(learning what to do with my hands and your condolences)
By Zeynep Bayirtepe
Art by Raegan Boettcher
1
i have crosses on the calendar for each confession
i burn the pages like sage, inhale the incense, make a wish
breath out smoke, choke on words, hold onto the smells
i wet the ashes and mold them into a body
i kiss the earth that raised you
i build a tomb and sleep with my socks on
claw marks on the calendar i will wait for you
i am the poet in a warzone
nothing to my name except for an enchanting elegy
i wait at home with the children
i promise them you will be back
i feast on a goodnight
i make everything about you
start every line with an overbearing i
2
swallowing blood and spitting soil
i don’t know how to live
with a million pairs of loving eyes on me
they call me their violet, beloved
throw me a birthday party everyday i choose to stay
i pluck out petals to get a hold of your mind
i assure them i don’t have a knife
savor a pair of safety scissors
i shall not disappoint and i shall not forget
my evil butterfly, i will clip your wings and hang them dry
i will suck the special out of you and season it with spite
a dial of poison to cherish and remember
i know now why maddening women take to pen and ink and blood
when your body is falling apart every word might be your last
and there is nothing to do but to act everything out
make sure you go out screaming, kicking, honest
i cuss out the audience they knock at my door
chew out their condolences and cold meals
i spit on your grave, you grow flowers in spite of me
your flowers i won’t forgive
your flowers i can’t forget
3
you must change your life, the poet cries
as i gaze into the stolen eyes of apollo
friends as fresh as scars, archaic as heartbreak
i paint my hands black, nails and lips blue
touch your face, avert my gaze
there is a me-shaped hole in the love i build
a sunburn shade of shame that i hide in the shadows
if i bit my tongue off and fed it to the cats
if i was cooler, crueler, colder, calmer
if i could be fixed, i would
pluck my eyes out and play pretend
and keep your twisted love pressed between pages
breathe life into it until i’m nothing but labor and dust
4
my sheets smell only of me and
the girl that loves me dries my tears off of me, tenderly,
like my mother does in her drunken dreams
and doesn’t ask for the time i wasted back
my sick sleep of relief gets captured by dreams of grief
and the guilt of the days i neglect her for you
the beautiful days i count down for nothing have moth bites in them,
a million you-shaped holes
i carve a monastery into shame and gild it with gold
try to melt my ice over a burning bridge
pray for wings and kiss the sun
i fall (i fall) but i never crash
i go out clean, without evidence
not the porcelain doll i should have been
no shrapnels for you to kiss and put together
with the blood on your lips
you would sign love letters to foreign lands
they see you with your new colors blank eyes fresh tattoos
and i become the punchline to a heartbeat i can sing along to
what they call mourning i polish and pray to every morning
5
and i am a smiling widow
as i vigilantly watch the earth satiate its thirst
with the tongues you used to puncture
black drips off of my lashes and becomes a night
where the moon no longer is a broken plate
but a mirror, a mutilation of the sun, proof of life
i loved you and you are dead
i strike a match and take down love letters, keep them in order
i burn the funeral house down
to call my memories my own and give us peace
i kiss my fickle heart with flaming lips
scare the worms out, breathe in and out