We all breathe age nineteen
BY SARA ALDRICH
detox ourselves, truth and holy water run in streams
from the shower we take not to get clean
but to sing tender sacrilege and desecration
to drown retinal ripped lace and the smell of tanqueray
and the terror tremors when he touched our thigh
with a wet fingertip scrawling:
“i always knew you needed me”
we need like we breathe which is to say painfully
fixate on morbidity, plum like blooming bruises
on friends swinging from the rafters by their neckties
and we will never know if the last cries on their lips
were for mercy or for vengeance lovely wide eyes
we all become martyrs in their rigor mortis
and we are all terrified of seeing ourselves in them
in little orange pill bottles in worn gun barrels in the nightly news
we pray for a cure for cottonmouth
no one ever answers
feed our body, gorge it on the sound of our mother’s voice
on the hissing whisper we hear through insomnia
they say to come and claim our rapture
but nevermind the sainthood if we exchange it for sanity
we fill our body and find it rejecting its youth out the mouth
with throat convulsing we pulse high and defiant
fist raised compulsive like a millennial child
we run our body bloody through the streets
we may not all become redwoods or loudspeakers
but we know things other people never could:
the stripping of rights like bras in alleys
and the claiming of selves like baby blankets
HOME BODY
BY SARA ALDRICH
am i even a poet
if i don’t gut myself
with a housekey rusted over
maybe if i’m lucky it’ll break off in me
i seep into a ballpoint on the daily
i spend an hour writing as if
i could ever funnel blood back in a heart like that
i only ever learned to perfuse
am i even myself with still fingers or a regular pulse
if i stopped screaming into the drywall
such wracking theatrics make for a wanting daughter
but a wonderful artist
they love a perpetual basketcase
so i place it on my brow like crown moulding
i laugh
is that even myself
i feed off of others’ dopamine
an addictive personality in declining sanity
i gather homefuls of words from a stupor
it takes one million poems to get over it
but you get a million and one if you never do