Britney

Four months until graduation, four-and-a-half until 18—I exclaim this to an unwilling audience—the parterre empties under the mass of my words.

Self-voyeurism as I enunciate, looking for present flesh to hold my words and my hand because I am getting too big for my own pelvic cavity, outgrowing my weak maternalism, and trying to figure out how to become when I have built my house on unbecoming, on the land of curdled milk and honey, and now I am to be an adult when I have made a shoddy home in false childhood.

I don’t cry as much as I used to, I would like to think, but I sob when seraphim breathe on me from hundreds of miles away, and I sob when I return to the desert I have bred in my mind’s recesses and find that my shed has been masticated by a wedding party of dust bodies, and my tears are tasted by love I cannot see or hold. ♦