I think that nothing magical can be accidental
I’m desperate for affection and attention and I’m convinced
every symptom’s gonna kill me, I can’t trust lingering instincts
or epiphanies, not when my mind’s magical thinking wouldn’t
let me sing “If I Die Young” as a child because I was convinced
it would be self-fulfilling and it would kill me, not when my
worries birth worries and I wonder if thinking about my mom’s
death will make it arrive quicker, not when I couldn’t listen
to my favorite Hippo Campus song, couldn’t hear the lines
happy Valentine’s Day to you, hope it’s better than mine
because my dog’s about to die without thinking the cosmic
irony of the universe would make it happen, I don’t know how
to talk to god but in desperate moments I’ve sent wishes upward
to dead grandmothers, dead dogs, mostly missing them and
hoping they’re okay, I don’t know how to talk to god or how
to believe in something bigger than me, but I’ve been trying,
see the energy of the universe in a tarot spread pulled by me
and my sister, wear the Magician card on a necklace and my
evil eye on my left side to ward off negative energies, try to
believe in coincidences and angel numbers but catch myself
when I start spiraling, start thinking that the lyrics in these songs
are spells, I don’t know how to talk to god but on bad days where
all my urges push me to drive away, I find myself in the parking lot
of my old church, a place I haven’t prayed in since twelve, and
I think about walking in, I think about kneeling, I think about
confessionals and secrets and trying on religion for a spell, I
think about what’s left in this world to nurture me and if I can
find it in the eyes of my old pastor, the woman who hasn’t
worked there for years but when I think about godliness kindly
I still picture it in her eyes, her soft hands wrinkled over mine,
I think about opening my mouth to receive the sacrament
and letting things in that might heal me, and I don’t walk in,
I drive away, but I see my most faithful of friends on social
media and I don’t quite feel like I’m missing something but I
wonder about the feeling of being so compelled by someone’s
love, by the warmth of something that feels powerful enough
to have made the universe just for you, and I wonder how
much longer I’ll keep searching for my own sense of belonging.
Seussian sonnet for omissions
I thought an uncle would have died by now, my family is riddled with disease on both
sides, death always hanging over me like a curtain to be pulled aside, a shoe to be dropped,
but the real delay is in the waiting, the months after diagnosis when the parents didn’t
tell us anything, me and my sister living blind as if our mother’s cancer wasn’t multiplying
by the second, but who knows, not us, it could’ve been doing anything, living peacefully in
our mother’s breast like we once laid upon it, usurping her good cells like we did for nine
months each, waiting to be popped or chopped out, her skin just waiting for us to be made
so we could scar it. I think often about which parent is going to die first, fathers are
always the first assumption, and he has plenty to worry about, but my mother’s body
has been broken and torn apart so many times I think she’s surviving out of spite
or maybe something softer. I can’t imagine myself at 45, torn apart by grieving
them, I never think I’ll live that long, spent time with knives at thirteen like other
emo kids, had nowhere to put this anger, this energy, couldn’t trap or contain it or share
it with anyone because my mouth never learned the shapes of words and how to hold them.
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