renaming

the call came from inside the house.

i should’ve known it would, despite the month that had passed. all the grisly details she laid out were drowned out by sobs,
barely muffled by the bedroom fan bringing in cold
september air. the voice of my old self, that terrible teacher,
droning on in the background — and it mattered little to
pay attention to the viscera, or to catalog each individual
bloody part being examined and served to a voracious audience.

it was all my body on the screen, in the end. and it was mine to own up to.

i could hear my mom shuffle from one room to the next. the hallway, just outside my door, she paused: the bathroom, her adjacent bedroom. then the front porch, presumably for a cigarette. i still worry her, despite assurances and promises of stability. the maternal instinct transgresses pretty words. it overcomes its own denial.

there was little else to do but claim it. my body shook unseen as i stood to be witness to my own dissection.

saturn in pisces, the sun in virgo. the crossroads of self-sabatoge and meditation on failure. radical self-acceptance can only go so far, faith without belief does nothing for a devotee. the barrier between my world and the one we live in is far too thick, too bricked up for me to transcend, let alone to try and scale. people are hurting. i can’t turn myself down. i tell them about my brother and his other reality as if i am not of the same line, as if i don’t have a foot in another world myself — my only advantage, my only curse, is to be half-grounded on earth.

like my brothers, i carry myself passive. like him, i carry the hypocrisies of our fathers. how do you say sorry for the way cowardice inspires harm? how do you say sorry for being too wounded to be of real use?

worst of all, to do it with a straight face? how do you not dance right through the caution tape and off the jump, cursing your own name?

it’s dissonance that shocks us into recall — when we remember the yielding of harmony against that harsh backdrop. it’s here in the alto section where we sing that intentional misstep, we become something buzzing, we fall out of line with the everyone elses. i have to believe this is where i need to be, the what-not-to-be, not just the failure. i have to believe my god wouldn’t be so cruel as to send me here purposelessly.

not i went to the tree, not when i laid bare on the prairie. when i sat in the truck, nauseous

i sat in the truck, smoking

i sat in the truck, alone.