body work

x: the myth of dickinson

**tw's: sh implied, sui implied — esp drowning, sui attempt mention, abuse**

long gone is the desired
quietude of my solitude —
now made eerie by the
passage of time. this
hiding away was once
mysterious, but is now rude.
i don't think it was
the same for you—

how the mother tongue,
it suffers now.
i wring it out, gently at first
& then scrape the teeth down.
trying to utter a greeting or curse,
to me, both are the same—but,
i gape, wretched & wilting—

needing to say the right thing,
yet having no idea what it is—o,
language itself is the biggest sin. i
want to apologise,
but it comes out like a slur—
all hurried & quick to light a flame,
finally i have lost control
over the way i need to hurt—again,

i sought out oblivion today, right around the malnourished throat.
it still hurts, but not enough &
i am reminded of my youth.
those blurring lights, i was so
close & yet so far away. i go mute,

both because of the pain &
because i am scared
to ever talk again, i
become the grey charcoal
of the ground
we will all witness, someday.
it was what she asked for,

but then it became too rude,
too annoying, the less i became the more it became too much

to ignore—say, how frankenstein
hated his creature
but hated himself more. this is the retelling
of motherhood that you have heard of before—

the whole ordeal is a clenched fist,
i, the nails pressed into a palm,
seeking out the welt. the first
feeding is spat out into the silence.
this becomes a ritual, becomes a
thing known as life & then

all over, there is too much of feeling,
i interchange—from becoming
both the overflow & then the drain.
i, the river where sinners
flock to be baptised—say, how woolf
found the ouse & left vita behind. see

the stones lined around me?
an invitation, no?
so smooth & innocent,
an enticement to follow. how
the mother tongue stutters now,

folds back on itself & drowns
under the weight of its own sin
& spit, to be seeking
out oblivion, blocking
the windpipe—the eyes roll &
the chest pulls tight — it is said that to know about death
is to really feel alive.
& what an unfortunate thing
it is to really feel alive—

to hear the sound of
your own name & the firing
of a shotgun as one, &
not knowing what to do or
how to react

— both
turn a heart into a rabbit—
frightening the body to stiffness
but left with that quivering nose—
still, that urge to seek out what it surely knows—

that perhaps it will have some issue with the eyes
that will kill it. if not, it
will be skinned alive. it
jumps forth, out of habit —
knowing that if there
should be a death,
let it be a sacrifice—

—for the mother / tongue,
if nothing else. to be allowed to
finally call your loneliness
for what it is—the bridge
between you not having a mother
& her becoming your gift—

how many have fallen from
there? or lounged
in some water place? what a place
to find a life stilled—
most of them gone by their own desperate will.

you were not one of them, or
in a way you were—
a recluse wearing white &
roaming around the grounds.
just knowing that only the
dirt will welcome you—say,
how westbrook was disgraced with
child & still embraced by the tide. & how imlay thought that everything she held surely died.

but you will never know of any of this,
for now, with still too much on the mind, you
plant your bulbs
those are your
children — all pink & newborn —
your mother, she loved
her garden too,
despite her not being
one made for thought—

for the both of you, the turn of the
soil is its own solid prayer. you
level out the grit, parting out
your own language to speak to god,
or lose yourself trying to. one day,

there have been too many deaths,
it's too hard to keep your spirits high
& the townsfolk have not seen you around for quite some time.
the mother tongue is gone
for good, decaying & wasting
amongst the mulch & dew.
the townsfolk don't know this—
or perhaps they do—

they take care not to trample the gardens you adorn—
really their only sign that we ever existed at all.