from I BECAME LESS ACCEPTABLE TO THOSE IN POWER
Genuinely cared little for their dilemmas
Bloomed big on the stalk
Didn't want you to touch me
Didn't choose allegiance to any status
Named love “the only immutable abundance”
Questioned mind-based knowledge
Began to believe
My own lived mythology
Had an abortion
Didn't laugh when you were violent and called it humor
Became willing
Squirmed out of your preferences
Named you “ghost walking in fear’s footsteps”
Stared when you chortled at my public exuberance
Stared into your skull and beyond
The bones time hangs on
Found the moldy root
Burned each of your past lives
Made a paste from your life ash
Planted a lake w/ infinite tributaries
And sent you particle by particle downstream
To ease
Your immense caustic nothing
Pitied your power
Poured milk on it
Honeyed your blood
Dreamed it back inside your baby ears
Clawed you
Free but just enough
To know you were never free
Got older
Physically and yet kept enjoying
My body
Snorted in the make up aisle
Was a slow learner
Touched myself with the ferocity of an angel ascending hell's rim
Made gold of my thighs
Wailed on the subway
Puked in a bush
Believed each body to be a portal to its next explicit cosmos
Sometimes was clean
Did not take you back when you left
Did not nourish your narrative
Never faked it
Did not shave my vagina bald
Did not pretend to like football
Bled out from a broken family
Kissed her in the back of a cab
Held him like a baby but wasn't his mother
Was clear on who I was
While swimming or having sex
Emily Kendal Frey is the author of The Grief Performance and Sorrow Arrow. She lives in Portland, Oregon, where she is a teacher and therapist.