self

the moon sheds its waxing light, gibbous in the way only lanterns are. bagged air cinching out of me. i haven’t slept in days. oxygen-nitrogen-neon lighting up these bones. you can get addicted to the feeling of breath, the unforgiving sea of it. the moon cries wolf. loose lips sink ships. in dog years we’d be dead, so i am waking up a child again. outside, the supermarket is purloined empty, shelves picked clean, a body staunching its bloodflow. still, we sing for prayer like someone is listening. i apologize to the air that holds me, and too many other people. i apologize for the brackish yellow of my skin.

but this isn’t a piece about the pandemic; all my prose is about myself, i’m sweetly selfish like that. it happens like this: my mother tries to quantify the sickness over dinner table politics as if it is an orange-shaped tumor. why are you like this? going, going, i’m gone. mother, according to my handwriting, i’m ambitious and uninhabitable. according to my teachers, i’m report card-happy. i’ll be happier when this illness shuts its rusted grip, pushes me past the starving lip of summer. it’s like lorde said: maybe we just do it violently. maybe the killing floor will stay put this time.

today i picked apart an entire rind of cheese and my blue-lit body and my mother wanted to talk about the college admission process. may waterboards me with grief, its shoulders contracted in denial. there’s another world riding slipstream to this one where the sun came up today. i’m climbing out of the chlorinated pool again and still, the streets blur. still, the house refuses the permanence of my weight. skinned knees and flares of light. i don’t understand the love languages of childhood, i never have. going home is only a metaphor when you’re already there.

— apotheosis, by eunice

present, by juul

The curtains that I forgot to close

Admit the sunlight into my room unbidden.

The dust weaves its way

Like it has somewhere to be, urgently.

The air vibrates with all the things

I want to do and won't.

Instead I will lie here and watch the debris settle

On the desk and the copy of Mrs Dalloway

That I haven’t opened in three days.

I will lie here, and I might go back to sleep.

— 6.45am, by mila

— untitled, by tóia

Placing itself on the windowsill, the beetle weeps,

awaiting its rebirth. Another weekend outside the living

room, the family crouching, waiting. Their laughter

is burdened with hazardous, terminal passion.

It dreams (of leading a life). It dreams (of

all the past lives it has let through, without ever really

keeping them). It dreams (of rest, despite the regret

that comes with it). It longs (for another hand).

It weeps again. Brought to a halt by a puncture,

it rolls back and waits for its last breath to break

out of its hollow case. It’ s the way they look at you:

with hope, for themselves. They dare to hope while

you won’t. A legacy rises from the vestiges

of wretchedness. Deprived of intensity, the beetle

falls back down and drills a hole into itself,

crawling from one side of its skin to the other.

— kafka, by ayna