Author Archives: Rachel Beverly

When the Monkey Climbed onto My Back

1.
We dip our fingers into each other. I am insatiable, the beast, grunt, thunder; please – I don’t know how to express that I am not safe water to drink.
I corrode.

2.
I
never lose my voice
except
for when it speaks.

3.
Who says Atlas didn’t shrug? Who says we’re not in freefall?

4.
We train parts of ourselves
to be guards
and others
gatekeepers
we war with ourselves
about who to let in
after the last Trojan horse
we lock the portcullis
our parapets bristle
with the armies we have
made of ourselves
that they
have scared us into
forming –
we, insurmountable
fortress people
blocking out the world
for fear
of a single flaming arrow.

5.
He knew how she woke up now; how she wore her skin in the morning: like thermals dragged on over bare winter legs just swung out of bed. Quick-hurry, before the act of living freezes us to death.

6.
You want me to be different, to be better
or less;
But I am all of me
inveterately
and I can’t be someone else.
Trust me.
I’ve tried.

7.
Everyone is monstrous. This is who we are now; this is what we do:
We eat one another –
We eat everything.

8.
There was something in the water, dear, I swear that’s what it was –
I swear I didn’t put it there
(although I wish I had).

9.
She
godless pilgrim
thirsted alone in her desert
for something she could not name.

10.
over time
we regain the use of our minds
of our will
of our eyes
of our hands
we remember that
nothing is a shipwreck
that does not consider itself a shipwreck

(but it’s much easier to remember that when people don’t look at you like one)

Exorcism Superstitions

I tell her: I don’t know destruction – but surely does it know me; took me over years ago. Nary a hint of it coming.

I tell you what, I warn her, you take this advice for free: Don’t ever go closing your eyes around a graveyard late at night.

You don’t know what might slip beneath your skin when you’re not looking.

Fragments of a Fragmented Mind

1.

I have convinced
myself
I need nothing
because
in truth, I need
the world
and I cannot have it
and nothing else will do;
so nothing
it must be.

2.

When we speak we are
getting out of our skins
we are giving ourselves
to the listener.
When we lie we are
rewriting ourselves
into something we don’t
believe in.

3.

I lost
a hand to you. I lost
a body to you. You began
by kissing my fingers
drew me in, devoured me there
and kept devouring me
until there was no me
left to eat.

Feral Blessings

Sometimes, when the nights were pitch suffocation; when their blood turned to bile and burn and the morning a myth they had long forgotten, they clung to one another. Sometimes, when the air grew dense with desperation, they welded their hands together with white-knuckled fingers, like last-minute second-thought lemmings: oh god, too late now – they’re over the edge of no return and into the final fall; and the plummet brooks no saviours for the body from the earth.

Sometimes, when their mouths and hands were catastrophic things; when their insides were a biblical plague; when they fed from each others’ poisons (though they blistered and seared and stung), they would swear they had already hit the ground – that it spat them out when it swallowed them. They, too tainted for even the grave.

Too tainted for aught but each other.

There is a vile, blossoming beauty in all things upper-lip-curled, all things carry-concealed.  Whoever first decided that allure belongs to the light? What brews between the tongues of the lovers is black as tar from end to end – pure as a virginal bride; albeit, pure fucking hell. But pure it is, nevertheless.

Well, we too-late lemmings, we not up to par – we worship a new form of purity now; we live for a different order: depraved and glorious gods of the wretched are we, the raw are we awful.

We deplorable.

We flawed.

We will fling off any hope of being loved as others love – we will adore our demon darkness. Let forth and love our raw disaster.

 

Lingering Wistful Love

There were daily calls, at first – then monthly, then barely ever; then once-in-a-blue-moon letters slanted in handwriting changed by the years. They forgot the sound of each other’s voices, the inflections that once had been all-consuming when framing I love you.

Their writing took on the cadence of acquaintances going through the motions – and there was a pain in that.  But they never stopped checking their mailboxes; drudgery trudging home alight with pinprick distant hope.

The long-past lovers were hopelessly ensconced in the throes of divergent lives that had water-stained the memory lines of the once-familiar maps of each other’s bodies. Both had relinquished their hold on the other’s heart.

And yet…

And yet, still, there was something insistent within them: some undeniable agony, or necessity, or love (which in truth are synonyms); something that refused – that was unable – to abandon old dreams to the fire.  Some parched integral part of who they were that strained, perennially, desperate for the drops of water that fell from the heart of the other.

A Prefix for Isn’t, and I

I do nothing passionately.

I am dispassionate.

Dissevered.

Dissociative, distant, disconnection signal me.

When I have broken the literal logic down into small enough compartments, I store it in letters: black and white; I write down the world around me.

It does not write of me.

 

 

River Capillary Maps

He had asked her a question, some time ago; she had been considering it meticulously, laboriously, for such a long time that it had become a great many other questions. A river with too many tributaries.

She stood at the delta and wracked her brain, but the sea didn’t seem like an answer.  He watched her, patient, a client of silence himself; when her hands turned to water, her body both rock and relentless sea, he said: I’ve always been good at cartography.  I can teach you to chart your waters.  He said: pick a river, no matter how small; we will follow it out to the sea.

This is how maps are made, she learns.  With quiet reassurance. With the knowledge that being lost is a state of being too common to be something to fear.  With the first shaky line making its way across blank paper; taking shape, eventually – inhale-exhale, start again – as a means of navigation.