complaint v3
I’ve heard a lot of things about me. Some say I take up too much space, like a rash of carnivorous wildflowers, teeth-lined petals waving in the wind, biting at its meat. Some say my smile is aberrant, a plump glower wrinkled with ridges of flesh. No one ever told me I was empty, a hull of a broken ship. It wasn’t until he filled me, rolled himself in wool that stuck to the boards of me, the wood of me. Wool that dripped down his nose and out of his mouth, stuffing me. It was then I felt empty. His hands felt rough as they ran over the fibers of me, feeling my rigid breaks and I would pray that he’d pull away with a piece of me under his skin. He carried a switchblade, and I exposed the underside of me, expecting his name to hurt. He left me full of the words he etched. And I cried against blue walls lending purple light, because his name wasn’t there at all. And I should not—should not—be surprised. “Fragile” is burnt onto me, foreshadowing the day that I’m driftwood. The day I’m sand bitten pieces. He pressed his fingers against the smoked grain and lamented. He thought I was something good, before he knew of the fingers that set grime on my stern, the feet that had trounced on my sails. He made a place in me, before he’d seen the termites in my gut. When he learned what wood would wind up where in me, he made sure I knew he could do better, that no amount of wool could fill my hull. And you can find me floating across a bathroom sink, the faucet still running, a tattered sail in the mirror. No one sets sail in a broken thing.
birth/baptism
Water made me, laid on my
mother and held her close
until her hips ached and her
spine shifted and there i was
fully formed with two front teeth,
and she sang because she wanted
to, because she needed too, so water
could hear the song her voice made with
mine, so it would come forth when it heard,
and so, it ran down cheeks and jawlines, necks
and forearms that wiped the wet occupied hollows
that eyes are, and water never left me, never left her,
it sits on her back and shoulders and churns in my gut,
with the jealousy, the rage, the love, and lust that i often
feel when i’m confronted with the sight of it stretched,
laying under endless sky like a playful housecat. the soul
that could be born from that union; a labor of love like me.
does she thirst for the sensation of water in her lungs,
pressing the walls of her veins, a wrench of wet cracking
bones. I wait for the day water might hear me again,
and steal my breath, and hold me close, for water to
fill my womb, drape over my collarbone, speckle my
skin listening to that same song my mother sang
to me—Oh, sister! what news do you bring to
the blessed, the barren? what song of
water and sky did you carry with you?
mars robinson, a student of University of Cincinnati, is her mother’s daughter.