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harm j

cope by hurting others. it’s easier. it will make it easier.

.//

I tried to kill myself when I was ten, or: this is the first time I can remember trying to committ suicide or comitted an action upon feelings from far beforehand. We grew up on North Road, 4 miles down a crackling infrastructure and soon before the dirt path took over through the bright green woods of boy scout trails. Yellow and orange spraypaints stung the tree barks leading out through the brush. I used to climb my way to there, and crawl around off the assigned stretches. Try to get lost. Try to get eaten. Try to get kidnapped. I have memories of reading my first words off a gas station sign when I was 3 but my earliest memory of knowing death is taking a bottle of melatonin and holding it under my tongue and inside my stomach. Hoping that it would waste me in the night.

We got "evicted" or rather, mom took Mike and I and we ran away from that house when I was 16. She used the cops to kick dad out, they served the papers at work, and for a year, I think he refused to sign off the divorce. He slept on his friend's couch, a 44 year old man who's perplexity to using his open hand to get his way, could not close around a goddamn pen. I think I understand him.

The house had been built in the '80s, because development was on the rise under Reagan and DiPrete schenanigans. Mom and dad moved in when they had just got married - they left

North Smithfield, and both had left Providence and Woonsocket respectively as kids. They were neighbors. Now, because dad fucked up and hit her, hit us, hit depression back so hard til he couldn't acknowledge he was destroying any connection he had left to love with his callous-driven heart and hard hand headedness. Now, they just don't talk. It's civil. Dad has Mike living with him because he tried to get out too and then kept fighting mom when she would ask him to try and get a job, think about school, try to survive; because you can't slit your wrists open in a bathtub on your birthday and live a life of nothing. It has to mean something.

Ginny lives with her new husband and they love each other very much and have two cats and one day I'll be an uncle for them. We fill certain roles, sun, moonflower or stargazer. Fairy fruit faggot, feelerupper in the back of the room or with an ex lover, with your fucked expressions trying to search for an annulling to their pain through an annulling of your own. I fill out forms sometimes and place names I know are mine on them just to get some assistance from the government or the recognition of my fucked up friends and their fucked up Facebook posts. They swirl and entertain an absence of living from me, me who never leaves the house until the going calls for it.

I used to work at a deli, and when I crashed my car at graduation, it blew up with my diploma in it. So then I walked to work all summer or biked down Arcadia where I used to blast Kill the Poor next to the rich suburban neighborhoods. That's where mom moved...moved near. When we had to go. Dad took over his friend's house because their grandma died. So they got an upgrade and he was able to sleep on a bed. Some amenities are blessings really, and when you bike past Saint Joseph's on a Sunday they huddle outside of mass checking in with each other.

Like a funeral reunion every week.

But what of death while you die. Living never seemed to make much sense to me. I lived, yeah, and I still do, but we substitute this word for life into a schematic division that cannot be made so simply by intention to be. Each day I feel a pressure to die more fast than the last, entering the spheres of apathy to cope with the disdain reciprocated. Is that even coping at that point.

There is no stability in my life to be or not be, and reliving that is a trauma unlike another. It's not as if this is the first attempt every day, but it's the first death, or, the possibility of the first day, in a

long while at least, where it doesn't cross my path. This statment confuses me. It cannot be possible.

I used to clear the brush and thorns with my bare hands in my backyard, and they would leave white scratches on my thighs.

But I did it for princess, for roles imagined of love and pursuit.

This little faggot boy had an idea of the world possible and now is barely making it through the month without running out of money and the bridge, the bridge, the bridge.

Mom moved again. She's repairing an old farm. I live near the 6-10 connector. I want to throw myself onto the highway in the middle of the night. Take it out of my hands, and me from hers.

There are no surpluses, no protections of belonging to this earth that do not come with sacrifice, that do not come with history and scorched earth. If I ran my hands through the dirt there would be no red, no running water. Roots or even gravel dug from centuries ago, where the rock quarries and twine factory ran the town. There is little left of home to return to, there is little home to have.

