I put the bullet in my mouth (the bullet that is september), and I wait for it to go off. the metal is still warm from august, the taste getting heavier on the way: this is the best time of year, but what’s it worth? there have been better septembers and better years with better …
this just in: the acceptable quota of school children shot at their desks has been raised for the twentieth time in as many years. this just in: oceans are rising and the rain is acid and the air is poison. this just in: police budget raised for the continuation of federally-acceptable murder of people not …
Nicholas hates driving through the Midwest. The palette of pleasant yellows, blues, and greens is stretched so thin over the cornfields and isolated pockets of forest that it loses all meaning in the monotony. Mountains are towering, forests are mysterious, but the endless fields of rural Ohio? They’re just exhausting. He has to sit ramrod …
is that a space helmet or a halo? god’s never been to the moon: he’s lost in the stars. maybe divinity is just forgetting. losing the earth for the sky, selling out to the void. maybe divinity is just apathy. the absence of a reason to look back.
I’m tired of closing my eyes, just the same way I’m tired of bitter coffee and my own burning chest. the way I’m tired of losing time on dead end streets and in endless loops. the gps isn’t working and the maps are wrong. my words aren’t good enough and the paper comes double-edged. it …
you can pick up your shoes between two fingers: a peace sign and follow me under the awning where we watch the driveway flood and we don’t complain when the wind blows the rain into our faces. it deserves it. it did so well. our lungs make room for the rain and glow like saints: …
in the way that it is the most rotten fruit to swallow. in the way that it haunts me at night and kisses me in the morning. in the way that it sinks but I can still touch it so I sink with it. in the way that it hates to be written and loves …
there’s red in the sunlight, i can taste it in my tongue: heavy and holy— i’m dying in the sunrise with hollowed bones but no wings. I never left my country, barely left my home. the morning burns my eyes, and it’s quiet here, alone.
the best thing about the stars is that they aren’t watching us too. we drew the lines ourselves. god isn’t going to come down and set our aim true. there aren’t enough fingers to pull blame into a straight line. there isn’t another white man leading the earth on its revolution around the sun. or …
I’m not sure who I’m talking to anymore. It’s you, obviously, but I don’t know who you are. God doesn’t know who you are. The best window into a person is through the ribcage, not the eyes. Could you be (future) me? Those who I love (have loved?). A friend I’ll make, or one I’ve …
trapped beneath a rolling gloom, tasting the blooming death. we sit beneath a blinking sun, because hatred grows best in this soil and we relish the bite of winter thorns and blood-soaked billboards. what else grows here but corn and asphalt and steel? what else does heat do but leave?
The churches are full of gilded hunger, drunk on blood, praying with hands closed. But the pagans pray with their hands open, So I leave the rotten dogwoods, for the shivering willows, and spread my hands out, breathing so deep that my lungs could fit the entire world inside. The kids won’t be alright, but …
And I am cold metal pressed against your skin in winter when the snow takes your fingers and ears and nose and the wolves and doves gather to eat their piece the sky is pale and full the earth swallows the sound And I am that metal again in summer when you lick it and …
The back of my heel is bleeding. But it’s not my weakness, or my downfall. I can’t find one part of myself that’s indestructible or strong or remarkable A Greek hero that’s all heel, with no great acts to do, with no story to be told. There’s no fatal flaw here other than me.
Most ghosts I know are still breathing. I see them in the things I want to tell them, the time we could’ve had. They’re a shadow on my threshold, whispers in my ear. A simple fact of life, but it feels like being hollowed out. They don’t have to die for me to mourn. x …
Sidorenko’s Writing 