Lizzy Burnam 🐞

1. Yolk
You enter the poem to remember who you are. Inside, the walls are dark and drip with gasoline. You strike yourself with rhyme, reason, metaphor, searching for a spark. You try to speak your name but call yourself Lady-beetle. You try to speak your name but call yourself Karen. You try to speak your name but call yourself Scuttled. Your hands are soft and useless. You are the water Jesus walked on. You are the rain that flooded the valley. You are the swamp that drowned the witch. Ah, there she is—the witch! Her mouth a bleeding tigerlily, her body like a clock. 

2. Skein 
Each emotion is so fleeting you barely feel it. You chase after them like napkins in the wind. When you catch them, they crumble like butterfly wings. When you miss, you fall so far you don’t hear yourself hit the bottom. The bottom is infinite, the peak is far gone. You once heard a fox chirp in a woody meadow and God throbbed like a drum in your chest. Like a drum. Like a drum. You collect new pain in memory of the old. It’s not the same. Only the first wound matters. 

3. Mirror
By now you speak in every language except your own. You write with voicemail recordings, newspaper clippings, and dead leaves arranged to line the shadows. You wait at the intersection of addiction, devotion, and sacrifice with your tongue cut out, held high and bloody above your head. The sun never rises, the snow never melts. Your heart is an unlit moon, a rock out of orbit. The opposite of empty isn’t full, it’s beaming.