By: Cassidy Black
Some Body’s Wife
a knife against thighmuscle,
she wants me alive again.
everything ends up the same way
it started; smoke turns to ash,
dust to decay, bodies back to battlefields.
thinking of things to say
like she missed her brain on drugs or
sleep is a deathbed we crawl in and out of.
i’ve never seen her smile like that,
her jaw swinging wide, opening
the medicine cabinet and
jumping into all the places i took her
before i wanted to be some body’s wife.
wedded to philosophy, logic and reason,
i laugh at her jokes and wait
for the prayers to pour in.
she is far away from our mother
staring at the ceiling fan and capturing
spiders rather than killing them.
every sudden change is a trip
to the emergency room. i loved her and i
lost her. after years of being alone
i’ve named everything in the sky
after my love.
Moments After Cutting off a Hospital Bracelet with Kitchen Scissors
you wake up tired from rolling around in the sweat
of nightmares. your gums are swollen. you’ve got to stop
smiling. being so in love makes it very hard to see
at night. nothing matters. everything means the world
to you. you feel the edge of the knife blazing
white. you know they can’t blame the dogs
for everything. the guns should be locked away. you sit
in the passenger seat and watch the winter trees wave
back at you with broken little fingers. you have to decide
not to say anything. you will always be hard to hear.
too quiet, too soft, too crooked. you want to be
somewhere else. this can be very frustrating. stop saying
you don’t miss your dead. have you apologized
enough for taking all those pills? you don’t like answering
the phone on the first ring. sometimes you stand in the middle
of a silent room and understand the quiet clock
counting out your seconds. you shave off another day
and pretend you are beautiful. a lot can go wrong if
you let yourself think or sleep or laugh too much.
Cassidy Black (she/her) is a nineteen y/o small-town poet, libra sun, and postcard collector who has lived in the same yellow house her entire life. Her work has previously been published in The Rising Phoenix Review and Ghost City Review.
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