Your name crunches in my mouth like gravel
Pixels on a screen are dust. They have no sharp edges, no protrusions to rust and splinter and tear, no mass. This particular collection of pixels, however, is the cupboard corner striking with uncanny aim for the crown of my head. The splash of stars and sorrow and rage when it connects shouldn't be so familiar. Or being familiar, should have built up scar tissue, callous, bone spurs that rise high above nerve endings.
Here's the thing: It hurts every time. A dull deep bruise ache spreading through raw skinned tenderness, stealing my breath, salted and bitter. All the other siblings count. All their lives are important, their shoulders hugged, their names spoken. Even though you have way more promises than follow through, even though it comes with a price of preaching, they have your gaze.
They also have your DNA—a surety of your parentage that I sorely lack. They don't have to be picked; they were planned. Sought out, not tacked on. Here's the other thing: I know it wasn't always like this. I know you loved me dearly, protected me, believed in me. I hold on to that knowing so tight it's full of cracks now, taped on the edges but still dangerous to grasp so my fingers bleed a little. Of course by fingers, I mean heart. It's a metaphor most will get, but you, I’m not so sure of.
Reading between the lines is something my mother and I have always had in common. Something you deliberately didn't. Anything not laid on the line, yelling for attention, could safely be ignored. Could be not asked, not told. Like the men, then the women. Like everything since I was 34, and most things since puberty. Like anything confrontational, or uncomfortable, or in contradiction with your current faith. By which I mean your newest wife, but also now your church.
You know I’m angry. Heartbroken. Disappointed. Still leaving the door open just that little bit. Still crying every time it bangs in the wind. Another birthday, another Christmas, another Father’s Day. Another gathering you can't make it to until I after I’ve left. Another loving note to my sister, another photo with my brother’s child, in the place where you are friends and we are not. Another time I will delay calling them until I can put my sorrow aside; it hurts them, too. They see you, not seeing me.
I wonder if you have any idea of the amount of grace I salve on, trying to forgive you. Trying to understand. I know you were squashed from the beginning, that you want to know the answers, that you battle fear and a shifting center that leads you to seek an anchor at all costs. I know you tried, but I can't convince myself you tried hard enough. Or that you're trying now at all. I wonder if you realize you've become an echo of your own father. He erased me too, like he tried to do with parts of you.
Between us we're pulling holes in the weave of our family, and I don't trust you at my back. Your name crunches in my mouth like gravel. I hang a gossamer curtain around my childhood, straining my eyesight to keep it safe. I put away your photos, decades out of date, and try not to see you in strangers’ faces. You are a ghost in my home.
Pixels on a screen are dust. They have no sharp edges, no protrusions to rust and splinter and tear, no mass. This particular collection of pixels, however, is the cupboard corner striking with uncanny aim for the crown of my head. The splash of stars and sorrow and rage when it connects shouldn't be so familiar. Or being familiar, should have built up scar tissue, callous, bone spurs that rise high above nerve endings.
Here's the thing: It hurts every time. A dull deep bruise ache spreading through raw skinned tenderness, stealing my breath, salted and bitter. All the other siblings count. All their lives are important, their shoulders hugged, their names spoken. Even though you have way more promises than follow through, even though it comes with a price of preaching, they have your gaze.
They also have your DNA—a surety of your parentage that I sorely lack. They don't have to be picked; they were planned. Sought out, not tacked on. Here's the other thing: I know it wasn't always like this. I know you loved me dearly, protected me, believed in me. I hold on to that knowing so tight it's full of cracks now, taped on the edges but still dangerous to grasp so my fingers bleed a little. Of course by fingers, I mean heart. It's a metaphor most will get, but you, I’m not so sure of.
Reading between the lines is something my mother and I have always had in common. Something you deliberately didn't. Anything not laid on the line, yelling for attention, could safely be ignored. Could be not asked, not told. Like the men, then the women. Like everything since I was 34, and most things since puberty. Like anything confrontational, or uncomfortable, or in contradiction with your current faith. By which I mean your newest wife, but also now your church.
You know I’m angry. Heartbroken. Disappointed. Still leaving the door open just that little bit. Still crying every time it bangs in the wind. Another birthday, another Christmas, another Father’s Day. Another gathering you can't make it to until I after I’ve left. Another loving note to my sister, another photo with my brother’s child, in the place where you are friends and we are not. Another time I will delay calling them until I can put my sorrow aside; it hurts them, too. They see you, not seeing me.
I wonder if you have any idea of the amount of grace I salve on, trying to forgive you. Trying to understand. I know you were squashed from the beginning, that you want to know the answers, that you battle fear and a shifting center that leads you to seek an anchor at all costs. I know you tried, but I can't convince myself you tried hard enough. Or that you're trying now at all. I wonder if you realize you've become an echo of your own father. He erased me too, like he tried to do with parts of you.
Between us we're pulling holes in the weave of our family, and I don't trust you at my back. Your name crunches in my mouth like gravel. I hang a gossamer curtain around my childhood, straining my eyesight to keep it safe. I put away your photos, decades out of date, and try not to see you in strangers’ faces. You are a ghost in my home.
Disorderly in conduct
I'm the kind of witch who goes stiff at the mention of 'this is how we do this'. Who almost never plans magic, rather, finding myself in the middle of pressing my blood tipped finger into the hot wax scooped from a candle burning all day in memory of bad-ass ancestors, shaping it into a thick armed, thick bodied ward for my door. Instinct, not planning. Liquid molecules and free radicals. Lightning.