I don't want to pretend inclusion, self. More than the fat that pecks off skin, or marks that last a long time. Electric flapping coagulated to sin and external happiness. I can’t get over this and I worry that I’ll never be able to.

i will clean up your tylenol vomit. this is the most loving thing i can offer you.

nightmare for michael

When I was seven I fell down the stairs, and bashed my head on the front door. It ripped into me, but only a small bit, so dad called me Frankenstein for the next few weeks. When the stitches dissolved, a small white stripe hit the mid between my brain and skull.

When we were kids, our doctor would always tell us to wear a helmet because “a broken arm heals, but you only got one brain.� I think we only wore them when mom and dad were around. Ginnelle, me and you were careless tomboy and her brothers; and do you remember that time that kid David broke my bike?

Before then, we would ride around North Road in circles, sometimes cruising down the hill. It was mainly for the danger or for a feeling of control you could get when you pulled off of the brakes, slamming metal to metal and skidding the tires to the side.

Streaking the pavement, falling into thornbushes when you hit the curve wrong. Laughing at yourself being scraped up in a pile of brown leaves. Sometimes a car would race around the bend, and that too a danger, would be energy; adrenaline.

When you became a teenager you moved onto skateboards, but you really sucked at it. I watched you fall. I watched your shitty friends make fun of you. I made fun of you.

I just bought one, but I want a better helmet ‘cause frankly

I look like a fuckin’ dweeb and can’t skate for shit. I can’t balance and I’m still imbued with the fear of busting my head open to see what’s inside. Sometimes I bike now, but only from place to place, and it’s no longer fun to dodge cars.

I feel a lot older than I look or am. I don’t think I’m that old, but I feel it. It’s weird always being three and a half years older than you because we shared a room for so long. We would stare at the ceiling and you used to copy me back when I was a cool brother. I remember ghost stories of the tree branch smacking against the window, and claiming that to be the reason we wouldn’t sleep, not fear. Anyway. It was fun.

On the day you slit your wrists, you had just turned 17. It was in the bathtub. The only thing I knew you had taken was as much Tylenol as you could stomach, and so a red-orange and foamy vomit danced around the white tiles, the mirror, the sink and the toilet. The tub is yellow too, no amount of bleaching could remove twenty years of stain from it.

I said, “Can I clean this up.”

The cop said, “Yeah. You might want to turn the water off.

It’s about to flow over.”

He couldn’t reach his hand in there to stop the water. I wish I had punched him.

Later, I put my hand to the bottom and pulled the plug.

The door was wiped down. The tub was bleached. It was yellow again, and the water grey-clear again. I scrubbed behind the toilet and threw up into it. I flushed it down. I grabbed a tall white garbage bag.

In went the bathmat, rug, and your shirt. I could have just washed it.

In went paper towels, sour lemon zest, broken razor blades and box cutters. I pulled the drawstrings from your sweatpants.

In went hair, vomit, dust.

I had a really big cry after that, because all and all, I do love you. It made me stop crying for a long time. I just started again but I don’t want to talk about that now. It just definitely feels different, you know?

I wiped down the phone. In went the wipe.

When I was done I put the bag in the passenger seat and drove it with me, searching for a dumpster. The bag was dumped behind the law firm near Saint Joseph’s.

You are the only one with Nana’s eyes. You have the lightest hair.

You are the only one who was skinny and tall You were “cool.”

When we were kids we were in the Christmas pageants.

Ginnelle was Mary once. I was never baby Jesus. You never were Joseph. For years we did that, but you wouldn’t be caught dead if anyone knew about it.

Well, there’s pictures to prove it but they sit in dad’s basement and gather dust. He has stuff he could never get rid of and you have stuff still at mom’s house. When I visit, I go to your room and stare into it. It’s a bed, a beaten up guitar, some tables, your computer. She’s been using it for other storage lately and I don’t blame her because its become a huge absence in her life.

She and I are the only ones who have entered there in a few years now. I don’t think you mean to hurt her.

You may hate her.

I think that’s a bit strong. When she walks by your room, I wonder if she cries. When people ask about you she says nothing and talks about how things will be okay soon. Dad too. He says he loves all of us, Ginnelle, me and you. He’s proud of us, no matter what.

I had a nightmare last night.

