You jerk you didn’t call me up
You crashed your motorcycle Saturday
Because you were hasty
Your hand wrapped around the handles like crab spines
And this made it easier to weigh the bike into the ground
You didn’t think of me
When Steven and the swedes burned their house down
Was webbed between one handle and the wheel
And your turbine legs churned up the ground.
You want to see my body bent like a broken bird? Turn to page 8.
For the broken glass that scattered the asphalt and my skin, turn to page 19
You are cracked board game spaces
Perfectly symmetrical squares of auctioned land
But do you remember when I tripped and broke your guitar stand?
You got pissed and kicked my dog across the beer stained carpet
Well Sparky didn’t appreciate that and neither did I
And we would both appreciate it if you would come pick up all your shitty paintings
The apartment seemed emptier
When our muscles were trained towards the bedspread, we observed it like this:
I think of the layer of skin beneath
Tiny pieces of stone tumbling and spilling from my seams
Clever bug, carpet skinner
Its tassels drawing our wrists to our ankles like hog ties
But I am not yet disassembled; not yet stolen
We write, we bleed, we live, we bleed,
We bleed.
Emily Clarke and Danae Devine are both students at Idyllwild Arts Academy and major in creative writing. Emily is the nonfiction editor of Parallax and enjoys incorporating her native american culture into her writing. Danae is the fiction editor of Parallax, and hopes to make creative writing more noticeable to the public.
Art by Dawn Jooste