CW: trauma, possession and loss of control, existential crises, references to accidents, childhood trauma, fire and burning.
This poem was born after a strange empathy opened my eyes to Matthew 12:43-45—the Bible passage where Jesus teaches about demons wandering in the wilderness after a demon-possessed man is healed. Here, I tried to capture the persona’s body as a living space, a forbidden yearning for an otherness of the self, a wild tension between emptiness and longing, and an acceptance that is simply a fancy word for self-harm.
i do not tell
padre i’ve been
no good
with a will,
no good at all
in this body
without a
manual, where
it always feels
like my first
time in my
father’s brakeless
volvo i crashed
into a tree—
a car my first
roadkill was
the “soft animal”
plath x-rayed
lives inside me.
i tell you, there
is no safe space
but the mind
to confess
to anything,
so i do not
tell him
i listened
to life
for rent
a little too
much on
the darker
side of hearing,
i now find
this body
a childhood
home with
broken toys
& an absence
echoing the
ringing of
its doorbell
at odd hours;
nightly footages
of a frost-eyed
being knocking
& knocking,
i want to
let it in, suddenly
realizing there are
too many homeless
things, in this
fucking world,
it wouldn’t be
sad to say, hey
you’ve wandered
far too long
on exile, in
the wilderness
outside these
many useless
consciousnesses,
come home
to ruin.
but i do badly
want to
tell him what
i know of the
zebola women’s
spirit possession
dance; to tell
him how badly
i want to carry
an otherness of
my self, to share
the space illustrated
in the spacing between
“my” & “self,”
with what i can
tell once harped
god to sleep
on a child
in a house fire
by how it smells
like a burning
cradle. to say, this
is my place, to
show them
a room in my
body overlooking
a warzone.
to say, you will
love it here,
i promise,
& now, my rules,
dangling a
bunch of keys
in its face
that open
every door
but the exit.