Someone had tried to die. I think about the word committed a lot. Frankly, no one commits a suicide as an act, but does commit in some way to dying. Someone had committed to a death. I still can’t tell if they died or not. I was responsible in some way though, I knew that. I had seen the signs and been present this time. I had watched the blood drip rather than find its poolings. I could smell it, feel the snuff of the hair around the house that had been sliced free its captors. I could feel a peeling of cover from skeleton and muscle and all of those tiny hairs. Those long hairs. Those growing hairs. Creeping hairs.

I think about wrists. There are parts that curve through them real easy. Veins yeah, but the skin that bleaches the patterns between the brown hair making trees, and that breathes air into a bright crimson or blue. Orange fuzz. I think about rugburn less, but instead the striking slide of flesh to twine. Your body becoming slack, hanging high over a staircase. I think about bright blue and hazel eyes and brown and grey eyes. I think about losing all color.

I think about the pellet gun dad kept about the stovetop.

I think about all those times I thought about grabbing it and wonder now if when I was so naïve, if I could commit to blowing it away. Mark my eye red.

See color.

See blue.

I could not save them. But I didn’t know if they were alive or dead. But I could not save them. But I couldn’t tell. My hands became incapable of holding; my arms became weak to moving, and so I sat in the places where they had been and I stared at the white walls and the scripture that stung through it.

So yeah. You’re the only one with Nana’s eyes. Bright blue diamonds. Tall skinny, marked watchtower gazes. You could guide ships to the stones.

I have written thousands of suicide notes but none of them have mentioned your commitment. I commend the watchtower, and I want the oceans to bathe you clean. The salt may purify your wounds and spit out the grey-matter that makes dark displacement in its caverns. If I wrote you again I wouldn’t write it to you, I would simply talk of seas and stagnation, spit fire out my mouth and break my arms until they could sustain pressures.

I think you’ll remember this but, when you fell on the stairs, when you were seven, you were chasing me up them. Your face smashed into the suspended ground and your eyes wet fiercely.

I could feel the thud when it happened. I remember the sensation of it.

I dashed down to you and lifted your face. Your eye, to me, protruded out the side of your temple. A gouging gargantuous pulp, spreading red flush through your face. I had to yell for help.

Dad came down the stairs, mom came from her bedroom, and Ginny had been at the bottom of the stairs. She grabbed at your hands reaching to cover the pulsing. You were sobbing but half-there, and I lifted you best I could, my little brother, into the air.

Mom leaned down. She dabbed at your face with your shirt. She took you from my arms, and dad took off to get his keys.

We all huddled in two cars to the hospital and waited for hours.

“His eye got knocked out,” was all I could think. Your face, mashed and beet red, malleable forming a golem out of true flesh.

Your body became a monster by way of injury and mummy by

wrapping. When they let you out of the ward, you walked around. Your face mauled by tigers. Your teeth spoke real boy but, hand coating your eyelids, you grew your hair long and it grew to cover your mouth too. Slowly you got quiet. In the nighttime, we wouldn’t talk about running away or the scar that now marked you a sinner too.

Ten years later, before I drove to pick you up, you’d called me.

You sounded muffled and said “When are you getting here,” and I feel haunted by it.

I need to let you know that.

It wakes me up sometimes. Or, when I see a bottle of Tylenol I think about downing it too. My ex used to cut words.

Another would snap rubber bands and run high off the stinging.

I’ve read about people who run into walls. You can simulate an intense smash, and can hit the fragile parts. It’s the adrenaline and punishment. It is called euphoria.

They said they found traces of burns on your upper arms, staining a blue-purple down to your red-riveted forearm, wrapped tight and safe.

I know what it feels like to have felt pain.

I want to let you know.

I haven’t said hello in a long time, but you haven’t either. It feels selfish to want to. I’m sorry.

I’m not.

i love the faggot girland when one of us gets laid to rest, the other strings clear sharp cuts, a courage pours red deepsnappy neck, broke viola, somber melody but- no, i love the faggot girl, i do i do.

a tombstone reads a name more than her carver can muster strength to chisel to cut to make angels from God’s rib & sin from a snake biting cock thrust throat choke dust crumble & time wears stone & bodies erode & compose

vignette for noraa

Noraa and I piss off the side of the hill behind the old cemetery bathroom because, even if it it’s a toilet, there’s fucking spiders and all kinds of other bugs and shit in there, and it makes it easy if I don’t have to “feel anything,” so at the end they ask me How mad would you be if I jumped in front of that right now and I say A little mad and they say I know I won’t and then but I will watch though and they watch the last dribbles leave it. And the oak roots splatter.

