2023 Hattie Lockett Award Winner
Memory finds me clean. I offer it space inside of my kidneys.
It wants to know a face. I don’t have a face I only have
hands. Bear the fingers, torn through stitches. Watch him graze
the gaping wound. Open your eyes. Watch him. Save. He will part you
frenzied, if you let him. In truth I don’t want to watch the next girl
rot but if it was only me who pleaded in dead language
I will have surely earned every break in my skull. Open. Infect.
Why is it indecent to dream of beheadings when all I have ever known
is save? I sit in obscene silence because I have never been good.
For this he will tie our bones together and lie upon them to reach the sun.
He doesn’t know his hands are cold. Maybe he doesn’t know.
Flesh-bound creature. There is always a body. It hovers over me
with the threat of its weight against my ribs. It knows my name and it
is violent. I am thrashing but I can never reach far enough around myself
to be safe. Memory demands satiation. I ate him alive. I ate him
alive. Tell me I am the last bad thing left unpunished.
Rebecca Crager is a poet and writer from Lubbock, TX. She holds BAs in Creative Writing & Psychology from the University of Arizona. Rebecca is the Editor-in-Chief of EMMA Literary Magazine and has work published in The Bangalore Review and Sad Girls Club – Literary Blog.