I Feel The Grating Fingernails Of Progress On My Tender Skin, And Wonder How It Lead Us Here. To Desolation,

It hurts to watch my father split in two each night.

Right down the middle of his face, one half hops to bed and the other to the garage to yell.

The sleeping half is kind, and has never touched a drop of alcohol, and makes big pancake breakfasts on Sunday mornings.

The waking half is cruel, and has fascist memorabilia on his walls, and drills screws in pictures of the opposition to hang.

I can only love half of him, but I cannot stop even that. His image bleeds in my mind, I cannot grapple with the fact that they are the same man after all—that Nazi’s have daughters, too.

I miss her. Is there anything else to say?

My skin prickles with heat,

Dropping doves on laundry lines

My heart leaps hard against my ribs,

Shelving sonograms in my mind,

Oh dear. I am in love.

When I think on 18, and the years that have passed since then, I realize how many little deaths I’ve had in my one life. How many versions of me had to abandon my flesh for ephemerality for me to exist, fettering away. Do they watch me, the way runner up pageant girls watch the winner be crowned with sparkling tears gliding down her cheeks to match her sparkling tiara? Do they envy me? Or do they watch in glum acceptance, the way a parent would as their child draws in spontaneous sharpie all over their orderly white walls. Do they think they know better? Worst of all, do they watch in horror, the way the drug addicted’s partner would as the one they love most spirals down deeper and darker paths? Do they pity me?

Do they think of me at all? How lonely it would be to exist in this world as only one version of me.

With so many before me and so many after me, I feel I owe humanity something. Something I don’t know how to find or how to deliver, but that I search for, always.

There are parts of me, like patches in a quilt, that don’t seem alike at all, that aren’t quite right sitting next to each other at first glance. But I promise they are. I promise my silliness does not contradict my seriousness, I promise that all of me is better together than ripped apart.

She caressed her lover’s hair like a bird tending her nest; she saw only futures in the black tangles clinging to her fingers.

What is left for me, impaled on the hills I’ve chosen to die on.

I lost my boy today. He wasn’t overly fond of me, more so my mother was his favorite, but he had his moments. Moments when he’d remember the day I saved him, abandoned by his mother as a kitten only days old. Whatever happened to her, I don’t know. Maybe she knew he was sick. That one day his heart would fail, and she didn’t want to stick around for the ticking time bomb to finally go off. The one only of his litter to survive the cold of the night, finally joining his brothers and sisters on the other side. I loved him more than you can imagine. And I cherished his tender moments with me, every one. I do not care that his heart was enlarged and he would live to only 7. I would save him every time I found him in every universe that I did. He will always be worth the pain of loving him. Always.

It’s easier for the caterpillar to die than to grow wings. You cannot choose ease when splendor demands difficulty.