And the trail rivers down the hilltop, towards the great lake that they almost died in, or at least tried to jump in front of. But the piss is never gonna reach it, so it just trickles till it pools and seeps into the ground.

It’s the end of summer and last time last year I moved into an apartment. Mary and Bianki packed their cars with everything I own, and I rode up with Bianki so we could smoke or whatever.

In 40 minutes I left my hometown behind and dropped into a doorstep. I left my life in a pile on the middle of the hardwood, took them out for pizza and by two had to figure out what I had to do. Pay rent, send mom a text.

This year it’s only been cold sometimes. The wind makes me feel more alive most the time, and a life constrained to the will of a sweater’s clutches is more familiar. The green of the cemetery rests in front of us as we jump the incline of brown. The folks who died here had some money I guess, or some of them did least

and the others pay for the cut clean greens between the tombs. I say 1876 and they say I’ve seen older. 18th century reminders, but not far enough back to where burial land was before. We find the graves that mark the streets of this city, and expect Carpenter and its portraiture of Abraham Lincoln holding a log to be a motion of dark comedy more than what someone with the last name actually should do with their gravestone. A reccomendation.

On Passover weekend, Noraa and I had come here, me coated in sweat and bedhead from sleeping on their couch. Their cat – the good one – had woken me up when the clock struck 6 AM by jumping on my stomach. The night before I walked an hour and a half across town. That day we walked an hour in circles towards the gazebo. I smoked and they sat as still as they can do, and I think we talked about not being very talkative. Good, so as to not wake the dead.

We passed the tomb with the doorbell, we passed the Emo gravestone, we passed trees labelled living for the same their dead counterparts.

“You can tell a Jewish gravestone even without markings like that. Jews place stones on top of graves, see?” They pointed to pebbles strewn across a red granite stone too far away to read the name of, but close enough to see the legacy. “The idea is you want to continue building the story of someone. They won’t be forgot.”

We don’t place any new stones on any gravestones but I became more increasingly aware each time I see a stone and, for the ones with the oblong tops, the rocks scattered along the bases in small formations. The piles are always misshapen and the wind blows them into the grass or the woods or the lake, but often someone returns to amend them. Noraa and I pick up some of these and made our own amends with someone else’s fallen memories.

The gazebo is old but not that old. Wood weather-worn, knots poking out and fraying around, but ultimately holding intact.

A lot of this city’s architecture – even in public parks, like cemeteries – are remnants of the 50-70s, where urban renewal ran rampant and caused a lot of future problems and solidifications of community wellbeing. The far back east side was historically houses of workers in the mills a town over. Obviously the industrial revolution took over and folks immigrated here then,

but a continuing crowd came in the following century, especially the 1890s-1930s as it is relevant to us here, where French-Canadians, Lebanese, Irish, Italians and Armenians found the American dream in the hearts of western capitalism. Unrelated to much else, the Jewish and then following, black and Cape Verdean neighborhoods of the east side were prominent figures in its development, although not architecturally, but culturally. These houses carried something.

Most of this history is gone, but some of the gravestones remain. Gentrification processes have pretty much made this area a hotpot for college students and couples searching for simple suburban life in a quiet neighborhood. The main street might be busy but the nights are quiet. The side streets let you play basketball on them. Or ride a bike. Or be small in the care of a community who no longer talk much with each other.

Noraa’s grandparents owned the house up the street but are not buried here. They told me in the gazebo that they want to be buried here and not the Jewish cemetery.

“It has always been a good place for me.”

I told them about mom, crying in my arms two years before this. “She just cried and said that she wanted to be cremated and I just kept reassuring her it was okay.” I said. “Personally, I don’t give a shit. Burn me. Throw me in the trash. Dump me in the landfill.”

They said that their body could not go to Zion when the time comes and we thought about the ash trying to collect itself and blow across the oceans, north or west back to a different diaspora and colony. It didn’t pick up because it’s just not a possibility. We joked about just leaving a hand then, to crawl itself on the sea floor. The rest of the body, well maybe it will get there afterwards. Maybe not.

