opheliarot

[opheliarot]

anatomy  /  human body as a house,  toviyah kats  /  the bloody chamber and other stories,  angela carter  /   still 02,  tanja jeremić  /  why are you haunted?

[opheliarot]

the insidious thing about re-entering the city is that sometimes you don't realize it until it's too late. the mist creeps up like a cold fog rolling in over the ocean, blurs all of your edges out slowly until you are a creature of vapor. look at yourself in the mirror. what do you see? a woman in fog?

you aren't brave enough to wipe away the condensation. the person you are when you're solid and real is too bulbous and blundering, too insipid. instead you share a slice of cake with the garbage can and suck tar into your lungs on the balcony. what you crave is a kind of destruction you can control. this might be killing me but at least i'm choosing it. it's mine.

there are lighted windows in the distance but the further into the city you wander, the more remote they become. moisture in the air blurs them out until there is only you, the mist, and the empty buildings of what your body used to be.

[opheliarot]

hunger - florence + the machine / hunger: a memoir of anorexia and bulimia - marya hornbacher / novitiate (2017) - dir. margaret betts / eve overcome with remorse - anna lea merritt / birds hover the trampled fields - richard siken

[opheliarot]

they said: be seen and not heard. make your voice so small it withers and practice the art of concealing. be seen but never perceived. obfuscate. be an outline of a woman, a silhouette in mist, don't let them know you want. your wanting is your weakness, your wanting is your sin.

they said: people are not psychic and they cannot read your mind. you must communicate your feelings. you were taught manipulation but this isn't how you nourish the people you care about. use your words.

god, i am trying. i have spent so long swallowing myself and then reaching down my throat for the scraps that i don't trust my own ability to give the words shape. when you hide yourself away for so long, even you forget who the pieces total up to when brought back together. recovery is an act of violence, of breaking down and fashioning together, and there is nothing beautiful or easy about it. there is nothing palatable here, nothing digestible.

god, i am trying. i am pulling parts of myself from the back of my throat, i am digging them out from between my teeth, i am finding them hidden away beneath my tongue. all of these pieces i am trying to give to you, inviting you to watch as i cut and staple and solder them together into something understandable. i want so badly to be seen. can you make out the sharp edges now? can you see the dark circles under my eyes? the slant of my nose?

god, i am trying. i am working my jaw around a tongue that feels like leather, trying to form the right words for you. my mouth is dry and my lips are cracking but i am choking out syllables and sentences for you, definitions and descriptions. i am saying: this is me, please notice. i am saying: i am trying to be better, please be patient. i am saying: i need you so much closer, please don't walk away.

[opheliarot]

Oddities (2)

My heart is an oddities shop: I take from other people in small handfuls and store pieces of them inside myself, on consignment in carmine caverns. I collect almost-lovers and preserve fragments of their hearts in glass jars, tie them together with ribbons and strings of pearls to wear like medals, artifacts of half-conquest, leave them on shelves to collect dust and float in the formaldehyde of bad memories. The walls of my atria are lined with his poems, her songs, their touches--

and none of it has ever been quite right, all oddly misshapen, abnormal. My heart is an oddities shop. Her music is too Saint-Saëns, Danse macabre, all xylophone and rattling bones, the sound of our knees knocking together in the dark, clumsy and frightened; his words are too honeyed and soft, cloying on my tongue, fruit on the razor’s edge of ripe and rot; and when they touch me, it is always fumbling and selfish, when my hands take theirs take back threefold. I am pieces of a skeleton, malformed, in the wake of them.

I carry these things and they turn my body into a shadowbox. There’s a glass casing over his hand-print on my hip, a moth mounted in the cavity of my mouth where she kissed me, pins in the palms of my hands keeping me on display. There is a string tied loose around my left finger where a price tag was once attached. My heart is an oddities shop.

[opheliarot]

Oddities

My heart is an oddities shop: I store fragments of other people inside myself, taking in small handfuls. I collect almost-lovers and tuck pieces of their hearts away in glass jars, tie them together with ribbons and strings of pearls, leave them on shelves to collect dust and float in the formaldehyde of bad memories. I have his letters, her photos, ???

and none of it has ever quite been right, all oddly misshapen, just slightly malformed. Abnormal, oddities. Her music never quite matched my tempo; his words never quite painted an image of the core of me; and when they touched me, it was always fumbling, always desperate, always selfish. Everything my hands took, they clawed back threefold. I carry these things and they turn my body into a shadow box. There’s a glass casing over his hand-print on my hip, a moth mounted in the cavity of my mouth where she kissed me, pins in the palms of my hands keeping me on display.

[opheliarot]

you treat your anxiety like a viper like it’s something separate from you, beyond your control. you treat it like the venom it breeds isn’t yours, like the wellspring is not somewhere inside you.

when you begin to set your bridges on fire i finally let you and you burn me for it. you expect me to be a snake charmer, but my body is not a rehabilitation center my tenderness is not 20mg of lexapro it is not my job to suck venom from your wounds.

you’re dancing on the stage of your own self-made misery, a prima donna of flagrant self-destruction -- but i cannot unmemorize the calories in a cough drop. my hunger might still be a black hole, but at least i recognize my own event horizon.

