V. Oh! Oh! You(')r(e) Inside!

Snailhouse

When I rain,
the world drains to grey
and what was already grey stiffens
to brick-blue
lighter black and darker white.

rain on me rain me on
no space and pure oxygen
marches through my ears
until the voice s
wells and swells

the sea learning
my name as it sweeps me
through the tide, my voice curling
inside the sea witch’s shell
squirming, popping,

bubbles

bursting through my nostrils

waiting to become
                      a daughter of the air
red

The Body in Mo(u)rning

I can only fall asleep when my ears
are brimming with earbuds and wonder––
if the sea lives in my ear
and that is why I wake
drowning in salt, snot, tears
that thin my face until it forgets
its own blood.

I can only fall asleep when my brain is full
of words, of wounds––hope
hope stays sealed in its box,
the fire still drowning
before it reaches my tongue.

I can only fall asleep when my eyes
are brimming with knives, with nights
that might open me the same way again––
a drowned Carrie, carried by none
but herself.

I can only fall asleep when the moon goes dark,
when the sea can no longer see through its tears
and leaves the looking to me.
The moon drowns the stars on my floor,
like frost or dawn pretending to be kind.
I gaze at the sky’s pale wheel of time,
at the burned floorboards beneath me,
at the gauze that hides my arm
from my family
from my wounds
from my own name.

I strive to be the morning sky,
to shine though grief never lasts long enough
to earn the dark.
That’s why it is always night somewhere.
Isn’t that just tragic?
I can only fall asleep at night, when it’s mourning.

Stheno

She used to be the deepest sleeper.
Now she doesn’t sleep at all.
Though her eyes are almost always closed,
I watch them flicker, like a conch shell learning
its song.

I hold my thanks like breath,
for Medusa
cannot sleep anymore,
and she’s always been loveliest
in her dreams.

Euryale and I spend our days mopping
death from mirrored stone, soaking up tears
before they sharpen,
before Medusa looks too long,
for we both feel her hunger
to look herself in the eye and––

I do not know how to speak to that hunger.
What would change its mind?
Sometimes, I want to borrow it––
until I see her sallow cheeks,
the silence that builds like laurel trees
finally threatening to take root
in her lungs, and I take it back.
No one is worth that hunger.

Euryale’s better at grieving than I am.
She sings in the mornings––
fractured lullabies that once stirred the sea.
She braids Medusa’s hair like it’s still soft
pretends it does not hiss against her fingers.

Often, I find Medusa at the cliff’s edge,
facing the ocean-blue
(her eyes were that color, I think).
She murmurs half-stories of untouched skies.

I listen. That is all I know how to do.

I keep waiting for her to cry but
she has not touched water since that day.
I suppose we did that right––
hiding her from herself.
We blamed mirrors.
She was starving long before.
We never looked beyond her eyes.

Euryale and I braid each other’s hair now.
Sometimes, it sings against our palms.
I tell myself we did our best.
I lie often, these days.

in the brittle sky,
Dream of fire, tell Father
dead dreams of salt-slick flesh

as I thrust my wings toward
your warmth, you cry and crack
against jagged shores and jagged night
A message in a bottle twists and snaps

My body shatters on the sea floor
Bones fold into currents, inked by tide
wax wings patched and scarred with false
feathers charred by waves and

My bones scatter, gather
in shadows the shape of my wings
And every fragment of loss bears
the sun’s mockery of my wings

Gravity pulls memory from my bones,
Folds my arms into the dark
I rise

in the shimmering sun
Dream higher as his hands caress
My cheeks, urging the wind to press

fragments of Father’s cries I gather
Tether gold to the tide, to weather the sun
I fold each fragment, glue and pray it holds
my back as it aches for a memory of wings

In oceans pink and orange gleam
Father presses dead skin into paper, forms
fairytales filled with a promise fluttering with
fear that dries to salt, to blood remembering

the sea’s excess of tears. I duel for eternity
for even failed wings are known to the wind.
the shape of hope, the branches and stones,
They sink into the sea and burn their trail to bone.

A crippled sun smooths vespers into my wings
and vows: no one will ever die this way
again

3 hours 14 minutes 15 seconds after leaving

I check into a hotel room
in the city I have lived in for twenty years.
The carpet smells like take out and dog hair.

I wake
hours before I used to and lie
in bed,
listening to the pipes
breathe, waiting
for yours.

I tell my friends I’m fine.
I say it the way the clerk did
when he gave me my room number.

I moved out.
I forgot to pack

my lungs.