By: Caitlin McGillicuddy
Already broken Mess one, pile two Stuffed fierce and strong. A puff of cigarette smoke Wisps then gone. You wink. We fuck. I laugh. You cut me. I like it. I’m naked. You’re drunk. Is it me, or you? The crutch. The foothold. Who does the saving? The drowning? Prove me wrong. You Can’t scare me. What others don’t, I see A dim star, clawing the walls Wading through empty bottles on the floor Tripping on tears with Jeff and Van Too much mystic, lilac wine. You’re beautiful I’m beautiful We’re beautifully fucked. And fleeting, likely So lean into this Entangled messy warm. Not scared. Not afraid To get dirty. Not your dude or your baby No, we don’t need saving.
Caitlin McGillicuddy lives and writes outside of Boston, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in Entropy, Jellyfish Review, McSweeney’s, Gravel, HerStry, Chaleur Magazine, the Black Fox Literary Magazine and Bitchin Kitsch. She’s a writer in residence at L'ATELIER WRITERS and is at work on her first novel. Twitter: @CaitlinMcGill, Website: caitlinmcgillicuddy.com "I write lots of different things, but poems are where I find myself when I need to give form to a moment in time. I love to explore people, what we do to each other, for each other. When a feeling I don’t understand or recognize digs its fingers into me, I know a poem is being born. I latch on to one moment of discomfort or euphoria or terror or grief, an extreme gut punch that may otherwise be settled and forgotten and dig deeper in order to illuminate it. It doesn’t need context and it’s excused from judgement. The Unfixables is about a moment like that."