Blog
There are a lot of tragic stories. Another where some obscure white girl doesn’t get her way is hardly worth anyone’s pity. And that’s not what I’m here to tell you about, anyways. I’m here to tell you about my mother’s handbag.
And how that handbag, with its rough stitching and cultural-appropriating rainbow-coloured elephant print kept me alive on the night I was attacked.
The night that stranger took everything from me: mind, soul, and body.
A ship to sail
upon the sea,
with wind, be caught
and follow thee…
If idyllic plots areplots of land andhouses built onsinking sand arenot as good aswalls of stoneand timber fallsbut castles stand(except for thosewhose walls are sand)then I might sleepquite sweet tonightwhere down six feetI’ll dig my site
An update on our lives (and why it’s been so long since I last posted).
Wilt, oh petal,
breathe no more
of sun and sky
and cease your chore
to branch and leaf
in cloudless sky,
to mark a stone
in black to cry.
Storm of winter
clouds of night,
break o’er the crashing
waves of fright
and bring the cleansing
rains of tide
to waken us
in sleeping, hide.
You’re my armour:
beat thine breast,
where all cold steel
at mine behest
might sing in echo,
violence swayed,
No time for a shower. Grilled cheese for lunch, if they were lucky. Too late for order-in groceries. Could she order pizza? She could ask him to pick something up, but his trips to the grocery store always took twice as long and came with a bombardment of questions via text: “Which isle is that in again? Did you want the organic or the regular? What size diapers does she wear?” (Maybe if you changed them more often, you’d know!) And that was if he thought to text.
The tight press of bodies around him were just shapes, smelling of sweat and blood and the tang of stale urine. He wrinkled his nose in disgust, stifling a gag. The smell was on him now, like a baptism in a tainted stream that could not be washed by any number of holy prayers. The bodies around him shifted and murmured. They were animals in a cage, grumbling over the pangs of hunger and thirst.
Liquid language
drips from lips.
The lies we speak,
they come in sips.