Trigger Warning: self-harm
I didn’t believe in loneliness
until the day I unraveled
into myself, which is to say that I finally understood
how people become millionaires
off of a stranger’s soul-ache.
The truth is that a body too familiar with this Earth,
with its knife-cut borders and
hand-carved hills and
days so holy we start to believe that a god exists,
is a body too long rented.
How a boy, wingless,
marbles his arm black and blue
the same way a morning’s second storm
plunges bulb-deep into loam.
But somehow in my inner riches, I saw the best part
of the body; the blood-dashed place
where life outgrows itself, where a mother
memorizes the heartbeat of her unborn child and traces it forever
against her palm. Where I discovered
that we all just long to be
touched. To be entered. Yet
what is a lover but a body with a bullet wound?
What is my own shadow
but the war within my mother?
By Sarah Street