The gazebo isn’t much different today but I actually notice it more, and we sit more silent than before. I apologize for it less now. I lay my head on their lap and feel shameful. A family walks their children through the paths, one in stroller, the other in tow.

I feel like I need some stability. I like the calm and relish as much as I can before I force myself off Noraa’s lap so they can lay down.

I say Sorry for the silence and I just don’t have much to offer and they say I don’t mind the silence and Sometimes it’s just really hard for me to stay still and I say I know.

They rest their head down against the bench and we stare at the ceiling. Silence and stillness pass us, the family walks away.

I mention going to the lake or that I’d rather just go get ice cream to be honest. And we’re off again. Two bicycles pass us and we fight about calling them bikers or cyclists. I think I win this round. I don’t think they hear us talking about them or the couple of ivy leaguers have no reason to acknowledge us.

On our way out, Noraa gave a small follow me but no report as to where. And so I did. And so we winded back through new roads.

The cemetery’s hills don’t get as extreme as the edge but they twist graciously up and down where land has been levelled, trees cut, roads paved, and the older graves’ spacings before any redesign. Sometimes we just cut through the grass, whatever is the most direct journey.

I used to be weirded out and cautious about stepping on graves. Something about stepping above a corpse frightens me.

That day I kind of just followed footsteps. So, long as no feet hit the footstones, we were probably in the clear. Noraa led me to the forest. We watched the guard take a turn and broke through the bushes and thorns.

In the clearing, blue flowers sparkle the ground. A cassette tape hangs from dead tree resting on a dying one. You can see the earth grow up into it and fasten the pair together. Moss, leaves mushrooms, ferns, thorns, waves of green and brown but the blue takes into the ground brighter than anything else you can see here and so “I call them bluets.” Noraa said.

They took one, placed it on my ear and smiled.

At the gates the cemetery guard is locking one side and we head out the other. We don’t talk to cops. We sit at the bus shelter because their thighs are chafing. We get ice cream and go home.

in an act of self mutilation of the kindest sort, i delete what my hands can kindle: a fire. blown glass, shattered reds and orange glory. hallelujah, hosanna in the highest.

joseph, patron saint of workers

I never met dad’s dad. Andrew. I take that name on alongside my surname, but am forever stained with something more personal than the patriarchal reproductive contiuum. It’s his fucking name.

It’s my name.

My grandfathers are old Italian men, and I’m learning Italian while I try to leave school forever. It’s fucking bullshit, academia, and they never went to fucking college. Grandpa was an automechanic, grandpa went into the Airforce - he studied computers, never left the goddamn base. Nowadays, mom slaps a hat on his body that cannot walk - and will never walk again.

“Veteran” without the benefits. The man with one leg who appears near Cathedral Square makes me cry because I have nothing to offer him. I cannot fix cars, and I cannot speak to losing my sense of pride and falling into nationalism. I want to love like a man can.

There has to be someone in these lines that has become a guide for how to act. I wish it were so simple. Sometimes I think about enacting my hands on others. Dad learned how to do that and it’s a mystery I haven’t repurposed it.

I faced nazis a while back and fucked with the Police chief even sooner. These instances mirror dad standing down Bill when he pulled the shotgun on me. I had been walking Nico, who had pissed on a tree, and “a plate in his head” Crazy Bill stormed out of his delapidated shack with a shotgun and ran me back to the

house. Dad with his arms crossed met him on the street. I remember him yelling, not passive, not unready to die. Am I doing the same.

I want to. This same anger, whether it a spoon taken to dad’s rear end when he was a boy and got caught doing what boys do or his fist across my face or his body pressing mom against the wall or his lips curling into a smile around the hairs on his face...these are all the same physical interactions that a kiss on the cheek and a slap on the wrist are. Violence is necessary to fund any sort of interaction’s purpose and I do not recoil from it. I have the capacity to die in war but not the capacity to murder the unknown face of men who come before me. Noraa talks about this as the “end of men,” a genocide of sorts where masculinity has to repurpose to sissification - the bottom bitch to another’s place. I would rather rip the throat of my own than another. I do recoil then, I am living up to a legacy that in itself has never been written.

