Grey shadows loom in rows around my door a cluster of bruises, waiting for the moon to rise her slipknot circle into the rafters of the sky. They move in time, loose and heavy as a noose of hands around my throat. My breathing closes swallow, swallow hard shallow gasps as smudges tread their march spreading black into my room. I watch with nightjar eyes and hear with ghost-bat ears for footfall and door creak. Hallways baited with breath loaded as a gun and screams I cannot speak. Horror is cut into the bone skeleton of this home. In the dark my ears grow ears of their own. My antelope heart turns and runs. Daylight bleeds its fingerprints over the wall embers of relief ignite burning heartbeats and breaths through my chest with their slow growth and gentle crawl. The knifeblade under my pillow loses its weight as my hand falls. The spell breaks, and I lay my head down, down, in drowning sleep. A moment of death before voices waking with the day disturb and raise me from
My breath catches in my chest and flickers out. I howl down the corridors fluttering like the flame of a sputtering candle in the darkness. Howling smoke wreath, I reach for the crack of the windowsill. My voice aches and screams to lift the pane a perfect prism of glass separates me from home. Outside, streetlights wink so many stars and I dream of freedom. He lifts my feet onto the metal pedals it bites into the soft underside of my flesh. I steal footsteps. Cold floor, machine whirrs lyric alarm to my racing heart. Sleepy nurses snap to attention in the night, they shine their tiny laser spotlights into my eyes “Why are you awake? Get back into bed! You’re sick!” Check the tubes and IVs for tampering, crisp nods. Their pens bobbing up and down in small salutes.
My lips crack and bleed, the skin of deserts. They restrict my water and dispense ice chips measured a millimetre at a time. Heart monitor beeps with every motion butterfly effects, slow echoes pulses and waves of pain, pain, shame hollow caverns missing from their charts. They don’t see my face, they see a collection. Insect bodies stabbed through with delicate pins perfectly preserved, labelled, prized, cotton-wool stacked and exo-skeletoned. He presses the soft underside of my mandible and leaves me to my pain for days exclaiming that he’s never seen nor heard of a specimen like me. He relishes the study. The tube pulls deep into my stomach like the rope of a well or a divining wand for water. I imagine dropping stones and making wishes to fill my belly or create a sinkhole big enough to swallow me into oblivion. I wish for rain that never comes and realise they never hear my words or ask the right questions. I touch the salt of my cochineal lips ground ruby red and taste
Submitting Survivorship by Rosary0fSighs, literature
Literature
Submitting Survivorship
A forest looms inside my mind, memories in rows.
The shadows cast of white bones and headstones,
trees marked, stark and waiting,
cut into survivor-ship masts.
This pain waits for voice,
encased in darkness, silt,
and silence.
This bodymind carries volcanic scars
restraint, solitary confinement, self-starvation, blood, violence
comas, restarted heart,
hospital gowns and locked doors, grinding shut.
I write them to an unknown audience across a sea:
these are a few of my dangerous dreams.
I follow a recipe to soften me
boil down, simmer, blanch
into objectivity.
Red barcoded bracelets were cut into my soul -
select the perfect adjectives for
We step into universes of unrest, and listen, listen
hear echoes and ghosts.
The whispering unuttered sounds of fear, longing, unbelonging,
scars hushed and ushered in to corners.
Covering bright teeth, papering the brush of lips,
we bear witness to grimaces and listen for
the humming underneath.
Swallowed pain, lingering alienation -
shadows pressed in to cracks and
looming over doorways.
We take note, watch and listen, listen, listen close.
Restless, this murmuring, we learn to listen with our eyes.
Listen by creating spaces first,
hearts pressed soft to the earth.
Thrumming and red,
we track hurt and loneliness.
Our thumbs wrapped ar
You cut your teeth in my words
catch the hitch in my vocal cords -
a pulley of ropes to hurt, shame,
darkness, ghosts.
You ask permission to come close,
to climb the stage.
You shift the curtain with your hand
while I scream the house down.
Banshees tremble underfoot and you
tread the boards.
Your eyes follow the lift of my shoulder,
the scatter of my gaze, and you
take them like an elevator
to red, velvet pain.
Falling, falling, falling floors
guillotine tears suffocating me in secrets
a thousand cuts to my soul.
You move fast into this universe of fear
to prompt a kind of love.
We find hunger here,
we meld breath.
We weave a web of s
Goose-fleshed skin, bathed under fairy lights in bright reds and gold
as warm and whole as you don’t feel.
Trembling fingers undoing the clasp of your straps
knotted treble clef of your hair trailing down to the
curved base notes of a spine and hips
too prominent and shook with cold and nerves.
Rising over the crescendo flood and hovering above yourself in the
sweet night air of this pool, you loose your hands into your hair and send it down -
a tsunami of blue.
Pearls dot your skin – fear tattoos
raised quavers in staccato bursts, in time with your tread -
full stops and ellipses of dread… breves of cold unreal.
You h
The Locked Wards [Reworked] by Rosary0fSighs, literature
Literature
The Locked Wards [Reworked]
Statistics written in skin
naked and sick,
lips hung with words but
hollow of expression.
There is no softening the medicine
trickling into bone.
Dream lucid or speak insane,
mad tones lost to effortless hands
guiding your skeleton to a locked room.
Bound in white
breathing in the scent of stars and faded galaxies
gauze and Betadine and
decaying souls, light already gone.
The florid notes of hope
linger in doorways
ground shut on the back stairs
a two-at-a-time descent.
Pills trespass fairy weights on her tongue
a cloying sweetness rich and thick that is darkness embodied.
Blue sheets billow out their sails and go nowhere -
they moor their
Your tongue hits your teeth like a drum
in time with your heart,
in time with mine.
Your words trip fast like fists
beating out of your skull
our hurt as plain as headstones
that we stake deep between the ribs of our earth.
We are tiny satellites
spinning, hidden in this sky.
Broadcasting pain in the vast dark
unfolding our truth in a battlecry that
rips us red and open.
Supernova stars exploding blood
eons and light years apart that will echo and echo.
We will be picked up and felt
for generations down.
I hold space for you and you for me.
We see each other and say
we are enough and we always will be.
I hear you and I love you
the sham
A close study of life instead of a living, breathing model
grinding glass lenses beneath lamplight in early hours of the morning,
spine crunched under soul-less eyes.
Tiny shards the size of stars
return to sand and fill my lungs.
Without my noticing
they make their cuts,
the gradual post mortem of breathing.
With each breath, I aspirate death as easy as winking and peering
down at the shadow cast by the gentle mirror curve.
Press my hand against its concave heart
as though feeling for a beat and
examining the loneliness of this room.
Crush crush crush hush this stillness and
pool it beneath my feet.
Macro-phage cell deaths leapt of