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my dead friends
walk backwards at night time is still and time reverses as a child i watched twin peaks in the night crosslegged on the dog-hair-matted carpet with bated breath i was laura palmer only younger and not dead riding my bike with bloody knees on empty small town streets because it was more freedom than home blue couch closed curtains cigarette smoke in the light of the tv the half moon table in the kitchen held the only phone the only connection to the outside world besides the two doors that no one ever dared to knock on my bedroom felt like an attic a slanted closet door a lead-painted window that stuck stubborn in the summer and winter the bookshelf and tv were the only things that were allowed to tell secrets
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at a hotel room i look in a trash can for clues next to the staircase in the street i see a dead body zipped up in an orange sleeping bag on a dirty table in a makeshift clinic i lay naked i travel in a time machine that looks like a shitty one bedroom apartment my big grey dog is bleeding under a sheet i have to adjust his oxygen tube several times i need to go back to 1987 because it was cheaper to do laundry i hold change in my hands in the middle of an empty yellow laundromat time travel is bloody there is blood everywhere i am tired of surviving i cry this again and again in to the fur of my now dead dog at night i reach 1987 when i fly over the ocean the lighthouses wink at me i fail to notice the beauty in this i didn't sleep again last night
i am in perimenopausal purgatory my rage keeps me up as i remember all that i have tried to forget nights sweats and regrets my heartbeat blooms curses at all those who have wronged me i think of those times where hope was a shrine and my placating was considered a feminine art form by those who didn't bother to see me my body protested this invisibility ovaries burdened with cysts my uterus harbored fibroids as i cried in nondescript bathrooms and homes where i wasn't at home my womb never stopped weeping at that miscarriage that was silenced because it was just another normal nothing it rained that day i hid in the clouds while the X was busy pretending that working out at the gym wasn't just some code for that other woman that wasn't me my identity just air that slipped out open windows i have learned that hate is an art form that calls to all all the wandering ghosts their unfinished business is mine my resolution is their ticket to elsewhere my daughter at risk of slipping out a window like i did going unnoticed into the ether the planets shift i watch stars fall at my feet at 3:00am the dead will surround me conjure my future that chance they didn't have hands still fists directed at the men they knew that had a part in ending them dead women and children eyes swallowed in darkness this what hope is to me now this remaining long after your story has ended thinking you can change time this nightly vigil just another communion with death follow those yellow lines in the road until you forget that every crossroad is just another vast desert |
AuthorMichelle Tinklepaugh Archives
April 2023
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