Sometimes When I Have A Dream, I Feel Entirely Refreshed Of My Old Perspectives. I See Everything Brand

I would let her put rods in my fingers and tie thin golden ropes around my wrists if it meant she’d smile at me. I’d make a good puppet, a very good puppet. And I don’t mind forgoing being her daughter, she never liked me very much that way. I make a much better puppet.

Lucky for you, there are people far more forgiving than your inner critic. May they find you and show you the softness you cannot show yourself.

Why is it light is thought of as good and dark as evil? As if the shadows sewn to our heels want anything more than to be like us.

Futureless moth, eating old keepsakes. Nothing else to be done in locked closets but eat. Soothing herself on the past, indulgently gorging on memorabilia, unbothered by the holes her little mouth leaves. No better meal than childhood. No better place to die than in wools, and silks, and cottons, refusing to batter oneself against the closet door.

I see her far from me. My mother is cool and white and floats like a sun in my mind. But she is a dying star. Her past self pervades my memory but her realness, her fullness in the present is nothing but black space where a blip of sunshine used to be. I cannot reconcile what I reminisce in my mind and what truly exists. I see her far from me. My mother is cool and white and explodes in my mind. The old light she used to shine will keep going long after she stops. And one day, even that false hope will fade. And there will be nothing left for me to peer at from a distance, but a stretch of sky I once called my mother.

Why can’t you let me have anything? Why can’t you let me have anything? I ask the mirror.

The girl in it is too busy weeping to answer.

Though yellow grass grows

She wanders barefooted, on dry and cutting blades

Something has died here, in the glades of her old memories

Its terrain water-hungry, fertile with long-lost mistakes

Sweet aroma of morning dew has forsaken this place.

But she returns, like sunken ship to lighthouse unmanned,

though only yellow grass grows in her past.

The siren caressed the sailor girl’s cheek gently, like a receding tide brushing its long fingers on the sand reminiscently.

“You never wanted to hurt me, did you. Why? Won’t you starve? You’re thin as bone,” the sailor girl asked, letting her eyes roam over her wet skin as she bobbed out of the dark water.

The siren shuddered at the comparison, and whipped her hand back suddenly. Mermaids were competitive, the more meat on a girl the higher she rose in their ranks. To be thin as bone meant one was nothing but that, a carcass without value, without muscle, sinew, or flesh.

“I am more than bone, but you. You are thin and sick even though you rove the land where food grows on trees and you hunt for nothing, and yet, you come to me to die. I will leave you disappointed. If I have to suffer this life, so do you.”

Her short dark hair seemingly melted over her face, as the sunset turned to night and shadow enveloped her entirety.

“I, I meant no harm,” the sailor stuttered, unaware of her misstep.

“Your people never do, and look what that leaves us,” she spat, and turned her head, now a dark hungry pit, toward the docks where a siren hung by the neck.

“My people? Is that what I am to you? Some violent human eager to noose you,” the sailor girl’s eyes carried hurt, and she nursed her chest’s wound with a calloused thumb in circular motions.

“I wish you’d broken my heart with your teeth and not your words,” she said, and retreated from the shoreline with a flush cheek from where she touched her.

What secrets I would tell you if it would not take you drowning to hear them

-Diary of a Siren

A letter to my father,

I behave youthfully around you, happy go lucky and thoughtless at times. This isn’t because I am those things, but because you let me be. You have never been a parent to me, but a friend. And as your friend, I must tell you:

I behave as if there is nothing the matter, to keep the peace, and not ruin what bond we have, but I have been lying to you, and to myself, that our differing politics needn’t ever intersect. In fact, they intersect every time I look at you and remember the hat you hang in your garage. The red one, with the white letters. I remember you voted against my interests for your own, which foolishly you did, as you will not get your way in the end.

And seeing as I cannot have my father and honesty at once, it seems neither will I.