Nostalgia Is Not A Cradle, But A Coffin.

“You’re gentler than they said you would be,” the girl remarked.

The siren smiled graciously in return, and took another chunk out of her calf and thrust it down her throat without reprieve. The girl didn’t feel a thing, her saliva numbing her skin the moment it touched it.

“We’re only hungry beasts girl, not cruel. We leave that to the men,” she said frankly and wiped her mouth of blood the way a child would of jam.

I seldom love those I admire. What is there to hold in the greats? Achievement sits on the shelf while a lover rests under my bed covers, I cannot converse with trophies though their gold sheens are beautiful, they are empty things. I need a mess, I need something to fill my aching hands so full I could never hope to grasp it all. Keep me busy, keep me warm. That is all I ask of the one I love.

I can’t have children, I’d have too much love for them. I’d bring them up scared of the world like I am. Scared of nothing and everything at the same time.

Melodic, melismatic is she. Her song is her figure dancing in air, steam rising ever out of reach.

And when the night took his knee, and the sun grazed his face with her locks long and blonde as she stood, his eyes rested only on her.

There is a kinder world within all of us, but we must agree to be as kind as it is to see it.

I need a new wardrobe—I’m running out of time to be young and beautiful. For people to see me and not just look at me out of some mundane politeness. I need to be everything I am right now in these fleeting moments, or it’s like they’ve already gone.

My age is, youngish, oldish? Depending on who you ask. I have time, and I don’t. The future is so far away and right outside my doorstep, and I’m just sort of here. Waiting for something to happen. Waiting to become my future self and grow out of all this childish shit. I have trouble discerning bad habits and personality traits, what grows from me isn’t all me after all. I have to take care with what I cull and what I cradle. I could become a walking quirk from middle school that I misidentified as wildly important to my sense of self and not just a random cultural reflex. What makes me myself? And how did it get there? What is genuinely me and what is grimly biding it’s time until I figure out it’s a stranger’s voice and not mine?

Ode to the Red Boy

I see a red boy winking, perpetually still. His right eye is closed, his left open, unmoving. He wears pajamas, the Spiderman kind my brother used to wear when he was small. The red boy is on the floor of a hospital in Gaza, his blood caked on his face with soot and ash. His chest does not rise and fall, his eyes do not blink, but he holds his wink. One eye shut, the other open. A playful gesture, as if he's playing a trick on me. As if soon he would awaken and wash the red from his face like strawberry jam, and go play with his spider-man figurine in the sunlight. But he does not move, the red boy. The fluorescent light holds him still. His swollen eyelid does not so much as twitch. He is determined to fool me, and I am happy to be fooled. If it means he will one day wake up, I am happy to be fooled.

I’m not going to hate myself anymore.