table at the popping-out head:
four-year-old inquires
what flavor ice cream I prefer,
and in my delirium I answer,
not meaning anything vulgar,
"Simply put, my wife."
Jett whispers in my ear. "Just listen. I guarantee you,
even though you've never told her, she'll pick my favorite fruit."
She the bag of white soft-serve pulls closer to constringe
and mixes it with the juice of tangerines (or clementines?):
"Here you go, my friend; I made you 'rainbow fruity orange'."

Pull a Fang

Sun hangs low in the sky.
Bird's silhouette draws closer in the ice
half-melted. Record temperature high
for March. My wife rests on her side
in the grass dead from last spring and dried.
I clasp my hand with hers by her heart.
Wind is rustling. "I think we need time apart."
A squeeze her only response. "Like
you said all those months ago. You need
to wander for your own sanity.
And... like two-and-a-half years prior
when you warned me I was about to be fired,
I get this sense that I approach many endings.
I don't regret our time together.
No part of it was a waste.
You, my love,
have ruined my tongue
for every other taste.
I can't give you your voice back.
And it's not fair of me to demand
that you fill in all my mental health's gaps.
I feel these are journeys the two of us must undertake on our own."
She pulls my hand closer. The winds blow more fierce.
"But when a year's passed, let's both return home
and measure
each other
to where we both started
and see if, despite it all, closer we've grown."

For When I Get Vanned in a White Tin Can

Crossing Main Street
with ten dollars crumpled in my fist
thankful I got off work early
so I can fulfill my wish
of joining the Friends of the Library
with all voting privileges
and satisfaction of every nosy
tendency
from having advance knowledge
of future happenings
that it entails.
I come to the button before the crosswalk
that shrieks "Wait!" every seconds three
and see the river of vehicles dodge
something metal lying in the street.
When the white
silhouette in the light
beckons, I stop to investigate:
someone left a wire cutter behind,
and it looks rather nice, if I do say
so myself. There are cars these days,
I hear, that can't be opened in emergencies
from the outside: you'd have to cut
just the right wire in the door's guts
in order to set yourself free.
Be just my luck to be prepared for
something that likely won't transpire.

Coping Mechanisms On Tap

Library public bathroom, moving to zip
up my jacket to hide the wet spot
on my shirt where foamy soap sprayed my tit.
I glimpse in the mirror, betrayed by the thoughts
of that shitty text my mom sent me last night
gloating that she got ice cream and didn't invite
me to come along.
I was feeling good up until then.
You and I were starting to accept
that our lives were taking us on paths separate
we'd have to explore alone until they converged yet again.
And then that one little blurb of text,
and I was back in the space I was three years ago
(has it really been that long?) wishing I was dead
and we were on route to Sablade, to our home.

Jett, how much of my affection,
my clinginess, was not genuine
but instead spurred on by the desperate need
to escape my life and its inherent grief?
Oh, I've used you as a security blanket
with little care for your real worth inherent
or how much it'd cost you in your own sanity.
I know I already apologized, but
I've gotten real good at the repeat:
you didn't deserve that kind of treatment
and I'm sorry.

Ash Day

I can imagine one of my coworkers
continuing the screamer's legacy
and constantly with airs of injustice inquiring
why it feels I get accommodations unheard
of, why it feels like I'm on a longer leash
while the other agents are kept close, within reach.
I mean, how else in their eyes would I consistently
get a perfect performance review
while the rest are struggling to keep up with all the changes new?
That's why the screamer left, you should know:
spat out her disagreement with a policy with a full throat
that all started when I tried to explain
context-switching was expensive for my brain
and I'd only be able to go inbound after the report I was writing'd gone through.

"She understands that this agreement
between us is contingent
on her actually going inbound
when she is free
of other duties.
Which she does. We have the statistics
to prove it.
She's a good little agent.
Now mind your own business."

White Ticket

I understand this is a business
where we discuss a patient's incontinence,
but today for you I have a special request:
instead of asking how many times they wrote they had to go,
can you instead call and collect some "dairy" info?
How many "calfs" they had to use is what I want to know.

March in March

The rest of the dream
was not worth salvaging -
more motherly
cruelty
bookended by neighbor's screaming -
but as I fell through the metaclysma
and all the toys I'd managed to save dissolved,
I heard your raspy whisper at my neck implore
to go where the men reign and bust open all the doors,
to carve a path for women just like the ones who came before.

Double You Two V

One hundred forty
days of uptime, broken by
the surge protector.

