We’ve shaved our heads and tattooed lightning along our shoulder blades.
Every night, we draw black lines around our eyes and swallow shards of glass with ash and medication.
If we speak, we whisper. We only tell lies. We only say there’s nothing wrong.
We only scream when we’re alone, because of claustrophobia and exhaustion.
I wonder where we’ll go when power lines snap and the city goes dark, if we’ll hide in a smoked-out bedroom or sneak into a stairwell leading down to an old bomb shelter. I wonder if we’ll be able to breathe there, if we’ll be able to think there.
If we can’t see the city, then we can imagine it empty. Not dead, but abandoned. A skeleton. A shell.
We keep dreaming of shock treatment, memories, and confessions leaking out through our teeth and streaming down our chests, then rolling through the streets like oil.
But, some nights we stay up. Counting obsessions and hallucinations and evacuations.
Whenever we hear voices filtered through radio static, our bodies shake. Spasms we don’t know how to control, even though we’ve learned to whittle down our ribs and sharpen our wrists.
We’re shattering,
burning,
vanishing.
Is it possible to destabilize and electrify and survive?
Is it possible to realize and know and remember?
Is it possible to recompose?
Even now?
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