I was carrying around an enormous boulder of grief in my chest and didn't know how to put it down. My dead brother, my sorrow, colliding inside my rib cage until my breath was shallow and my vision was narrow and I didn't know how to put it down. I found myself threading slender needles through the skin of my chest, encircling the pain with pain. Opening pathways for the despair.
I found myself choosing threads of color. Red for his passionate loyalty, blue for the water we loved, green for the last bowl we smoked together, laughing at our persistent insistence on survival. Yellow for the high desert sun, no longer shining on his ragged hair. Black for divinity. Everything and nothing. Gleaming starry night and all the unnamed spaces between.
I wrapped those threads around the needles and each other, a web of all the ways I loved him, and all the ways I'd lost him. Wrapping and wrapping and sobbing and rocking and remembering. I found myself hollowed out, but like a canyon, not a crater. I untangled my chest, wrapped the threads around a desert rose. Gave it a place on my altar, forever.
I set wards with blood and spit and the words that come to me, through me, in that moment. I befriend the crows and seed my garden with feverfew and elecampane and roses. Put blue glass in the windows and rocks near the doors. I talk to the moon and the crows and the roses. I talk to the dogwood, arching over me with gentle strength. Lifting me up with roots sunk deep and wide.
I imagine myself so small the waves of lemon balm, spilling over and across the yard, become ocean deep. An expanse to shift my perceptions to being the mote I am. Stardust and desert sand and salt crystals. Drops of water huddled together for warmth. Any meaning or magic I find has actually found me. Pulled together by electrical impulses and familiarity.
I respect the directions and the elements. I respect the tools. I respect those that have come before. I do not want to do it 'this way'. I cannot. I become an observer, unable to see the atom or the transformation. My magic is under my skin, flowing and flowering in my gut. My hands hear at a higher frequency than my eyes or a book could capture. I embrace the gifts they bring me.
My rituals are naked bodies in the night. Feasts of hedonism and laughter. Femme gazes, long and tender. My rituals are often overdressed. My rituals can get rowdy, or go completely unseen. My rituals are broke and a little bit feral. They sometimes drink the finger water, or use the completely wrong knife. They prefer it that way. My rituals sometimes but not always play nicely with others.
I tried for years to make my magic 'right'. To find the rules and follow them. Frustrated and distrusting myself. I had to learn to let that go. To tune out the ego and the everybody else. To trust the flow of energy, to hold it gently, and let myself be held. The universe is full of magic, and none of it belongs to me. I can only make an open space inside myself and meet the magic there.
I'm the kind of witch who goes stiff at the mention of 'this is how we do this'. Who almost never plans magic, rather, finding myself in the middle of pressing my blood tipped finger into the hot wax scooped from a candle burning all day in memory of bad-ass ancestors, shaping it into a thick armed, thick bodied ward for my door. Instinct, not planning. Liquid molecules and free radicals. Lightning.
I was carrying around an enormous boulder of grief in my chest and didn't know how to put it down. My dead brother, my sorrow, colliding inside my rib cage until my breath was shallow and my vision was narrow and I didn't know how to put it down. I found myself threading slender needles through the skin of my chest, encircling the pain with pain. Opening pathways for the despair.
I found myself choosing threads of color. Red for his passionate loyalty, blue for the water we loved, green for the last bowl we smoked together, laughing at our persistent insistence on survival. Yellow for the high desert sun, no longer shining on his ragged hair. Black for divinity. Everything and nothing. Gleaming starry night and all the unnamed spaces between.
I wrapped those threads around the needles and each other, a web of all the ways I loved him, and all the ways I'd lost him. Wrapping and wrapping and sobbing and rocking and remembering. I found myself hollowed out, but like a canyon, not a crater. I untangled my chest, wrapped the threads around a desert rose. Gave it a place on my altar, forever.
I set wards with blood and spit and the words that come to me, through me, in that moment. I befriend the crows and seed my garden with feverfew and elecampane and roses. Put blue glass in the windows and rocks near the doors. I talk to the moon and the crows and the roses. I talk to the dogwood, arching over me with gentle strength. Lifting me up with roots sunk deep and wide.
I imagine myself so small the waves of lemon balm, spilling over and across the yard, become ocean deep. An expanse to shift my perceptions to being the mote I am. Stardust and desert sand and salt crystals. Drops of water huddled together for warmth. Any meaning or magic I find has actually found me. Pulled together by electrical impulses and familiarity.
I respect the directions and the elements. I respect the tools. I respect those that have come before. I do not want to do it 'this way'. I cannot. I become an observer, unable to see the atom or the transformation. My magic is under my skin, flowing and flowering in my gut. My hands hear at a higher frequency than my eyes or a book could capture. I embrace the gifts they bring me.
My rituals are naked bodies in the night. Feasts of hedonism and laughter. Femme gazes, long and tender. My rituals are often overdressed. My rituals can get rowdy, or go completely unseen. My rituals are broke and a little bit feral. They sometimes drink the finger water, or use the completely wrong knife. They prefer it that way. My rituals sometimes but not always play nicely with others.
I tried for years to make my magic 'right'. To find the rules and follow them. Frustrated and distrusting myself. I had to learn to let that go. To tune out the ego and the everybody else. To trust the flow of energy, to hold it gently, and let myself be held. The universe is full of magic, and none of it belongs to me. I can only make an open space inside myself and meet the magic there.
Sossity Chiricuzio is a queer femme outlaw poet, a working class crip storyteller. What her friends’ parents often referred to as a bad influence, and possibly still do. A 2015 Lambda Fellow, she writes as activism, connection, and survival, and is found in places like Adrienne, Lunch Ticket, Crab Fat, |tap|, and Argot. More info at: sossitywrites.com. |