I’m sinking into a fog of dissociation, your voice
waking me from dreams of rape, this body
disgusting, the rot of me drawing
you in like a hungry fly, everything bloated.
I’ve never been this close to death or this far from it. I’ve never been a lot of things, especially beautiful things, afternoon sun splitting against a window pane, hand-sewn lace on a white handkerchief, things that are small and thin and feel like nothing or almost nothing. I’ve never been a piano, throat opening when you touch me, notes rising from my chest and landing soft on your ears and the tip of your tongue. When you smash your knuckles against the xylophone bridge of my teeth, it sounds like the lid of a piano slamming.
My ribcage is a wind chime
you’ve weighted down with bricks.
The only times I can sing, the wind is already louder than my voice, sweeps through the empty bowl of my body and takes even the dust. I used to be a girl, a whole girl with a church organ body, pipes heavy and brass, the congregation expecting me, eyes open. Now there is a collapsed church in my stomach, steeple stabbing up through my heart, the arms of the cross reaching their bloody hands into my lungs. Now I might be one gear of a broken music box, shattered music box, one moment of cacophony then nothing, not music nor box, not even a lid and one lone note, nothing, nothing, nothing but the pieces.
But really I’m not an instrument and never have been. I’m just a body, corpse with a butterfly in her chest. How much of me is still alive? All of me is still alive, but how much of me is here? Is all of me still alive? Is any of me?
When I was seven I broke my arm falling off a swing at girl scout camp. It didn’t hurt but I cried anyway because I wanted an x-ray. I didn’t expect to be broken. There was no pain. Now all I have is pain but the x-rays show nothing, only solid white and I search for tears like a road map, proof I can point to, say “I was here,” say “I saw that,” say “I feel this.” Soon my flesh is picked away and I’m a perfect skeleton, a specimen worthy of display, the stench gone, all this flesh dissolved, everything rotten taken by something with claws or a mouth or at least a stomach, small organ digesting, quiet eater swallowing all of me.
If everything else was gone, would my bones still write? Would a pencil blend into the thin remnants of my fingers? Would anything move? Old bones become hollow eventually, the way birds start, light enough for lift, light enough for sky, light enough for heaven maybe but the jury’s still out on whether birds have souls.
My aunt’s chickens run to her when she opens the kitchen door, smooth their dry beaks on the hills of her feet, nestle into the dirt by her window and wait for her to come back. Chickens have hollow bones but can hardly fly, their breasts too weighted, their bodies round and clumsy. We carve them at our kitchen table, knives splitting skin casually like you would open a drawer, thinking more of what’s inside than the opening itself. Teeth grind body to paste then send it to stomach, this small and quiet consumer, snail under the dirt, mouth hidden but aching, wanting, hungry inside its shell.
Lately I can hardly make myself eat. I spend an hour making dinner but it tastes like licking the sidewalk downtown. All night I urge myself to swallow, to convince this body we don’t want to disappear yet, that every bite they take can be replaced. I miss wanting. I want to want again. I want to press the whole of June to my lips like a peach still sun-heavy, warm and soft and full, let its juice run over my chin, sink teeth into fruit and tongue into taste and break out of this season of dust, of grey ash that coats everything like a volcano erupted in Maryland six years ago and is still coughing into my sky. I miss blue. I miss open. I can hardly see through the gathering flies, can only hear the droning of small wings thick as glass, cutting air. My body is a city street covered in thousands of feet and everything they stepped on to get here. No one stays long enough to learn my name except one butterfly who might be a mirror, eyes blue as summer sky, voice rising like a piano song in a quiet room, alive and moving, flesh and wings, no bones at all.
jenny did it 