Humanity: Raw & Unfiltered
The most beautiful moment I had in college (aside from the day I bought myself a vibrator or learned to make poached eggs) was when I went to the lake, picked up a flat stone the size of a driver’s license and threw it. It skipped four times, just like that. I didn’t need CJ to show me how to do it, reveal any special secret to me. In the end, I didn’t need him, didn’t want him, at all.
Then, in a wine soaked haze, I realize what the worst part about this is.We are always on guard against the men in the streets. The ones who whistle while we walk. We guard against the men at the bars, whose smiles turn to snarls upon rejection. We guard against the men online whose thumbs could spell “slut” without help from their eyes. We are almost always on guard. We almost never feel safe.
I am sorry.
I am sorry that you held on to faith,
I am not a believer, I have no allegiance
other than the one forged by pain,
with the Goddess of Self-Preservation.
Verse gleaming bright, imbued with might
Men’s words cannot define you anymore.
Once, you may have let others tear you apart
only to strike the final mutinous blow yourself;
but you have come back from that.
You are more than that.
Your potential is unlimited.
I break character through dynamic vocals and stray fingertips. The beach looks like me, sometimes: grainy, abundance of free speech, unintentionally waterlogged. But you, you live green: soiled, unrooted, an unexpected baptism in nature. Thirty times over. A clashing multiple of prints, seared and stained and loving, all working through the same tangles just to find what’s left in a woman. To find what’s left in a body.
“It feels like you’re inside my body,”
he whispered and squeezed tighter and
tried to meld two into one
like lonesome clumps of wet clay.
The landing at the top of the stairs sounded the loudest lament. Her fingers traced the expansion and contraction lines on the white-washed plaster walls as she took the first steps slowly, navigating the bowed and weakened wood on the stairs. The house and her family were accustomed to her. Read more