cybexaide

[cybexaide]

Waning

The moon pressed

her cold face to mine.

But,

unlike her’s,

mine never changes.

[cybexaide]

Spoon Fed

He knows my agony,

but feeds me gentleness

like I might one day

stop spitting it out.

Like he knows one day,

one day,

I’ll finally eat

without an apology.

[cybexaide]

Fault Line

There’s a crack in me

that people step over—

polite, like it’s not

gaping.

I speak soft

so my ugliness

doesn’t echo.

But it does.

It grumbles

like a sleeping earthquake,

ruining even the most

stable foundation.

He holds me

like I won’t break him—

and that

softens the blow.

[cybexaide]

Advantage

I buried my face

in the sky

and felt nothing

but hot stars

pressing back.

Sometimes

the brightest light

deceives

with the worst blister.

[cybexaide]

There’s no future

when the past

keeps dragging its corpse

into your arms.

[cybexaide]

No one tells you

how much you’ll hate the world

after you survive it.

[cybexaide]

Siege Upon Him

I remember when

I stopped being someone.

It wasn’t loud.

It was a gradual crumble—

A once mighty temple

choked by lying vines

and foreign dust.

I want to go back—

not to the place

but to the me

before my chiseled marble

glistened with fissures.

But the temple is gone.

The city overtaken.

Or trapped somewhere

beneath a different structure

that survived too quietly.

There’s no map,

to where it went.

No line I can follow

to reconstruct it

back into being.

So it stays hidden,

torch half-lit and aching,

waiting for something—

For the Priest to begin

an ancient hymn

and finally

F I N A L L Y

mean it.

[cybexaide]

the bed

was the first lie—

now I have to lie

somewhere else.

[cybexaide]

I feel everything so heavily that the death of a small animal, a raccoon, a bee, a dragonfly, a bunny, feels the same to me as the death of a family member. Actually, this is a lie, shamefully I have cried over the glossy eyes of motionless roadkill where I have not even teared up for people who once held me when I could not yet walk or speak. Family members have gripped my wrists, pulled me in and told me of how insensitive, how inconsiderate and selfish I can be. But the bugs land on my fingers, the bunnies and birds sit in the grass across the yard, they stare at me as I stare back. We share secrets through glances. They die in the dry heat, they’re hit by an SUV, they starve, they overindulge and I cry out to the sky, I visit the places in which they went to rest, I clutch my hands over my mouth. Grandparents and estranged uncles die but I don’t cry, I think that I should feel sorry, but I think it may be worse to have cried for the sake of performance.

[cybexaide]

Molt

I claw at the dark

with blistered hands,

begging the light

to remember me.

Begging it to be patient.

something in me

wants to live—

but it’s buried

under years

and years

of violation

I don’t know how

to peel away.

[cybexaide]

he makes sure I get in bed.

I leave my gun in the safe.

neither of us speaks

of the ways

we are saving

me.

[cybexaide]

Stillbirth

Each drag births

a smaller version of me—

less breathing,

less seeing,

until gestation is cut short,

and my unmaking is

complete.

[cybexaide]

[cybexaide]

I’ve stared at it a thousand times.

But today,

The ceiling is new.

[cybexaide]

Funeral Practice

I rehearse my leaving in my head—

quiet, clean,

without apology.

I wonder

if anyone would call it tragic,

or just/

/inevitable.

[cybexaide]

I am tired.

Tired of being a secret, tired of being a burden to my own memories, tired of being the aftermath of things no one will ever say out loud.

[cybexaide]

Fog

The floor slurs truths I can’t verify.

My form walks ahead of me,

answering questions I never asked.

Everything looks so real—

until I touch it.