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but the price of freedom / is the knowledge you are trapped / & she found it more and more difficult / to be anyone but herself
is the only way out of woman man? How can the exit also be the fire?
I am wondering / if / after I walk into the light / I will be met by myself / that dead part of me /
the world being re-written. What was alive is now sickly, what was proud is now wondering at her clothes. No one believes herself.
the men outside are men outside. Valentine wonders if it is always the same men outside if they want the same thing. they want to come in the locked room. the occupied body.
the men bring the forest in with them & in their dark thinkings, animals hunt themselves & girls in red hoods turn to thank them there is something wild in their civility. ladies, they say, ladies their faces red, white & blue, ladies.
when I let my hair down / everyone climbed up / & anyway / they don’t tell you / that our enemies dress as us / it is difficult to tell the difference /
the thing about triangles is / she’ll say / blowing a smoke raven / there are three sides / your lover, yourself / & whoever is watching.
what is a closet but the body. & what is fire but the lie.
the interrogation suite is in the old gay club the mirror ball reflects on its mistakes has each of us imprisoned in its vernacular we stare up at one other, sad parenthesis
a cathedral of girls snuffed like candles.
delete my heart. evaporate the idea of me. a slow striptease down to the breath, the belief the last part of me to disappear my absence
because we were young. because we were. because, we.
each kiss unravelling into the outline of a man asking me why he cannot come inside
I’m teaching her how to hide behind herself how to make a man smile.
while they bicker light loses interest & none are aware of the silhouette of the man approaching tossing a loose stone between hands.
if war is God’s way of teaching Americans geography / then maybe this / 0-god / oubliette / is God’s way of teaching woman history /
are all women / inside other women / & how do I write / that you are there too / pretty dust girl / curled deep in your cave of remarkable horror / inside yourself / uroboros / smiling a no / putting your headphones on / staring into your hands / unscrewing your fists / every time you / open your mouth / a white man jumps out / & wolfs you / how do I write that / there is a grave at the grave meeting of my legs / & no one goes there after dark / except with nets / to catch all these beautiful ghosts / pinning them to novels / pages plucked /
