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prompt: this will pass
you’re getting emails addressed to my deadname
and i can’t message you in class because my smile, sappy, sticky, sweet gives me away; nobody else in ap lit online class cameras-on-please is happy enough to be there to be smiling like that. and i tell you about it, smile dripping down my camera viewfinder, i bubble and spill over the edges when you respond; i’m giddy over you, like summer, like sweet crepes, like fallen dress straps. and when we met we were planets revolving around each other, stuck fast, but now you are a universe to me. and every night we load up a discord voice call with our friends and listen to the sound of their voices, crackling too-loud-too-soft through the speakers, saying: it will be okay, this too will pass. and you’re getting emails addressed to my deadname but you could call me anything and i would answer; you see through me, i trust you to. and the next time i get to touch you i will hold your hand and it will say: i love you, you can see the part of me that is rotted, you can call me anything.
prompt: the wound
alkaline hydrolysis
wikipedia says “in some cultures bodies have been buried in fetal position” — that is, you are on the shower floor, teeth pressing indents into the meat of your palm, into the skin stretched across your knuckles, biting at your own unclean hands — that is, you have been built just to forget — that is, you exist in memory cards and computer chips and a hundred people’s memory, yet you have tried to scrub and scrub it all away — that is, you are always going to be twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen — that is, you are almost eighteen years old and nobody you have loved has seen the stretch of your naked skin but — that is, you are a gaping wound, you are a ruin, festering from the inside out, you are a monument of sin — that is, shower water pools around you, fills the hollow of your chest, a water cremation, burial at sea.
prompt: cannibalism as catharsis
i am on my knees in the backyard, still breaking soft soil underneath my hands. i am on my knees on the bathroom floor, still fourteen, still coughing up bile. i am on my knees hidden under my desk, still praying to a god, still a non-believer. i am on my knees in a grave, i am still digging. i am driving my dirt-stained nails into her skin and it is tomb-cold and she doesn’t bleed. i am cupping my hands to my mouth, formaldehyde-sweet, i am drinking. i am kneeling over her, embalmed, i am tearing at muscle. i am crying at my communion, i am not looking at her face, fourteen and small and still holding prayer on its chapped lips. i am on my knees in a butchered animal’s body, i am on my knees in the dirt, i am on my knees in front of a phone camera timer, i am flat on my back in a grave.
prompt: the hedgehog's dilemma
i am atoning for sins that weigh heavy on my shoulders and there is a photo of my wet bathtub on the internet and i say i can’t show my heart to you because i cannot bear letting you taste the rot of it and i say i’m sorry, i’m sorry, for biting into the veined underside of your wrist but i have been a cornered animal in a twelve year old girl’s body and i am standing pressed against the shower wall, i am standing soaked and bleeding and i say i would let you just cleave me open, i have torn myself apart at the seams, broken open my ribs, grafted off the skin of my thighs and i say don’t ask me to lie down, don’t ask me to hold you, i would, i would, i would, anybody could do anything to me and i am atoning, i am praying, i am asking god if he is kind, i am sitting in that bathtub, naked and shivering and small again and and and all i can do is ache
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