CW: intent to harm an animal.
Writing this piece felt like a hard look in the mirror. I wanted to be honest and vulnerable about feeling helpless, about the true cost of being a bystander. So, I anchored those ideas to the time in all of our lives when we have almost no agency or power.
Caught in a net
Under the cruel leaning of his knee,
It hissed and spat like a ball of snakes
Or a frenzied medusa.
I thought to say something,
But instead fell prisoner-witness to a scene
Pasted down into the yellowed, stabbing grass
Of my neighbor’s lawn.
Purpose unspooled,
This bag of daggers cried out,
This inert chaos,
Privy only to the tyrant whisper
Nudging it vile and slow to death.
And I thought to say something,
But I sought peace with schoolmate strangers
Who saw me as totem,
As omen in glyph,
As shipwrecked and tossed aloft.
And I craved the comfort of broken homes
More than I valued the life
Of a rare and bottled sprite before us.
I sat my insecurity on my lap,
A smug and drooling gargoyle
With desperate palms for eyes,
Whose spotlights scanned for starved refugees
To fumble into its stone teeth.
And how insidious that space,
That blank canvas,
Where a plague-drinking god squats and
Threatens to trim and tar all that glance his way,
Kissing only to vacuum out the air
And mimic the art of breathing.
There was more to be done
On the end of us—the wickedly curious
And heavenly bound to punishment—
Long before we grew so crooked to miss it.
And from that cloudy spire
Cushioned with flame,
Cracked with tales of regret,
We watched in a delighted horror.
The weakest chanted.
Fiends at the coliseum.
Holograms of former and future rot
Sang until silence churned and cranked enough to
Summon a torture dripping ghastly and divine,
Taut and so buttery sweet on our spirits.
The firing of death squad synapses.
A sudden descent.
The peeling and chewing of a razor’s pith.
Our childhoods carved and kneaded into
Ugly, unwieldy handfuls of thought.
The strongest crumbled,
Toppled by the hammers
They’d brought from home.
The rest melted patiently, plucked their eyes,
Preened their feathers,
And cast themselves in marble,
So they would never have to talk about it.
Fractured selves upon fractured selves.
Spasm of memory to false sigil
To lonely, crowded abyss.
A struggle to wash ashore
In sparkling, peculiar circuitry.
We slept asea,
Pried awake by the crinkling static
Of our stubborn and mangled empathy.
But, before knuckle-blade met fur,
Fur raised like quills through fine wire,
Yawning upwards, staining the sky,
A horn called us home.
One of hell’s very own
Spade-tailed, port-eyed trumpeters
Spied the bile upon our lips and
Found it all too dreary after all.
There were psalms of begging,
The cool hint of copper,
And streaks of brine across the stadium.
The hostage was freed,
Darting blurred into a craggy burrow,
Where shadows gave way to two small fires,
Burning and branded there forever in distrust.
I fell as a statue,
A myth of a martyr who had
Forever sewn fear and failure into bruised skin,
Tethered it and reworked the drying leather into
A set of restless, wandering glances.
I was caught in those ashen, silted palms,
Traced by the scorching and unsure beams
Of a thing betrayed.
I did nothing.
All this,
And I said nothing.
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