I Am Laying Flowers At The Grave

How to Save Your Own Life, Erica Jong

on the two angels that visited me at work

matching white coats, dirty from being on earth too long; a kaleidoscope of color inside the younger one’s hood

they are mean to each other, but that’s just how angels are. it’s all they know. the taller one rolls its eyes— all of them— every time the younger one can’t make up xer mind. the younger calls it a slur in a language no one can speak.

more than a few dollars short for the wire cutters and sealant they need, so I hand them a twenty.

the taller one insists it doesn’t know me, I don’t see how that matters, so I tell it, “it’s a gift.”

but the word “gift” feels like the word “offering”

a last ditch attempt to appease a god who ignored me all my life

maybe this is a last piece; a last peace, a treaty.

and echoes in my mind whisper:

“be kind to strangers

lest they be angels in disguise”

so hold me on the way down,

and do me no harm,

i cause myself enough injury

from day to day, love

Dirt road Polna droga

and I would rip myself apart for you,

crack open my ribcage and let you

take whatever you wanted.

but you have been teaching me

that you do not need me to,

that I do not need me to.

I am holding my bloody heart out to you, my hands stained with red from holding it for so long.

and while you are not the person who ripped it out of my chest,

you are the person I am trusting to take care of it.

maybe you can put it back in for me.

one of these days,

you will ask me to hold you,

and I will crush you in my hands.

not through any ill intent,

but out of never learning to love

and never learning the art of being gentle

the screaming that bounces around the inside of my skull is back to grace me with its presence. guttural and keening and feral.

i take another sip from my soda can and pretend i do not hear it, because to let it out into the world, where it would transform from visceral agony to banal noise, would be worse than enduring it silently. at least this way i can still feel it. at least this way no one else has to.

i have crawled so far on my own without you

that i am starting to think i can stand.

I am not a girl,

but rather a boy in the way

that I am burdened a daughter.

disappointingly so.