Our Numbered Days

by Neil Hilborn

I’m so lucky we all lived through who we were to become who we are. I’m so lucky I’m so—lucky.

I’ll say I love you when I actually love you.

You no longer think of suicide as a house you will build one day.

In her you have seen the color and shape of your perfect life and now the children, the house, the arguments about tablecloths, they are all fading like things left in sunlight, like any dream left too long in the light.

You will remind yourself, she will remind you, you will remind each other, that this is for the best, that you are physically incapable of loving one another, and in those moments you will be lying, your heart screaming I CAN I CAN I CAN. But you’ll stay silent.

So maybe love is a form of crying. Catie Rosemurgy

she loved me once, though it wasn’t for very long, though it was distracted, though it shouldn’t have happened, once, she loved me.

Time goes, you say? Ah no, alas, time stays, we go. Henry Austin Dobson

Still Life with Pills I too have wanted to open myself. I too have stared at a razor and seen in it a doorway. I think I am only still here because I was too scared to make the first cut.

Depression wasn’t an endless grey sky, it was no sky at all. I’ve got to go somewhere. I’ve got to go.

will have fun like my life depends on it because it does.

It’s unfortunate that your offspring make people wish for a dystopian future in which euthanasia is a universally beloved form of birth control, but when elderly women literally everywhere are better parents than you, perhaps it’s time to hang up the baby-making spurs.

Is this a poetry collection or a stand up comedy transcription? Idc either way I love this

Here and Away I’ve been hearing that the world is ending. I’ve heard it so much these days that I can either completely ignore it or never leave my house again. That is, if I actually left my house for things that don’t directly enable me to keep my house. See, I’ve been thinking about driving nowhere. I’ve been thinking about becoming a box inside a locked room inside a dark house at the dark end of the street. I wanna go away until I’m gone. It takes so much less energy to not exist than it does to exist and get burned. I’ve been burned so much I’m not me anymore. I’m a stupid puppet version of me. I’ve got strings that lead to nowhere. Nothing is pulling on me. I wish someone would drag my hand out of hiding and sign my name on the dotted line. There are days when I cannot find the sun even though it’s right outside my goddamn window, when getting out of bed feels like the key in the doomsday machine, so on those days, this is what I tell myself: whatever you are feeling right now, there is a mathematical certainty that someone is feeling that exact thing. This is not to say you aren’t special. This is to say thank god you aren’t special. I too have kissed no one goodnight. I have launched myself off tall places and hoped no one would catch me. I have ended relationships because suddenly I was also exposed. But isolation is not safety, it is death. If no one knows you’re alive, you aren’t. If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around to hear it, it does make a soun...

The basis of optimism is sheer terror. Oscar Wilde

Enabling: a Love Song for and after my grandmother It’s called kissing the bottle because of the way your lips move. I seem to recall that your lips moved like that on me once, but I doubt either of us would remember now. Now, after the years and what I’m sure must be several houses full of glass. I bet you could fill all the places we’ve lived together with all the bottles we’ve emptied together. Bob, I know you never much liked drink. I think you only drank so I didn’t feel lonely so you didn’t feel lonely. I’m lonely now, Bob. How’s heaven, Bob? You must have gone to heaven. You spent too much time taking care of me to do anything bad. Our children have to give me the wine now. Our children, who you always kissed goodnight with your mouth or whatever implements were closer at hand. Bob, this Christmas all the other words were gone but I could still say your name. Everyone noticed, but no one would tell me where you’d gone. I knew where you’d gone, but I still expected you to walk in the door with Spotty, who I know is also dead, but there are too many deaths now to use them to accurately measure time. Bob, I looked into Marilyn’s eyes and asked a question. Every word was your name. Even if I could have said anything else, I wouldn’t. She wiped the mashed potatoes off my chin and said “I know. We miss him too.” Bob, that’s it. I miss you. I’d forgotten what it was like. Since you came home from the ocean I’d never not been near you. I may have been sad, but never lonely....

Liminality The best way to get to heaven is to take it with you. Henry Drummond Our headlights snake across the West Texas highway. Out here they’ve only got two kinds of music on the radio: Country and Western. Her hair touches my shoulder in the wind. The road signs say turn ahead. We sing along to songs our parents taught us. Turn ahead. Steep cliff. Her finger is curled around my belt loop. Steep cliff. Pay attention. The road curves away from me, my voice crumples as we clip the guardrail, our back wheels lift skyward, the car spins, flips, the sky and the river bed fight for supremacy, our headlights kick into space. All of our clothes float around us. Her blouse blossoms like a supernova, the change in her cup holders forms constellations glinting in front of our eyes. We are astronauts coming back to earth. When the nickel stars settle in the dust, we hang upside-down, dangling like marionettes from our seatbelts. We unbuckle them, fall to the ceiling that was never meant to be a floor. Her collarbone is broken, the same one she fractured at six years old. The glass is flung around the car in a perfect halo orbit, we’re freezing in our own solar system. As I’m blinking in and out of consciousness, she speaks to me in a voice that comes from just behind my ear, she says: "All that has ever mattered is volume and if you turn up the speakers past the point of sound, to deafening silence, you will hear me again, I will whisper your name from the cracks in the canyon ro...