Dissociated

shotsstudio

Kaitie McCann

Iam clinging on to my existence at the intersection of who I am, who I was, who I think I am, who they think I am, who you think I am, who I will be… and the song that is playing is Fur Elise, the tinkling of piano coarse on my sensitive ears.

My calloused fingertips slip ever so slightly on the rocky edge of “okay” and I instinctively look down. I see you standing there, below me, on solid ground. How can mirrors work so that I may look in and see anything other than my own face?

Your hair has a cowlick in the crown that I’ve never felt before, not even when I’ve run my hands through each strand, paying close attention to the way they lay across the left side of your face. Or was it the right?

Your hands are gesturing in a way that I’ve never noticed before. Since when do you paint your nails black and use them to tell stories about people you claim to love?

I’m grasping for this jagged edge but unable to take my eyes off of the clothes I’ve never seen you wear. The makeup I never saw you buy. The hair you never told me you dyed.

Despite my aching heart and the growing pebble in my chest there are chasms blossoming between us and your edges become faded and confused.

You and I are creating a supernova in this space between us and nothing can stop it, not even my hand which I have risked to let go to reach below myself and stretch towards the stranger I cannot help but gravitate towards.

You don’t look up and you never will but I cannot stop reaching and grasping and falling apart.

You’ve changed since I stopped loving you.

Does my finger slip or do I let go? I fall either way and my heart bursts open like a glass bottle full of bees and I become the chasm between us.

I try to see you but you are no longer there to catch me. So who will catch me?

I hit the ground with a deafening thud where you once stood. Your shoe prints barely visible but definitely there. I am hurt but not broken, only through my own self-preservation. A single foot down at a time and I am standing where you were. I can almost feel you, if I knew what that felt like.

The sun is staring into my face and screaming at me. Get it together. Look up. So I do. Above me, a cliff. And the tiniest figure, dangling by a single hand. What a strange place to test your life. What a strange figure, to be all alone on a cliff, out here of all places.

I see their hand stretching further and further towards the ground where I stand, like they found a wormhole in that single spot to reach through and grab me. I feel fear. There is no other feeling like this that a stranger so fearless could see me and grab hold. Take me to the edge of the cliff, closing this chasm I have created between us. I must run from them.

I stop just a second long enough to see them hit the ground. Does it make me a bad person that I feel no remorse? I run.

You changed since I stopped loving you.

Kaitie McCann is a new writer who is soon going to graduate from Shippensburg University with a bachelor’s degree in English with a concentration in writing. She has been previously published twice: Stained Glass, a flash fiction piece published in Shippensburg University’s journal of arts, The Reflector; and Conceit, another flash fiction published in Shippensburg University’s art and prose chapbook, The Spawning Pool.

Sergey Golenko

Under the Floorboards of a House in the City

KIERAN ROSE PILON

you’d think I have a deathwish with the way I want to count these bones together, ribs against ribs, ulnas intertwinedcan we be tender in our decomposition? can you lie beside me, replace whatever ghost yearns to wrap its arms around me? this longing bursts through my sternum, fingers grasping for a hint of you. we’re all dying, flickering out or fading away, so give me some semblance of comfort and sit beside me in the dark.

Kieran Rose Pilon is a genderqueer college student from St. Paul, Minnesota. He currently studies creative writing and theater arts at Century College. When he’s not writing, acting, or in class, he’s probably watching horror movies, excitedly analyzing fiction with friends, or drawing pictures of his cats: Jimmy, Olive, Ianto, and Teddie.

rolffimages

Molotov, Not Mixed

KIERAN ROSE PILON

i. let me say this first: i am broken with burning. i have burned so many buildings, chucked cocktails of rum and rag into the broken windows because the splinters looked like teeth in the moonlight. do you remember moonlight? the way it reflected off of half-empty plastic cups, my back as i hunched over and tried not to spill my guts? i’d spilled them to you before, so many times, after the first building burned to the ground. i burned it for you, baby, just for you, because i wanted to take a chance on love that wouldn’t leave my throat tasting like pennies. turns out it tastes worse, tastes like hard lemonade spit up into the toilet: sharp and acidic, with just the slightest tinge of sweet. ii. i smashed the gin bottle when you left. i ached sour, an iconoclast, but what am i if not a thing that breaks glass and leaves it to rot in its sparkling shame? but i kept the polaroids. you said they weren’t good, pawned them off on me as we sat in bed. i never told you that i cherished everything you touched, the flick of your wrist, the way your fingerprints were the first on the shining film. i’m good at burning: paper; buildings; meat on the stove, picked at with hesitant fingers. but i haven’t burned those. iii. i burn you everywhere i go nowadays, say how i want you to rot yourself hollow, how i want your lover to gut you like a fish. and these curses feel so right on my tongue, hot and heavy like fresh blood, that you’d think they were there all along, right below the surface, like if you’d have peeled back my skin on one of those summer days you’d see something screaming, wreathed in fire. like if you’d listened under my i love yous you would’ve heard my tongue going up in flame. here’s the truth, darling boy: i want you to burn so badly i don’t know what to do with myself.

liyavihola

Something Thought, Left Unsaid

KIERAN ROSE PILON

When I call, he’s half-silent, all pauses and beats. Says he means it. Says he cuts his tongue so nobody will see. He tells me he might break tonight, tells me I’m his soulmate, tells me I’m his light, tells me like it won’t carve out my heart, leave it bleeding on the bathroom floor. And the point of this poem isn’t to say I’m in love, it’s not to stand on a soapbox and sing. It’s just to say that sliced-up tongues can still be deafening.