Jillian Clasky
CW: disordered eating, vomiting
From Half Moon
Even last year I could smell you on my breath,
could feel you in the trench of my body, guns blazing.
Yours is a partial death, a death made of motion,
a restless drifting through time; again and again
you claw your way up my throat, into the open air,
my fingers the bridge on which you find your footing.
In my head I divorce you from me, pull our selves
apart like sticky toffee to lift the blame off my neck: me
a breath and you an attempt to make physical the things
that burrowed in the gorge of my stomach, that danced
like fire on my tongue, that ached to escape the walls
of my body no matter how hard I tried to cage them in.
Or maybe you were a coincidence or an accident or
a practical joke, a blemish on my past born of faulty genes
or circumstance. In my head I mythologize my life
but nothing here is sacred. Every time I cry, the earth
keeps turning. Someone is having the best day
of their life. Someone else is dying. Someone is falling
in love: a first kiss, a wedding, the birth of a child.
Someone is writing a better poem than this one.
The faces of strangers blur into
a single, vicious beast and in the noise
I lash out at a world that never hurt me
on purpose. My skin sheens
and my bones turn restless and rigid
and I try to scale a wall but find
no footholds. Only when I am alone
is the world small enough to grasp
and smooth into a softer echo
of itself. I am terrified of loneliness
but mostly I am terrified of letting
you know I’ve been lonely
all this time. I am terrified of sound
but the quiet makes me lonely.
To move into a world where
the floor is just the floor and not
the stone-hard surface I turn to
for warmth on the nights when
I am coldest; where the sky
is just the sky and not a blanket
over everything that suffocates
the planet with its brightness
or its darkness or its emptiness;
where the window is a clear pane
of glass, a crystalline opening to
another world, and not a mirror;
where my body is my body and
not an object I drag in my wake.
When I bend my spine
protrudes like a crooked bough
and I fear this night will be
the gust of wind that rushes in
and fractures me for good.
My body was built not for wings
but to keep me standing: these are
the words I repeat to myself,
the echo that beats against the back
of my skull like a feathered thing,
even when my skin is too thin
to shield me from the cold.
Jillian Clasky is a writer from Toronto. She is currently studying English and creative writing at the University of Ottawa, where she serves as managing editor of Common House Magazine. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as PRISM international, flo., and Vagabond City.