Trying To Tame The Electricity In My Veins

Ohio Total Solar Eclipse

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.

Henri Gervex, Rolla (detail), 1878.

Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux.

Nicole W. Lee, from "Even the Dust"

The Pittsburgh Press, Pennsylvania, January 14, 1935

What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade

by Brad Aaron Modlin

Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen to the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas,

how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer. She took questions on how not to feel lost in the dark

After lunch she distributed worksheets that covered ways to remember your grandfather’s

voice. Then the class discussed falling asleep without feeling you had forgotten to do something else—

something important—and how to believe the house you wake in is your home. This prompted

Mrs. Nelson to draw a chalkboard diagram detailing how to chant the Psalms during cigarette breaks,

and how not to squirm for sound when your own thoughts are all you hear; also, that you have enough.

The English lesson was that I am is a complete sentence.

And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math equation look easy. The one that proves that hundreds of questions,

and feeling cold, and all those nights spent looking for whatever it was you lost, and one person

add up to something.

Ossuaries, Dionne Brand

Diana Reposing by Paul-Jacques-Aime Baudry (1859)