The pains in my abdomen are leftover from a ferocious laugh and a searing cry and all the ways I’m not sure how to feel about either of them. The earthquakes seem to come from the sky as the sidewalks fall away from my feet. People aren’t listening you can tell by the panic in their eyes, chain smoking cigarettes and coughing up ignorance disguised. As I watch them not watching, I’m imagining cutting out faces: one for each day of all the weeks that people throw out the windows of high rise buildings hoping for new ones by the time the elevator to the basement drops. How did we get to this place where wrought iron gates are more intricate than we are and less cold. Everything I try to make move stands still in its cage.
I don’t mind writing alone for weeks on end next to these fleshy crimson roses dying in a vase at my crystal fingertips. The way they seem to bow out of a life they exposed themselves to fully, ripe, red, soft and silently urgent seems like the purest form of a love that knows no fear, only bloom and grace.
Thorns, tho, no bowing out for them, hard and tough as nails for good, stabbing like the piercing of your eyes underneath my skin: bleed me of my salacious greed, pin my poison against all the things I can’t stand about hurting myself and believing its the truth.
In dreams the words I want to drown you with flow, it wasn’t supposed to be so hard in the daylight but there’s a condemnation in the expressions on the people passing by that I seem to swallow and worship like someone I no longer recognize; someone who has lost her conviction. I am stronger than this but the desire to go limp is the edge of an elegant cliff at ten thousand feet and me on one toe on a pinhead hoping to balance the wind through my teeth.
I’m in love with the promise of another morning, the rain falling on electric orange autumn leaves, the gray skies please me because we understand each other.
Maybe after coffee I’ll shave my legs, wear that dress you like and learn to look at you again. Tonight it’s hard to sew all the faces back into the one I came with in the box. So many lives are shifting inside of me, none of which I can depend on for more than the better part of the hours that tighten against my slender neck.
Forgive us this day the terrible monsters we care about. We are skin wrapped around steel interchangeable bars, chastity, vice grips holding tight to the things that turn us to black inside. Let it be ink and not terror, let it be black as the night we feel at home inside. If it’s only darkness I can’t breathe.
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Allison Marie Conway 