I do understand what would drive someone to chart their loneliness on a grid.
I do understand the precipitous tower of books relies on
labors paid and unpaid, mine and others, in order to exist.
A leaf depends on no one’s labor to exist.
A tree may have been planted by laboring hands
but doesn’t need them to live, propagate, grow leaves, photosynthesize, die.
Fires combust across the landscape, including houses near me, housing I don’t know who.
The fire in my soul licks clean the landscape: flocked gold.
I don’t believe in the soul and yet when the poet sings I can feel something scrape.
I thought I was doing a gentle job boring a hole in the center of a body.
I thought I could forget how it felt to be young and also how it felt to be older than.
Each private suffering stacks on a plate, and I don’t eat, just admire.
There was a real self-aware quality to the afternoon light, languishing as it did.
The torches snuffed out for the end of the party, the end of parties as we know them.
It would be useful, to be the dark blue bottom of a cloud,
collapsing beauty and gravity, beauty and the forthright pleasure of being.
You could be absolutely stupid with youth and still drag me into a lake after you.
I wondered if I’d be able to touch you like I wanted, with no illusions.
Love marked me with its claws, delicate red scabs.
It was a dramatic image, but mine, a necklace of want.
I was attempting to go out singing but went out hazy and drunk.
In a room, alone, I could be any kind of angel.
I want someone’s thumbs inside me and swiped with blood,
to be an open, feral animal, rusted with hair.
I streak mud all through the house and don’t say sorry.
I burn the dolls and I burn my clothes.
What I do for myself is photograph a dark bruise on my ass.
It doesn’t matter that I send it to you, though that’s part of it.
I’m not sure it’s what you want, but I do it anyway.
I beg to be touched and then you touch me and I am sodden.
Blood pink on a white sheet, in the shape of a flower.
Stephanie Cawley is a poet in Philadelphia. They are the author of My Heart But Not My Heart, winner of the Slope Book Prize chosen by Solmaz Sharif, and the chapbook “A Wilderness” from Gazing Grain Press. Their poems and other writing appear in DIAGRAM, The Fanzine, TYPO, The Boston Review, and West Branch, among other places. More at stephaniecawley.com.