there’s so many different parts of you capable of picking up a pen and writing.

don’t let the perfect hand 

of aesthetic sense 

pick up your pen.

she writes beautifully,

but her wrists are cuffed.

don’t let the hand of order,

of patterning,

take your pen:

he is exacting, 

& will entrap you

in his cell bar grid lines.

but the base of your spine 

is illiterate, and your gut 

communicates in grunts:

still—

they’re better suited for the task.

the animal of your being

cannot weave falsehoods.

Dive, Persephone,

into your underworld—

for that is where you 

and where the poem 

hide.

Remember: your depths cannot lie.

Some of us would rather die slowly than all at once. Like denying yourself the mercy of the end’s sweet embrace— instead of falling off the cliff face, you take the slowest descent down suffering’s spiral staircase. The destination’s the same— but you take the scenic route.

You can kill a flame by throwing water on it, stealing the air from its lungs. It coughs, it sputters, it dies before your eyes. Or, you can steal the logs from under, one by one— you can watch it cling to what fuel remains. You can watch it emaciate itself until all that’s left is bone. You can watch it crumble.

I took a log from under myself so life couldn’t. I stole the breath from my own lungs, refusing to let someone who filled them walk away, leaving me gasping. It was the chemotherapy of the spirit, the indiscriminate erasure of all that I was, if only to escape that place of pain.

Self-harm, it takes casualties: innocents taken in the line of fire. You raise the blade, you hope to excavate the virus. Healthy tissue’s taken with, civilians slain— all the while, the enemies replicate.