Remembering Him Is Like Getting To Know A Shard Of Glass. I Push My Finger Tip Down Gingerly Into His

While the humans lose fingers in factories, the robots produce artwork with too many. Dystopian novels were amusing once, when I was not living in one.

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.

Living with my mother is like living in my office. She is my boss, my judge, my jury—my executioner. I hear her performance reviews of me in the living room, sat comfortably next to her easing into the armrests. I however can’t afford to be comfortable, I live on the clock and there is only a pinpoint for my big toe to precariously perch on as I teeter in and out of her good graces.

If only she understood that I ate her with love, and not hunger.

-diaries of a Siren

Oh, I was happy. I was so happy, until I looked down at my reflection and saw I wasn’t me at all.

How pathetic. To spend my days reassuring myself that they are not wasted, all the while wasting them in trivial debates with the wretched thing in the mirror about the very topic. Why I should answer to her, I do not know. She is the opposite of me. Her left eye is where my right is, and her right eye is where my left is. Her hair is parted on the wrong side, her college chosen wrong, her days spent mindlessly, her work set to waste, what a rotten thing she is. I know who I am. And it isn't her. It can't be. Or every poor thing I think of myself would be true.

It hurts to watch my father split in two each night.

Right down the middle of his face, one half hops to bed and the other to the garage to yell.

The sleeping half is kind, and has never touched a drop of alcohol, and makes big pancake breakfasts on Sunday mornings.

The waking half is cruel, and has fascist memorabilia on his walls, and drills screws in pictures of the opposition to hang.

I can only love half of him, but I cannot stop even that. His image bleeds in my mind, I cannot grapple with the fact that they are the same man after all—that Nazi’s have daughters, too.

There was a worse fate than death, I found, as the god I once worshipped laid his hands on my very soul.

To be unmade.

She paws at the gentle glade’s hair, and twirls the green betwixt her fingers. Nothing tastes sweeter than the dew procured there, nothing hurts more than having to leave it.

I’ve whittled myself down,

Suckled myself to nothing like a cough drop in a cheek,

And all I have to show for this betrayal, is a familiar flavor in my mouth to mull over as the adults speak.