Catching Flies

CW: child abuse

I’d avoid confrontation like tax season. When I count

the miles I add 50 more for safekeeping; when I dream

I hear familiar knee bones crackling up stairs. I bloomed

in closed-throat soliloquies, in the post-credit scenes of arguments.

Words bitten back, teeth slicing tongue like birthday

cake, the blood vessels rising in worship. I’ll wake

with my tongue halfway to the butcher’s. I want to grow

a vegetable garden. I miss my childhood friends and my dog.

If my unspokens were flint in underbrush I burned

like wished-on wax. April comes from the verb aperire:

to open. A tulip’s bulb learning to unravel again. My mouth

better teach itself to gape, teeth brazenly exposed to the stars.

May 2015

CW: outing

I’m still trying to forgive my parents for things they’ve forgotten about. Staircase tears, burnt brownies. I’m still debating on what takes up more energy: the forgiveness, or the grudge. Holding a grudge is similar to holding a toad and being scared it’ll pee in your hands but at least it’s something—forgiveness is just holding nothing at all. I hate looking in lakes where I can’t see the bottom. History is written by the person who wants to escape the past the most, or is maybe the most successful at it. When my dad outed me he said he couldn’t keep the lie in, like it was a stone pressing on his lungs, or a dog threatening to escape. My own dog was reading the letters backwards, heartsick, chasing its own tail and choking on it. As time passes, a choir will start to cacophonate and blame the original pitch for deviation. When I stare too long at my reflections I worry they love only the image of me, like they watch me on a television but if they saw me in the park they wouldn’t recognize me. I don’t know if I would want them to. Throwing stones at a funhouse mirror. I think of them when I fold my socks, when I pump gas and pick at the Joe Biden I did this! sticker with my thumbnail. It’s the day-to-day that troubles me, the routine I want to break over my leg like a too-large stick. I want to start thinking of myself independently from them but it’s as if my clause doesn’t contain a verb. I start etching tally marks into the walls of the glass closet, in boundaries built before I was born but am told I made myself.

Can you not tell Mom? Can you own up that you did? Can I forget, too?

Clair Morris is a poet who romanticizes sleeping and annoying their cat. They are currently an MFA candidate at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. They aspire to be a regular at a coffee shop even though they do not drink coffee, and their favorite book is one that hasn’t been written yet. They are, most importantly, a double Aquarius.