{I}.

Remember? What light, water, and earth was memory made of?
Only haptic in my hands and in the crevices of my head, but beyond that.
your soul lies, asleep, curled and muted except for the exhaling of breath
like a small animal tucked in a corner of sunlight. Death wakes it, stirs it
in the same manner as love, and the sight of love. It draws it up and pulls it back.
Death lets the animal of the soul out to feel real air, true sunlight.
But mine, mine died imprisoned, raking claws, talons, teeth against its captive walls.
So the scars, the cuts you see inflicted by my own hands are nothing,
Nothing but the simple necessity of breathing.
Without them, letting the smoke of my burnt soul out, I would be screaming.

 

 

 

{II}.

I don’t remember my life before this. I only have this one moment, now, sitting on the precipice, while my calves dangle. Shifting in the wind as if they were caught in water.

In these seconds of lost sunlight, grass bending under my back, and the susurrus of leaves, I am motionless.
Amnesiacs are timeless, but choosing to ignore memory as some intangible enemy imprisons you in each second that passes. It breaks down every molecule of your body and every fiber of your soul.

That is why I am here.

Rejecting memory is like rejecting your blood. It breaks you down, because the more you deny it, the more infectious it becomes.
I’d like to believe that when I am gone, broken down completely and drifted away, this will remain true for you.
This one moment of silence, of snow caught in dying sunlight, will infect you.
That my memory will poison your blood so much that you must reject it, break down, and become nothing but air.

 

 

 

{III}.

So you’ve found it.
They always use that phrase, constellations of freckles. For me it’s truth. Just, fact.
Ursa Major settled upside-down on my calf, as if I should have been hung from the sky by my right ankle.
It’s my mark. I’ve been marked, loved, by a God of Silence. A bride left as a sacrifice then taken, and rejected, I failed to die. By luck or intervention, I always fail to die.
I see him in the eyes of a few human men, behind the clutter in the front of their minds. If I could just reach in through the darkest point and make a space.
Could you feel him hiding in your head, to be extracted by a small incision between the eyebrows, into the cranium?
Don’t look at me like that, because I won’t.
Because I can’t.
I am choking on tar. Remnants of the pine they set burning in my stomach.
The black molasses slips from my lips every time I realize that I have been left on an altar and will never know passion again.
Humans love humans. They try to make each other inhuman and then they fall apart.
I’ve watched.
But my love is through a barrier. A barrier of human men, a barrier of luck or intervention, or even fate.
I am left on an altar for so long I have become stone and nothing other than a statue for lovers to repeat failed prayers.

 

 

Ryn graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with an MFA in Writing. She makes random observations and quick poetry on twitter under the handle @snow_and_soot.