i’d never in my life so much as dipped my pinky in a glass of wine, but my god, i was drunk on you. i was the kind of drunk where you can’t string together a sentence for the life of you and yet you reach for the vodka anyway. you were my first gasp of air after holding my breath for three years. i consumed you hungrily; you let me depend on you.
I. this turkey is testing
my patience and
i’m not sure how
many more times i can hear
people ask me what i’ve done with my hair
before i burn
out.II. 21 years ago, you thought
you ate too much stuffing. but
instead of indigestion,
you ended up in a hospital room.
you said it felt like i was tearing
you apart. i was tearing you apart
from the inside the second
i knew i wanted out.III. you buy me a traditional
Armenian dress, mistaking my wince
for a smile. so i try it on for you all
the while wanting to unroll my tongue:
to explain that though i know i am
yours in my bones and my blood
and the color of my eyes,
i am also myself and i don’t quite know
where i belong amongst
antiquated pronouns because
i am not quite ‘she’ nor ‘he,’
but nothing in between exists
to my mother
tongue.IV. the headdress doesn’t quite fit
under my locs.
‘what a shame’ you say
‘what a shame.’V. My tongue is on fire and
every word i learned in
Armenian Saturday school is being
burnt off
with my taste buds.
‘go as high as you can possibly take me.’
you sold me a piece of paper and
told me it would make me
fly.
now i’m crashing into walls,
you’re terrorizing my mind.
this shit is going up in smoke,
my mind before my heart.
you once said you’d rather die
than watch me burn, but
i am almost all ashes
and your heart’s still beating
on rhythm. when did you realize
you had told us both a lie?
you said you wouldn’t let me burn.
how long have you been
playing with fire?
Is that an invitation in your eyes? Or are they just reflecting mine?
you’d heard the phrase “to love is to suffer” so you weren’t exactly surprised when the first time you saw his eyes you had stained the sheets red. but you had been so ready to cradle him in your arms and feel his beating heart that you ignored it.
twenty two years later you’re looking through his desk drawers while he’s out; not quite sure what you’re looking for, but knowing there must be a reason his eyes have looked so golden lately. there must be a reason he’s out so damn much.
when you hear the news, all you can think of is his heart, once so small and fragile. that heart that used to beat within your own body is now beating arrhythmically to the sound of train tracks on his arms. and you remember ‘to love is to suffer,’ yet you had never thought it would consume you so much.
you never knew that loving him would mean he would suffer, too. that often you’d hug him so hard, you’d leave a bruise. or that you’d love him so much, sometimes you’d try to save him from being himself.
I. i wish you’d stop apologizing for me. i’m sick of feeling like i was born an apology.
II. i know you’d never intentionally hurt me. but you have, you do, and you will.
III. i know you have the rare gift of seeing the angels inside of us, and that your first instinct is to hold those angels close and shelter them. but you need to let us go. you need to give us room to be individuals who experience pain and make mistakes.
IV. i know i have, do, and will hurt you, too. i’m sorry.
V. i learned a while ago that the less i told you i loved you, the less you’d yell at me. so i stopped saying it.
VI. i love you.
VII. sometimes i hear your stubbornness in my own voice and fear i will grow to sound just like you. it took me a while to find my own voice, but it’s here, and i’m learning to be loud.
VIII. i used to put my headphones on, hang my neck off the edge of my bed, let the tears roll up my head and wish i had a different mother. i don’t anymore.
IX. thank you for all that you’ve done. thank you for nursing us with chunks of your heart. for continuing to feed us even when you felt like there was none of you left. thank you for loving me even when you didn’t want to. thank you for emptying yourself so we could crawl inside. thank you for never giving up. thank you for somehow finding the light within us and reflecting it back at us when all we felt was darkness. thank you for molding me into who i am today.
i can
put you in my
back pocket now.
you’re so small;
you fold so easily.
i can forget you
in there and run you
through the wash and
watch your face fade
because
you don’t mean anything to me
anymore.
we’re pressing pause
with ocean water on our faces.
you’re pressing play
with syrup in your veins.
this ship is going down;
one by one
we throw you our life
jackets so you may stay afloat–
we’re already sinking anyways.large waves are hitting us now,
water blanketing the floor.
you throw your head back and laugh
and jump overboard.
all lifejackets with us, even
yours.
nothing we had could
save you.
the whole world’s
pulsing
at sixty two beats per minute.
you can feel it
in the rain. i’m not sure
if it’s a ticking time bomb
waiting to explode
or if something in the
gears are jammed.
i just wanted to
stop spinning
for a while.
you’re close enough to me
that i can see your eyes,
but they are
somewhere far away
from here. and so we sit
on the couch in silence,
me reading my book, you
staring into space and repeating
the same five lines from a song
i don’t know.
i really do feel like you’re on some
other side, you know.
mom’s crying on the kitchen floor,
stabbing holes into
cellophane because
at least when grandma died,
her body didn’t haunt us anymore.
Silenticel 