Melissa Broder

How can you go swimming in another human being? I am swimming and asking for light. Once I paddled into dust and fucking and the horsemen and ruin and the poisonous hollows of a projected blue eye and cracked my skull on all and caught more disease in my already dread mind and entered the medicines of no human power, the forests of disappearing moans, which were rich in sap but lacked dissolve fertilized against my own swimming nature, Aleph I am swimming for you now and I don’t care. When you leave the forest you do not become the ocean and I have become the desert trying to swim in the ocean and knowing this, carrying the forest floor in a sweet wood coffin and the blackbrush and rocks, the yucca and cacti of receded oceans, which were never oceans at all or there would have been shells on the sand, they only looked like oceans in my thirst, I cut the old horizon with a sword you have given and I gut the heavens and bleed their light and swim in that.

I came into the world a young man Then I broke me off Still the sea and clouds are Pegasus colors My heart is Pegasus colors but to get there I must go back Back to the time before I was a woman Before I broke me off to make a flattened lap And placed thereon a young man Where I myself could have dangled And how I begged him enter there My broken young man parts And how I let the mystery collapse With rugged young man puncture And how I begged him turn me Pegasus colors And please to put a sunset there And gone forever was my feeling snake And in its place dark letters And me the softest of all And me so skinless I could no longer be naked And me I had to de-banshee And me I dressed myself I made a poison suit I darned it out of myths Some of the myths were beautiful Some turned ugly in the making The myth of the slender girl The myth of the fat one The myth of rescue The myth of young men The myth of the hair in their eyes The myth of how beauty would save them The myth of me and who I must become The myth of what I am not And the horses who are no myth How they do not need to turn Pegasus They are winged in their un-myth They holy up the ground I must holy up the ground I sanctify the ground and say fuck it I say fuck it in a way that does not invite death I say fuck it and fall down no new holes And I ride an unwinged horse And I unbecome myself And I strip my poison suit And wear my crown of fuck its

I want the hole in my ear to be quiet And inside the hole in my ear to be quiet And I want it to tell me what to do Or I will go to my lover’s mouth And say oh my quiet I am coming And tell the quiet how its kingdom should be made Though the quiet has already eaten me Because the quiet loves me But does the lover love me And why must the quiet be so quiet And why can’t the quiet have a cock And where is its violet mouth Its ten fingers with which to fix me And where is its belly breathing And O I want to be fixed But I am already fixed Why don’t I feel it

I had not vomited in so long Someone put the hex on my true-to-selfness Some sorcerer kept me far from my guts The guts I feared would choke me And make me ashamed of having no wings And drown my own heart I know how to survive a feeling But I forgot that I knew it A manic forgetter froze my meats I kept asking for help when I didn't need it My demons stared out from the ice When they finally thawed they'd been dead all along And now I am the walking thawed You survive yourself if you wait long enough And vomit your guts down your defrosted breast And bathe in your mess and say baby it's fine