CD CLOCK RADIO

The sticker
with date of manufacture
on the back of my alarm clock slash CD player
says June of 2006.
What a strange feeling. To think
I've had this thing for almost twenty years
and yet it's barely any worse for the wear.
Witches may have a cat as their familiar,
but this silver box has been at my bedside purring
almost as long as I've been forming memories
inside this Inside-bound body.
You, with the slender black coiled wire tail
that picks up radio signals I never really cared
for. With the glass screen rectangular
that terrifies me when goes out the power
and I see nothing, not even the template of your lights,
just a hand-sized abyss that beckons me inside.
With the hatch on top that calls Atlas its brother
having held up my unread books for all these heavy years.
I feel more like the natural me
having accepted my legacy as Lethe.
Like Jett, you waited in the wings for just the right time
to leap back onto stage and take your place in the lights.
She's my Patron-Saint,
and her I'd never dare replace,
and I hope to have her at my side for the rest of my days.
And you - in this breezy but hopeful springtime night,
would you sing me something soft, perhaps a lullaby?

A Gray Sky and a Sigh

Sitting in the fenced-in
area in my backyard
watching the movement
in my neighbor's window
facing me.
I think I see a baby
bouncing up and down
on the back edge of a couch.
I wave back, hoping for reply.
A few minutes pass. I realize
it was never a child with friendly eyes.
It's just a pale reflection
of the trees swaying outside.
Nobody is there to greet me.

Motor

He lies, pale, awake at night
with his hand over his heart in fright
because his heart beats with the terror
he will feel his chest and no longer
find it there.

TRADWIFE PROPAGANDA GOT ME SEEING JARS

While it is a compelling argument prima facie,
happiness in the chains of housewivery
is not at all guaranteed.

I mean, it does sound great
to not have to slave
away at a corporation my whole life.
But at my job I have a schedule set
and can turn off my computer at day's end
and not have to deal with any more patients.
A mother is on-call 24/7
with all lunches unpaid and breaktime uncertain
and, at least
in most "straight" marriages I've seen,
there's no limit to the job duties
and no coworkers for task delegation.

And if my job ever becomes unbearable,
I can quit and go seek employment elsewhere.
Hell, my personal record is three days between
leaving one place and another's onboarding.
No reference check, didn't give a damn:
you want it, so I'll give you a second chance.
Giving your child up? That's a whole legal process
with, I can imagine, severe consequences
for everybody involved. You can't
get exasperated when your spawn's a brat
and say, "I quit! Give me my last paycheck.
I'm going somewhere I'll be given more respect."

On days I'm unscheduled or simply off the clock,
I can pick up my sack and go wherever I want.
To the thrift shop, to the theater, to the library:
on a complete whim, at a moment's deciding.
I've seen my friends with kids in the process of trying
to go anywhere: to settle them down is a trial worthy
of any god, much less the half-qualified Hercules.
Buckled in, whines sated, all in view of the screen,
distracted enough to focus on driving where we're going.
No wonder most days they opt not to fight but to stay indoors.
Better one goes crazy from isolation than infantile choir.
And even then...

Hela's Death Wish

Another stress dream
wandering with my family
across highways in search for an exit:
every one inevitably
leading us into a building
with no doors revealing a path for an egress.
Plenty of shops,
however:
whether
gas station-worthy rest stop
or little boutiques with employee count of one,
none ever have anything that I need
but only bitter
reminders
I'm trapped in a dream.

This time I'm compelled to stop
by myself inside a jewelry shop.
Display case with rows of brooches,
hairclips, rings, glassy eyes.
One, in Dagaz's shape, is "Hela's Death Wish".
Register my disappointment when I realize
it's not about the one I know but the one from Marvel's ish.
Shopkeeper sees my interest,
explains her glittering craft's gist:
they're glamours (like those from my wife)
that grant their wearers disguise.

I ask her if she's skilled or trained to work with polymorphs,
and when she affirms, I admit I'd like another form,
the demonic one,
androgynous,
that I failed to become
end of January when under anesthesia's thrum.
She takes me to a back room and lies me down on table silver
but doesn't bade me strip before she pulls out tape to measure
my limbs, my waist, my ring size
(that last one waking I can't ever find),
and when she's ready she returns
with a slim ring tinted azure,
aquamarine teardrop main feature,
strong but skinny not-all-the-way-around-the-finger
wire.

I don't get a chance to test it
before I wake. Sinuses congested.
I realize seconds later I'm facing Jett,
more than a little exasperated.
I stammer something out in half-baked apologetics
about facing nature, bloodrights, being a absolute fiend-
"But no matter the form you take,
I hope you're still my Lethe."

