C.M.
Always the Bride
The bee that was frozen to my window screen has left me now that it is spring.
I’m waiting for the street cat to return from her indoor hibernation. I’m explaining
in the dream how the secret to life is to slow down and notice the subtle things.
The secret to death is more concerning. It looms over the days and weeks. A new
study describes the brainwaves that occur leading up to and after death. How memory
and dreams may flash before our eyes. The dizzying effects of the edge. I stood
at the gate of my sanity. I tried to stand amidst the stars, but my knees buckled.
Will the heart always jump and pound the drum or gong when we fall, whether
in love or from a physical height? Perception slows to notice the moments between
heartbeats. Perception quickens with the need to dominate and control. Fear without
respect is just hatred. Ken told me fascists are necrophiliacs because they desire
cold, dead systems rather than the dynamic unknown. Is it fearing not knowing
or fearing making the unknown known? In the depths of the ocean, I wait for a light.
Always the Bride
Fear feels heavy until it’s in the palm of one’s hand,
gently crawling up one’s arm. That the ancestor
of every placental mammal is a rat-like creature
who subsisted off mushrooms during one of the great extinctions
fills me with joy. The gift of life is pain. It reminds us
we’re alive. The time I took a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor
regularly was the only time I can remember not thinking about not
being alive. A brick turret surrounded my heart, the built up
feeling desperate to disappear or flood the town. Plug the holes
with your fingers and your toes. The difference between being
and belonging. I am on this earth. I belong to this earth.
O vicious mines of the mind, I rinse my mouth with terror
as each day I bear witness to the generational patterns of hurt.
We are bonded by skin and bones, flesh and rot. But the world
also continues to bloom with mystery and intrigue. The other day
I watched a naked tree cradle the sun like a newborn child.
And when we usher our love as a timeless, infinite thing
we cross the threshold in the way a wave is energy moving
the water, but not the water.
Always the Bride
The pendulum swirls from sensation to emotion to feeling to thought.
It’s probably more of a merry-go-round, shapes frozen with faces
of joy and terror. Form, forgive me for giving lip service to the static.
For believing everything was empty, that the “I” was non-existent.
I never meant to sever community ties. I was being given instructions
on how to breathe, but I was doing it wrong. The babies of the block
bounce with joy in their parents’ arms. When the joy fades, the perplexed
look takes over. I want to go outside to be with the people I love. They
are near and far. Why do I put up bureaucracies around feelings? The need
for it to be approved by insurance first. I fill each moment with dread
on my drive to work. The unnamable rises through boredom.
I don’t want to stare into the basin nor fetch the bucket from the well.
But when I sink with each step, I fall into the earth’s mantle and then the core.
I breathe the unforgiving fire into my heart. I feel each piece of grief catch
like wisps of lint floating into the sky.
C.M. lives in Philadelphia. They work as a social worker.