The spot across from the Holy Ghost is a highway, where a tenement kept grandpa for years. I imagine him climbing the greasepole, his hands no longer shaking as he attempts to use the electric knife to cut up a roast for our dinners. Grandpa though never got to cook for me. Or, dad’s dad, or, Andrew. Joseph and Andrew used their hands once upon a time and only one I don’t know at all. He’s a mystery that I can only remember in church services for the few years following the end. One man had to die for the new man to be born.

He smoked a pipe, and pipe tobacco only feels good if you aren’t the one smoking it. It’s delicious actually, cancer and death included. I want to see him in the hospital with IVs running through his veins. So that means his fingernails were stained yellow. Did he wear glasses? Can I even remember? I look like him, I look like every last one of them. Something in me was inherited and it can’t be my face, because 23 years later I’m finally starting to recognize myself. It makes sense, what I look like, there’s a story. It must be personality, fate, or sense of self. I want to see him get married to Grandma, or at least the pictures.

Because, Nana looked so beautiful in her wedding gown, and the sepia tones stain the antiquated look of their “family room.”

Light wants us to repaint walls and redesign. What if they lose the house? What if they die is not a question that bothers me, because I haven’t known how to lose anyone in that way yet. I feel nothing.

Even when Aunt Penny’s tumor took over, or Tom slammed into a drunk kid’s SUV on Route 1, I didn’t flinch til I cut all my hair

off. Looked like a skinhead for months, a fat flabby sham imposter stuck forever in chaos of self. Sad, I know, but I don’t need your pity.

I don’t want to be known. I want to be loved. I don’t want to love. I don’t fucking need it. Do you believe me yet? I will hurt you. I will hurt everyone. I have no filter, no way to be other than violent. I proved it. I did. I had to. I punched the fucking wall once. I left my fist print there when we left. I bite my goddamn nails, and they would never be so weak-lipped to speak first with scratches. I have to be capable of it and this must be who I am - a self redefined by legacies so why couldn’t you love me.

Why didn’t dad’s dad survive. Andrew, Joseph, Mary.

God wasn’t there when I got confirmed, just my living family dressed in black and white and Lenten purple, forever casting shadows. Me, my blue hair and discomfort, leaving dad’s dad’s, dad or dad’s dad’s stepdad, at the fucking pew ‘cause he can’t walk either. I ran off a goddamn hill once and fucked my leg up and so now I limp when I am getting desperate. I get called to the scene of the arrest and I run the best I can, wheezing through the plaqued up lungs because I gotta make it. The time for resistance is now! I have to be there. I have to. I will take that pocketknife and slit out your throat Elorza. I swear I fucking will. You are pathetic representations of your predecessors. I’m gonna take a shit on Cianci’s grave. No man makes these men live more than I do. And they will live until I am no longer. I carry your names and cocks on my person because I have to. I have them. You are born into a position and must fulfill it.

Non ho dormito ieri perque non sono stavo bene. Non so lo scopo.

Non so la lingua. Non ho la mia. We speak but never find the words to say endings, and sometimes it doesn’t matter. You wake up in a nightmare anyway, with your bottom fucked up teeth trying to push your top fucked up row out. Bumbling through names any time I try to use a new one, letting myself be whoever you need me to be. There is usefulness in Joseph Andrew Bruscini that you will never understand. That life has meaning, it can hurt.

I can make you hurt if you want me to. And even if not, there is something he will always carry.

He Herecognized recognizedititand andsaid, said, “It “Itisismy myson’s son’srobe! robe!Some Some ferocious ferociousanimal animalhas hasdedevoured vouredhim. him.Joseph Josephhas has surely surelybeen beentorn tornto topieces.” pieces.”

Then ThenJacob Jacobtore torehis his clothes, clothes,put puton onsackcloth sackcloth and andmourned mournedfor forhis hisson son many manydays. days.All Allhis hissons sonsand and daughters daughterscame cameto tocomfort comfort him, him,but buthe herefused refusedto tobe be comforted. comforted.“No,” “No,”he hesaid, said,“I “I will willcontinue continueto tomourn mournuntil until IIjoin joinmy myson sonin inthe thegrave.” grave.”

So Sohis hisfather fatherwept weptfor forhim. him.

i love you too,

dad