Marry & Burn by Rachel Rose

Author:Rachel Rose
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Poetry
ISBN: 9781550177190
Publisher: Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.
Published: 2015-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

Growing Pains

Tonight I feel the loneliness

of being cisgender.

I have no boy inside me.

It’s been years, if ever.

Some are kissed in their cradles

by the two faces of Janus,

god of transitions

god of war. They barely survive that kiss,

forevermore hold both kinds of joy,

and the twelve kinds of pain.

The rest of us, unkissed,

breathe the ordinary lullaby.

We live one kind of lonely.

Golden Age

This one is for the girls

who got themselves to the party

and didn’t get home, girls

who got drunk like angels—glimmering,

disappearing—then woke up under a towel

in a strange hotel. This is the glass of words to toast

your bad choices, the wink of a boy

tonguing your navel. Unconscious-

ly your own desire to be touched

was a claim you couldn’t stake, a willow

that needed water. This is the blame you’ve birthed,

cradled and nursed, blame that won’t leave home

because you didn’t bite, didn’t sit up, you just

closed your eyes and drifted on a sad river of burning

alcohol. This is for all the passive girls, the ones who sucked off

popular boys, the ones who half wanted to be wanted,

half wanted to die. To die a little death

as you did then, when you came to school

and the rumour was he’d fucked you with the handle

of a broom while you were floating down

the Ganges, the Nile, the Fraser, the Thames.

Gone: was it true or wasn’t it? There was no pain,

it was a lie, it was a myth. This is for you,

bitch, snatch of gossip in the hall,

twist of hair, sucker punch. This is for me, too:

girl of the skinned knees who couldn’t name the names

of those who’d passed through her body.

This is for leaving school, or staying. For the dangerous

damaged pack we make, the way we smell blood

where other girls smell roses. Sinister sorority!

Who knew that one day we would consider

ourselves lucky to have been raped

in the golden age of rape, before violation

was caught on an iPhone: posted, reposted. Look!

A close-up on sleeping beauty digitally defiled

and then digitally defiled. What poisoned apple

blocks her throat from screaming? Boots jostle. Time fucks

faster now. Featherweight, angelweight, song of floating

above the below. Blow and she’s still still: moth dust, shimmer.

Unbuckle your belt, her eyelids. She can’t move away,

can’t change schools. Even dead, there is

no escape. Link it. Click like. It takes three thousand views

in three hours to make a myth.

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