I've Been Smoking Cigarettes Made From Your Veins Huffing That Pain Worshipping Your Blood Like It Wasn't

Nicole W. Lee, from "Even the Dust"

this is it? is this what growing up is all about? we pass joy around in a bottle of cheap wine for one last time. I know, everyone is constantly changing and the earth is spinning and eventually everything happens just like it’s supposed to. but if my car were to crash on my way back to the city I call my new home, I wouldn’t be angry. my mom buys herself flowers now and I think that’s a good thing. she also keeps my scissors in a different shelf. and the tree in our backyard is gone. you never know when it’s the last time. is growing up nothing more than feeling younger than you are and leaving all the things you love so dearly behind?

-e.f

Roman Widow - Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1874 (details)

objects in art: swords/daggers

Liberty Avenue, Pittsburgh, 1940

“Dark and Fair” by Tadeusz Styka (ca. 1908) Marthe Barnède, nicknamed Madame Sappho, is ‘a stunning brunette, with hair the color of deep shadow,’ while Colette, her young and frail lover, is described as ‘a pretty girl with lily-white skin and light blonde hair that crowned her pale ivory forehead with a riotous golden halo. (source).

wet evening in April by Patrick Kavanagh

My jaw has unhinged itself again.

And I am shedding my skin.

It flakes off in small pieces,

revealing the delicate newness within

First born daughter playing therapist

Apology letters to anyone I’ve ever kissed

I think this weekend I’ll go on an alcohol bender

But at least drinks are free when you’re the bartender.

The Elevator is Out of Service- Please Use the Stairs - by Katie Walters

Fibromyalgia, took my bones when I was sleeping.

Crept in while I was resting,

Breathing deep against my pillow,

Or the paper of the books I could no longer read.

It grew inside me,

Drank my mitochondria like wine,

Took an angle grinder to my spine,

And wore me away like twilight.

I, got sick at uni,

In a small room, where nobody could hear me cry,

Or permit me to.

My nervous system quit, while I was working.

In the library where my legs were burning,

Like the oven door against my forearms,

And the stovetop, where I made myself curry. For the first time.

Independence, embryonic.

I was nineteen.

November was cold that year, and

January was colder.

As fresh and new as I was, and as,

Stark and clean and painful as my fading autonomy.

I tried to crystallize it.

In an essay, or a poem, in biro ink and off-brand toothpaste.

Like if I wrote it right I could write myself well

And when the rain fell in February,

I fell,

In Tesco and at the train station and on the stairs.

Swallowed the stones in my throat, chose not to dare question why it was that I kept falling.

And got back up.

Because strong people don’t get sick,

You stick it out, you do not quit,

And when the elevator is out of service,

You use the stairs.

I never knew how high the curb was until I could not climb it.

We searched for my bones in decomposing diagnoses,

Degrading medication on my tongue,

Took blood tests of my blood lines,

And on the coastline,

Tried to calcify my insides strong again.

Put our hands in the wet sand,

To build a tibia. Shape my sternum like a castle.

Clavicle and mandible and cranium.

Starlight and seafoam and gone.

My bones, are in the Rotunda museum,

Under the skin of the Gristhorpe man,

We walk where he walked, and I walk no longer,

Pressed behind glass, my skin tight as leather.

My bones, are in the limestone cliffs edge,

Grown from sediment,

Calcium carbonate, cycling, infinite, ground down to shale,

My bones are food for minke whales.

I am lying in bed, and ugly, like a princess.

Limp, and formless, and rolled out to sea

I am blue badge on double yellows,

Pepsi Max and heavy metal,

Flat on the backseat, and staring through the windscreen, where the starlings will dance until nightfall.

My bones, are a murmur of starlings,

Dark and undulating

The shapeless, shape of nature,

Inexplicable,

Impermanent,

And strong.

And I will not be another fucking tragedy,

Another DWP dispensability,

Too many of us have already died.

We build on their bodies. Defiant.

I, am a being of duty, and fury, and I want you to know, that I am broken,

Because they could not contain me whole.

Fibromyalgia, took my bones, and they grew. Fragmented, transcendent, and new,

I am fragile. And grounded. Bound to dropped kerbs. Sick insides.

But my bones?

Oh, my bones, are the sky.