CW: CSA and suicide. These pieces explore themes of trauma, grief, and the burden of memory, confronting the emotional weight of personal experiences.
The Weight of a Name
It wasn’t the violence depicted
on TV, not bruises, nor scars.
Just fear and shame
of what
I let happen
to my body; I knew
I was wrong. I knew
I’d be in trouble. I knew
I was impure. I knew
I became damaged goods.
At tender six,
I didn’t want to tattle.
I longed to be swallowed
whole, to be palatable,
ignorable.
There is no beauty in chewing
childhood wounds.
I never imagined the term.
It only happens one way:
she asked for it.
I felt complicit, burdened.
The burden, complicit, too,
in my silence.
With words on my tongue, the weight
of expectation presses me
to cloister pain
with pretty little words.
I quantify the unspeakable,
unable to assign a name, even
though I see an r-word,
as clear as Rumpelstiltskin.
Will speaking it give me power?
Your Suicide was Searing Steam from a Pressure Valve
After you, brother, the constant
question mark answered.
No more sweating, no more
creaking under your strain,
no more swinging tightrope
begging, “stop me.”
The news erased you, lifting weight
from my heart, cell by cell,
unloading baggage, beat by beat.
No more conversations
prematurely ended.
Your connection,
a permanent dial tone
between my ears.
Your line, dead.
No more pleading
with strangers
to knock on your door,
to check your breathing,
if you’re still holding on
by that fragile thread.
No more prayers tossed
into the void.
I felt the guilty tingle
of relief, of no more
sleepless nights.
I felt the guilty truth
of this final call;
I released a shameful breath
of fear put to bed.
Driving Home from the Festival
While the road stretches ahead
like a silver thread, unspooling
endless veins
of a sleeping giant, we drive,
headlights seeking to outrun
the past,
the present,
the future
waiting to unfold velvet dark.
In the hush of twilight,
it is not the stars that fail us,
but our internal flames, dimmed
by the weight of living.
Stars cradle moons in lullabies,
a celestial balm while
souls sail on stardust
to escape earthly tides,
this gravity well
of sorrow.
A cosmic disappointment drapes over
the rearview: the sky mirrors
a canvas of unfulfilled
desires. It is not the stars that fail us,
but the road, ever winding,
that tethers us to unyielding asphalt,
the here, the now.
A constant movement; this ceaseless
journey without end.
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