Latticework, Laboring
I am taking a different approach to truth. Yes,
I am aware of my own high drama.
My god is Vesuvian, Venusian,
all girlhood, all erupting.
Lacking form, sprawling with praise and begonias, I am trying
to transform myself through solitude. See a truer self
despite the bottle blonde,
the costume jewels, the lovers
calling me
so many different names.
Hallucinating cicadas and heavy air and garden spiders,
I am a blunt knife, hacking away at the old bad roots
of ancestry, of who I should be: gnarled, gangrenous,
active anchors in an unsugared identity. Look,
everyone else seems so satisfied
with so much less.
I want so badly to be easy, sweet. But my mother reigns ventricular:
irate, spattering, flouting the latticework of dream and memory
with a silk swish of her nightgown,
disappearing like a wisping cirrus
down the hall.
I am the child of myself,
retelling a story we know now
to be one of grief, a connotation
of burnt, gone stars.
The solitude has emboldened me, asking my lover in a dream
if she will be with me when I die. In waking, I know it is more likely
I will be on a long walk in the woods, alone with the owls
and snakes and other reaching predators, and my heart will catch,
as if a latch
in some oracular door,
and the trees will catch me
as I fall forward into the big No More.
The landscape of grief as lush, evergreen, exultingly alive—
it feels so good to be righteous in our damnation,
in our wallowing devastation, our lack
opening up like the orthodontic mouth of hell: pretty pearly white, a bed
in which we never have to get out of, because finally, yet
still
our sadness can be justified. So I draw the outline
of my own body on the white tile in red lipstick,
to see my fallen shape, to see
if I still recognize her.
Alone in the vanity mirror, I stare at myself until
I am unknown to me,
which is not long at all.
I would like, so badly, for someone
to let me forget. It is so dangerous
to know too exactly
the dire edges of the thing inside. How easily one can
simply never again
rise up and walk.
How easily one can
put the lipstick on the face of an expressionless I
and know so firmly
it is someone else.
LEIA K. BRADLEY (they/she) is a backwoods Georgia born, Brooklyn based lesbian writer, performance artist, and an MFA Poetry candidate at Columbia University, where she also teaches Writing in Gender & Sexuality. She has work out now in POETRY, Variant, Aurore, Ghost City, JMWW, trampset, Peach Fuzz, Full House Literary, Cutbow Quarterly, West Trade Review, and more, with her poem "Settle(d)" chosen as the Editor's Choice Best Overall pick for Penumbra Magazine's Pride issue. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and is the 2023 Featured Author of Anodyne Magazine. After climbing out from the coffin of her first divorce, she is accepting love letters through her twitter @LeiaKBradley or instagram @MadameMort.