[opheliarot]

we kneel at the water’s edge and tempt it to rise, testing the murk with our fingertips. the mud beneath my heels slides along the riverbank, a game of unsure footing – when you stand the shifting weight gives the shore its upper-hand and the dark waters take me.

on my back i descend and the sunlight filters through mud and moss, jetsam of green and brown in the wide unblinking blue of my eyes. i open my mouth and inhale, sucking swamp into my lungs – you could raise the sand if you wanted, but instead i find home below in the riverbed.

don’t pull me out – leave me to crawl along beneath the surface, gnawing on lichen, a vision in muddy waters.

[opheliarot]

sunflower

they say that absence makes the heart grow fonder-- or was it fungus? you don’t get to walk away from the garden and come home again to find it thriving. roots you planted five years ago still need nutrients to survive, and you say now that eight months is a drop in the bucket of five years but eight months is long enough to kill a sunflower. you can’t save a dead flower by over-watering it. the root-rot has already set in. you’ll just have to grow a new one.

[opheliarot]

first couple of lines reworked from the first lines of wind of the appian way by cyrus cassells

-

more than peace and cedar elms, emboldened junebugs adrift in the breadth of grass, i love the depthless sky, clear of starlight-jetsam, in oppressive small-town silence. as i sit encapsulated in the ambient ocean of quiet, harmonizing crickets herald a shift in the universe. light-pollution is a distant memory, miles away in our modernist milieu, but the clouds reign supreme here in cold nowhere: no twenty-story buildings with late-night lights to imitate stars gone extinct, no streetlamps to press back the pressing darkness -- only me, the universe, and the junebugs. the starless sky is a murky ceiling, and it renders the cedar elms in strange new formations, many-armed monsters held at bay by the moonless dark. we are sentinels, the junebugs and i, witnesses to the destruction of the universe’s iridescent magic. beyond the boundary- line of my blanket in the grass, neighboring houses become distant planets, the street a solar system thrown out of harmony.

sandia. h.t.

[opheliarot]

Rosemary for remembrance, and pansy for thoughts— touch her only with temperance,

paint her golden with reverence, tie her hair up in knots. Don’t worry over her severance

from reality, her irreverence for the flowers that rot. Did you expect deference? 

Deference? Your inference reduces her to an afterthought; this is not her interment:

she is not buried by embitterment. Are you? In your overwrought concept of her, is her innocence 

the cure to your belligerence? How necessary is it that she garrote herself for the sake of your deliverance? Watch her choke on rue in recompense.

you must wear your rue with a difference. h.t.

[opheliarot]

parts of my wallet are a scrapbook of my sickness. tubes of lipstick and stale cigarettes are pillars of disorder, remnants of meals i never ate. recovery says that tom ford and a marlboro red are not dinner, but if you dig a little deeper – it’s fine. wrapped around one tube is a whataburger receipt. don’t look too close: it’s from months ago; the most recent receipt is from the grocery store and it was for more cigarettes. wedged between driver’s license and gym membership is the starbucks card, worn with relapse: red cigarettes, red lipstick, and black coffee are the core pillars of a balanced diet. 

there is a rabbit hole in my wallet, and i don’t know how to talk about it without accidentally inviting you to follow me back down. we’re all mad here, but there are no little glass bottles inviting you to drink; there are no little cakes inviting you to eat. the load-bearing walls of my wallet are cigarettes and lipstick and a butane lighter and – relapse says maybe i should leave my debit card at home today.

[opheliarot]

limerence

honey      drips           the sun across your face in golden light. she would have swallowed it to make you warm enough.

her need sits beside her with gnashing      teeth—           muzzle it and watch her strangle herself on the leash just to be closer, closer, closer to you.

somewhere along the way you lost the true meaning of      passion:           latin root: pati. it is written on her bones. she was made for this.

[opheliarot]

honey

warmth spreads in a soft haze, permeating the empty spaces between bodies and seeping deep beneath skin. a sunset of pinks blending to blues blending to black blankets in from balcony doors. laughter and idle chatter hum distantly in every corner, a hymn to the night sky and to us. smoke curls in from the open doors, layering with the low beat of a song only the stars are listening to. the three of us together here means safety. a soft pink glow populates the room and we are sunshine even as a jealous moon peeks her light from around the trees. it fogs in with the smoke and the cat on the balcony and the faint smell of a spilled drink settling into the carpet, unnoticed.

at one in the morning we are still midday. the open doors spill our pocket of light into the polluted sky and together we have enough of it to spare. we are giving and taking in tandem, a sunbeam for a secret, a secret for a song and when it’s us we never seem to run dry of things to give.

at three in the morning there is nothing but us wading through honey. the stars have trickled out one by one in staggered fashion and all that’s left is us and the mess we’ve made. on the balcony we drip ash and breathe smoke and streak soft smoldering light into the open sky and the moon whispers a song about witchcraft on our lips.

at four in the morning sunlight burns out and settles down into the carpet. the air becomes a cooler shade of blue.