seams and stitching ♡ published

ANATOMY OF A SHATTERED SOUL

we are all just wishbone bodies with
tug-of-war hearts-- erasure marks,
blown tires, tripping wires,
starting fires,
shattered souls studying anatomy
as if understanding
why we need these
seams and stitching
will make us pick them less.

remember all the nights
we thought the gunshots
were fireworks? the cathedral
we viewed perfectly
from our bedroom window
lined in yellow police tape.
we didn't speak of it,
we sat on the cold tiles
of our strange resting place
and pretended to be things
we could not be.

we left the kitchen window open
on the cold October nights with
Uncle Benjamin in mind. we
dead-bolted the back door
with him in mind, too.

some mornings, when i was only the height of our grandparents' love,
i crawled over mama out of bed and watched the sunlight pour through the thin curtains in the living room.
i remember projecting memories
onto the furniture,
i remember remembering you,
all golden and fragmented with the newborn sunlight. illuminated dust particles and electricity charged atoms making up my hazy collage
of recollection. i think people forget that i was only a child,
only an ambitious child with wide-eyes and a big mouth
and strange things to say.

i remember the nicks
in the wooden table,
small sticky hands leaving imprints
like ghosts,
the echoes of canned laughter
in the dark
when mama tucked me into bed after a cup of chocolate milk.
the ridiculous novelas
playing on telemundo
into the early hours of the mornings, static  casting shadows
on the sleeping forms on the couch.
long days of work and sweaty necks, the drip of the bathtub faucet, growing mold around the drain.

we were not unhappy children.
we talked a lot and played with plastic, easily breakable toys.
we ignored the things we did not like, closed our ears
to the broken-down spanish
we refused to understand,
rarely argued but when we did
used our own bodies
against each other, wrestling
on the cold tiles
of the bedroom floor.

there are still home-made videos of us confined to VHS tapes, never to be replayed again.
they got lost in the fire, the same one that devoured  all our plastic toys
and the wooden table
and moldy porcelain bathtub
with the leak that could not
fight off the flames.

remember the visits to the sterile, blinding white room.
the sickly sweet scent of psychosis.
remember the room number, the ID cards, the insistence
that it took to see his
deeply lined face
and empty eyes. hospitalization.
internal destruction.

we ease over that part with a sudden gap
in the photographic timeline.
his absence
is completely blind-sighted
by the absence of any record
of that time.
i think people forget
that he was just a man.
he was just a man.

remember the four jobless years.
the red plush carpet and sea-foam green walls
of our brand-new apartment,
separate bedrooms,
first time on our own.
the absurdity of it,
of being alone. of course, we weren't alone, per se. we still had
the shadows out of the
corner of our eyes,
the fragmented nightmares we woke
to piece back together
with a single helpless yelp of fear.
the narrowness of the rooms
comforted us.

we were but narrow bodies
in wide expanses
of fears and shadows
threatening to swallow us whole
or engulf us in fire
or use our own bodies against us.

remember the tripped-wire
that is memory.
remember the bravery it must take
for a woman who was once
eaten alive by fire
to light a candle. i think people forget
that we are just people.

we were just children, sitting
on cold-tiled bedroom floors pretending to be things
we could not be.
pretending the cold October night
was the perfect backdrop
for the fireworks exploding in the sky,
pretending we did not fear the shadowy forms made of static
on the couch.
we were not, i repeat,
we were not erasure marks,
blown tires, tripped wires,
we did
not start the fires.

we were the children of the children,
we were the fragments and the particles and the atoms
that when sewn together formed
one long tale of survival. we study
the anatomy of our shattered souls-
it is only a sorry attempt to understand
why our hearts beat the way they do
and blood pumps the way it does
and memory wounds and heals
the way it does
but we've begun to stop picking
at these seams and stitching.
i think people will not forget
the strange things we have said.