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by Rivers Solomon

My ability to dredge up love from the paltry reserves is one that comes and goes. Let tonight be enough to undo all my sins.

I’m a baby bird, chirping for anyone at all to spit food into my mouth.

My chest is too clogged to think of swallowing, too full up with my heart.

Don’t think me small. If I am ever fragile, it is only because I prefer to be.

Can your arms hold your anvil-heart even if your chest can’t?

All three of us live for being chased, desperate for some assurance that if we disappeared, someone might mourn our loss or reach into the walls and grab us if a ghost claimed us.

If something were to happen to you. I wondered, then, if that meant that everything up to that point was stuff not happening to me.

And I can show it such things. Such beautiful, warm things. Such love, a love it does not know.

The broken, stray wolf cub in me is delighted to be treated with such care. I am something small in the lap of something large.

There is a human here so delighted to have found me. I need not worry for anything.

The comfort of a particular history no matter how horrid it might be. It’s ours.

Maybe that’s what’s wrong with me. I can’t really live because I don’t let things die.

You have a tendency to talk with such love and compassion for others—even now, how you cannot separate yourself from the plight of others, cannot extricate yourself from the rope of pain we are all encircled within, yet you talk of yourself with such … hmm, I don’t want to use the wrong word, but you seem unable to extend yourself—selves—the same grace you extend to the rest of the world.

Because if it’s not my fault, there’s truly not a thing I can do.

Conflict makes me feel suicidal, in no uncertain terms. I want to shrink away and die and never have the experience of a negative emotion again.

Now that I’ve begun, it’s not easy to stop. Anger is a waterslide.

The same mechanisms that facilitate language facilitate the passing on of pain.

us and take us away, outside ourselves. There is no predictability. At times, one spell trumps another, or multiple spells war at once, and the body becomes a shell in those moments, a shell that does not belong to you.

People hurt us, and we hurt people, and it’s endless. It brings me to the floor, supplicant, devastated, ready to surrender to anything that might offer peace from the cliché reality that life is pain.

I am fighting for my life, dear sister, at this very moment, standing in this kitchen, ready to die so I do not have to be intimate again with suffering.

I know what it’s like to be dead under someone’s invasive touch, frozen. Wouldn’t wish it on my kin.

She wants to be loved so fully and completely that her heart explodes from the pleasure of it,

The ghosts inside me tremble, frightened as they reckon with being forgotten and unknown, discarded and left out of the familial hold. They know that none of this is theirs.

So much of what we speak is our attempt to make our fantasies real.

and while Elijah knew this was coming, had hoped for this moment, in fact, she doesn’t fully know what to do with it now that it is here.

those preparations are inadequate given the task in front of her, the giving and receiving of it, pleasure, a thing that still eludes her.

Aren’t you cute? a cashier would say. More importantly, he’s brilliant and kind, Mama would say.

Your heart is so big. It’s the biggest thing I’ve ever seen.