by Lara Adams Carmena
Today my feet are blocks of lead and they will not be picked up.
And the scroll of unspeakables twice the length of us begins to unravel.
Things the silence swallowed but never digested.
I catch glimpses in brain fog, in trembling, in endless nightmares and tears that won’t stop
falling.
In faceless names and nameless faces, and a clamshell filled with ash instead of pearls that won’t
be pried open.
Left with pieces of senselessness and told to make sense of them,
I picture myself an animal.
Wailing and howling and hammering fists into earthy dust, until all I’m left with are bloody
stumps.
And then running and running and running and running.
Until my chest feels like it’s better off escaping out my throat in a final violent choking gasp.
Today my hands are swollen, with skin flaking, as I will for them to be weapons and not hands.
Heavy, and slow,
they won’t do what I tell them to.
Nothing is my own, not today.
My head severed from my body, the dissonance ripples and echoes in the space between.
I try my hardest to pick up the block of lead I have for a left foot and place it in front of my right.
Going on this way, the slow trudge exhausts all other possibilities.
Left foot.
Right foot.
Left foot.
Right foot.
One step at a time, right?
Head down, moving forwards, means no space to go left, right?
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