By Kayleigh Birch
I. Restart, Woman
I slept through May and woke up swollen and full of sun
The flowers in the forest must have bloomed while I was asleep
they have since grown into pink and purple orbs
I was blue and red with hunger when I opened my eyes so I crawled up the fringes of the wind
to gnaw on the fat trimmings on the edge of the moon
I nibbled her down to a crescent
small enough to notice from your windowpane
and big enough to feed the starvation
It felt so good to be a woman again
Upon the return
I slinked through my threads
and tucked in my shirttail and fluffed up my bed
before locking the door to the forest (once, maybe twice)
and telling the voices to turn off the lights
there is so much of the world that I must say hello to
I walked to the market to buy some new stars
the old ones melted like sandcastles when I pressed them into our ceiling
and I bought stalks of Saturn’s rings shaped in a wreath
I’ll be damned to turn this home back into a feeling
so I’ll kick my shoes off at the door
so all the stardust sifts when I arrive
It’s time to pull the mess back together
II. Oracle
When I woke
I thought back to when I was gone
when only the ground knew how I tasted
I’d been asleep for years
And the tide knew that
it stripped me naked when the moon turned the world over
and reminded me what I was made of
But in that slumber
I was busy lining up visions with dreams
in chases of aces of trails up your sleeves
in pride stitched together through fissures in pen strokes
He kept me in the forest and I kept it all inside
so we could keep something in common
and after I wandered through every last brook
and outran the darkness as best I could
I cried every color of the rainbow until the oracle found me
When we met
I told her I was tired of hiding but I knew that the world was watching
and she knew very well that if I cared what people thought of me
I would have been dead long ago
So I told her about the dream
where in the light
our bodies aged like paintings
and she told me that oil melts in the water no matter how grand the engraving
of my shiniest medal or deepest battle scar
skin is skin and skin is pulled apart
And she knew I was ready to leave it all behind
slinking like a fox for answers in the dark
and I finally did too
III. Prophecy
In that dream
I started running when you told her you loved the mountains
she
the newest woman
was smart enough to ask why you climbed down the highest one
and why
at the bottom
all you had left was bad poetry and a god complex and a silhouette shaped like me to fill with her
And I wanted her lips because I knew that your skin hadn’t been pulled off her yet
your body hadn’t been ripped and cleaned of her yet
she hadn’t started running yet
but our mouths and tongues were still the same
and nothing else had belonged to me before
your honey at the bottom of the tea
your phantom sculpted in a sundress
But she was new and right in ways I hadn’t been yet
she was
a nose job on Aphrodite
a Calliope algorithm I couldn’t have dreamed up
the girl crush on God built just to smite me
She had never seen the nightmares you had
where I cut off every part of me that was round
and turned the flesh into her soft edges
And I wanted nothing more than to see her hands in my sky
she was new and gentle and as rare as stepping in the same water twice
and she looked better in your clothes than I did anyways
I was better as a ghost than she was as a dream
anyways
IV. Hysteria
When I learned of her dimples and read the news
in a pile of soon-to-be laundry on your bedroom floor
I had lines on my faces that the sun couldn’t smooth
ironed in from pursing my lips to blow out candles and proportions
and breathing in the smoke of their aftermaths
So when my frame was burned to ashes and charred twice over
and your name was fresh in the stanza
know that I was too young to sift tea leaves for gold dust
My wrists were tied with the end of my rope and my body was full of spaces
that I wanted to fill with your name
in a perfect couplet of my lucky number
But I turned to stone before I could warn anyone else to stay away
so you’ll be left in the space between the things I thought and the things I thought to say
All to hell
we’ll water it down and drink it straight
sitting down below the flames
the mangled child in me who is afraid of kissing will snip up all the reins
I took one last look and did the bravest thing
I ran and ran and ran until my legs lifted
And I trampled and stumbled and tried to turn the curse in
The chains flipped inside-out and split behind my ribcage
I’ll rip my hair out and try again
I’ll shed this layer and try again
all I’ve ever known of this is how to try again
V. Clean
When I woke from that slumber
the light hit my eyes
and it shocked me like an inverse memory of what the birds were singing all that time ago
It was fresh
it was new
when the flowers bloomed upon my wake
in tiny freckled globes that remind me that somehow
I have lived this all before
And every sun spot on my hand is a faint reminder
that I know this world too well to just be passing through
May is still young
and I have done this all before
And if I can’t be your silver lining
let me be a golden something
telling stories
of sunrises and
other things that are full and
stories of how I tied together everything sacred in ribbons
stitched together from the bow I undid from your wrist and mine
Let me tell the stories of how I washed myself in every river
so I can live in everything
Let me tell the story
once more
of how I learned that if the universe can feed on me
I will never starve again
Kayleigh Birch, from Los Angeles, is in her final semester of her degree, graduating from the University of Toronto with a double major in English and Cinema Studies. This fall, she will begin her Screenwriting MFA at UCLA (’22). She has been writing poetry, scripts, fiction (novels and prose), and songs her whole life: her other published works can be found in The Los Angeles Times, The Strand Magazine, and The Louisville Review. Her debut poetry novel, Love Letters Only, can be purchased on Amazon, and her portfolio can be viewed at https://kayleighbirch.wixsite.com/portfolio
Illustration used: Spirit of the Pond by Hélène Béland
