I stare death and the face and see only me.
Battered, at scale, bruised in the places I hit myself. Or, perhaps, this was someone ___ else’s doing,
the way this story is someone else’s story.
How this sentence belongs to someone who is as of this reading not me, because ___ it is you.
I am not afraid of suicide, except for other people.
I have talked you off a ledge and maybe your cousin too.
I have fucked you both and said______ now isn’t life worth it then recalled
the precise warp of my pasty stomach and violent elucidation of my thighs.
Once upon a time, I could have been a statistic.
Pills were juicy, somehow, the weight more welcome than my tits.
My honkers. My jugs.
A surgeon would photograph, grope, and liken them to an old man’s. In that ____moment, I felt old. I
felt ancient, ready to croak.
I had a good mixture, a veritable salad in my palm.___ Do me a solid_______ I told ____ the pills.
Remind whoever finds me of my pronouns.
Nex was beaten to death at sixteen.
When I was sixteen, a table of boys in study hall called Caitlyn Jenner a tranny ____while I
studiously starved myself.
These are both similar and dissimilar experiences.
I hope this letter finds you thinking of me from the times I was a different me.
I’m sure the temptation to slaughter me — or perhaps just knock me down a peg — ____is very strong.
Visceral, even. I imagine you experience it with a near uncontrollable venom, a ____ current, a rage.
All the rage you have at times attributed to men at the precipice of rape.
I’m sure it is very difficult for you to control yourself.
I’m sure your hands leak with urgency. Yes, I wreak havoc on the very being of ____you.
You, tragic witness of my brief body.
When I was seven, the ocean almost swallowed me.
I thought within the waves______ is this all the life I’ll ever live?
My grandmother pulled me up by one arm and laughed, because she was not the ____ dying one.
I turned toward her with my burning face.
Notes:
“All the rage” is borrowed from the title of Sam Sax’s 2016 chapbook, All the Rage.
“…my brief body” is borrowed from Billy-Ray Bellcourt’s 2020 essay collection, A History of My Brief Body.
