buildup to tragedy braves like this: soft sounds of traffic, a breath hissed out like a crime, the staccato of indistinct voices fluttering in the rainy distance and an ocean speaking braille.
i left a wound the size of my benumbed fist in a bottle for you in your grandfather’s old office. my heart grows to tomb sizes. the walls are reverberating with all these sickly notions. it was a childhood of frosted screams & lips leaking bullets. it was a vampire’s melody in the kitchen. mother praying to a headless deity with her eyes half-open, my brother in the other room with a cigarette up his nose and fifty holes in my socks from all the mice kisses.
youth came like an unwelcome guest on my doorstep stampeding with his steroid gaze and hauling a pick axe shaped to shard the family.
my thigh gap was where boys with vacant eyes and sonorous intentions would snake their forked hands, my eyes abandoned water tanks too tiny to fit all the swamp’s storms. we embodied forests, lichen growing beneath tongues, our ribs reduced to stumps. all flowers lost, honey evaporating into the sad air.
they called it the butterfly effect, i called it martyrdom. someday i’ll find my mother in a burnished garden past the muddled moon.
i’ll see my brother again & his voice will sound like whispering on a summer burnt porch and pinpricks falling. someday it won’t be like this. someday it won’t feel like this.
i dream choking the wind out of him. sundays
spent floating beneath the warm currents of your body. blind eyes picturing rainbows.
the girl will be whole
again. the girl will be whole. the girl
will be.
——
Jupiter Reed is a published poet and writer whose been spellbound by the fairytale world of fictional realities every since she was a little girl. You can find more of her work on her tumblr.