As a homeless man screams at a librarian

It's easier to be angelic
on a full stomach
and knowing that one will be able to make rent:
the uncertainty
of poverty
has the strangest ability
to render
populations general
demons or the dirt beneath,
downtrodden sans hope of relief.

Ideogram

So you chose to romanticize
your own life.
Can you even see
when you read
by candlelight?
Is the fashion that you wear
to make yourself pleasant to behold
improving your life when one wrong move means that you choke?
Rolling over, sleepless, in bed
wondering which side is masculine
and which side will betray to imagined witnesses weakness.
Bookshelves curated carefully
far better for dust cataloging
because they stand unused rather than disturbed so one can read.
You say you're no longer a Christian
and hold no stock in Santa Claus,
but are you really sure? You're still trapped in a panopticon.

the shared language of home

Minnesota remembered
how to throw a winter
party
the night
right
before my beloved wife's birthday.
Which throws out half of our plans
right into the flooded trash.
Outside's warmer than usual
but inside's cold's intolerable.
And every curb is a Dalmation,
the worst cookies-and-cream I've tasted.
You know, something strangely poetic
about bundling up for an expedition
to the art gallery - "the shared language of home" -
and walk up to the front doors to find them all locked up and closed.

ASTERISK : ON

Twelve months I spent in apology
for crimes committed that I do not know:
if asked to recite them, I would surely fail;
some would take this as evidence that no
transgression had actually come to pass,
no real harm had been done that would last,
no trip was warranted to death's vale.

Bundled up in the library
because there's nowhere else to go:
all the places in nature I'd normally leave offering
were buried overnight in multiple feet of snow.
Found the widest soft armchair
that claims its residence upstairs
and curled up, you and me,
to try to create while ignoring
the crazy man whose face is buried
in all of last week's newspapers
and every few seconds feels the need to loudly mutter.

I told myself I'd finish this book today,
one way or another.

Think of my peers,
of my latent fears
that someone will take my work and strip its name away.
You know that's what they do to paperbacks in stores
they weren't able to sell and refuse to try to anymore:
rip the covers off, shucked like animals of meat,
trash gets the bones and flesh goes to recycling.
Skins back to the publishers
as books sans any fur
command much less of a price.
(To try anyway is still a crime.)
I keep a little solace, however,
that the concept of "death of the author" -
to them, that justifies erasing women
who step outside
the party line -
is a little difficult to apply to memoirs.
And what is my work if not a petri dish
of my life? I write so damned much so that I may remember.

Your fingers in baby blue yarn entangled.
I pull away from my keyboard to observe.
Crochet
with your breath sways,
woven with fingers, loose,
in lieu
of an actual hook.
The complexity of your pattern is insane,
but when it flat on the table you lay
to pull it more tight and coherent
it seems quite simple,
really, the cycle
of life in Sablade
it portrays.

"Lethe?" you rasp. "Please don't cry. It's my birthday."

It's your birthday, and it's been a year
since the job offer that got us here
with a nest egg of my own and a promise
to Luce that I kept: my own apartment.
I got everything that I wanted,
Jett,
everything,
everything - and yet
it feels like the moment I signed that lease
was when I started to stop being Lethe.
The woman languishing in her basement
under the heavy thumb of her parents,
waiting for nightfall
or just midday nap
to regain her wings and the love that she lacked.
I don't know who I'm supposed to be anymore.
I'm not the black sheep. I'm not Adversary.
I'm now in a place where my idiosyncracies
are either mitigated or seen as ordinary,
and it's driving me up-the-wall insane.
If human nature is supposed to be violent defiance,
then I've become just as "natural"
as any off-the-shelf
kitchen appliance.

(I suppose, in a shattered world
that demands I hate
those unlike me,
to choose peace,
to refuse to visit violence
on others except in self-defense,
is war in its own way.
I can't escape either way. But I digress.)

But I do know: regardless of "my" name,
I want you with me every step of the way.

I lay my hand on top of yours,
still tangled in the threads
you haven't cast off yet.
Weaver of glamours, I trust you'd still
love me in any shape,
but I know, if it's up to you, "Lethe"'d be the only one I'd take.
You're right. It's your birthday. I'm trusting your Will.
What lies beyond this road's dead end, my cherished Patron-Saint?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

VANE VANDER has taken Solanas' charge to create a magic world quite seriously. She spends her time contemplating the correct use of hyphens, the virtues of cutting men off (especially while speaking), and whether or not em-dashes deserve to exist. She can be found posting cringe at mayvaneday.org.

Copyright © 2025 Vane Vander. All rights reserved as detailed in Copyright.