to the journal i carry (like a burden)
I wrote in you again today
simply because there was no one else to listen
or to hear.
Where there were excited, grasping hands
now lay the soils that turned over the slithering
stream beds.
Silence was always a value I’d learn to not negate
because of you.
Sadness was just as insatiable—
it’d pour through up the head
and out of the mouth
like the tongue I’ve been forced to live with,
like sitting in my own flesh broth.
There was nothing I could do,
for it was all wet—
I didn’t want to live, you know—
more so, I didn’t know how to.
Never more strongly had I looked at myself in the mirror and felt
so estranged to my own self.
Never more strongly had I looked at myself
and known I was disfigured.
There was a beating heart in my throat when I spoke,
but the way the lips move
out of tune, off-key,
defunct and disjunct,
one throb ahead of the other,
syncopating,
had left an open rift where they took it all from me.
Never more strongly had I felt so violated
than when I stared out the window
and the sky, the trees,
the shapes and the nonsensical
began to skin me nude,
past the breastbone,
to the crux and no deeper.
There is a twilight where the sun sets,
a star where the world fades,
and there is a pity where I last placed my heels and
jumped.
Cradle me, coddle me:
it will all end up the same.
There is no me left to be made.
Even the bones have withered, too,
along with the syrupy flesh that sticks
like a tick,
and the membrane which once held me together
dismantles from this day forth
until I am nothing but rotting bone.
I’ve grown accustomed to living
in my own matte.
So now, the resting site is littered with the faces of
the would’ves,
the kisses of
the could’ves,
the fire of
the nothings,
and that song
which no one took to heart.
If my skull cap isn’t a bowl by the time the
flesh has melted on my prong body,
I want it to be worn like my graduation cap.
The cap is the flat, and you can even
pull the brain stem out from the top
to parade that little tassel around.
Rip up the lips from the body to blow
like a noise maker.
When you rattle the hands,
doesn’t it sound like the ocean?
My body is the living and breathing conch shell,
and if you stoop low—
put your ear real close
to the stomach,
you might be able to hear the sound
of the soul leaving the body.
Giulyana Gamero is a sophomore at SUNY Geneseo and the former Youth Poet for the City of Rockford. She loves to take on various artistic projects in any medium, such as 89.3 WGSU’s Sunflower Story Hour, a paranormal audio drama. Her writing has appeared in the Young American Poetry Digest, The Lamron, and in Carnegie Hall’s Traveling the Spaceways. Her visual art has appeared at the Rockford Art Museum and Bridgeport Art Center.