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ALL TEETH K. Cináed Cahill

#poetry #poems #a transformation #i am the knife #ill do the text id on this later

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negative space

#q #The Crossroads

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From the Wikipedia page on loons

Now with free ready-to-print .png and .tif file

#love as a kind of violence #q

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K. Cináed Cahill

[TEXT ID] My mother cannot hold a thing without hurting it so she does not hold me anymore. I told her once, this hurts. you're hurting me, and then she let go. [END ID]

#poetry #poems #the knife hurts twice #love as a kind of violence #text id

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working on sumthin

#poetry #the knife hurts twice #wasting game #WIP #visual poems #visual poetry #poems

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HEALING WRONG K. Cináed Cahill

[TEXT ID] maybe it was easier to love me when i was still hurt. maybe the healing made me meaner, shattered me into something unkind. a dog that bites. they don't tell you what to do when you come back worse. [END ID]

#poetry #poems #a transformation #the knife hurts twice #i am the knife #healing wrong

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there's a row of wrinkles emerging on my forehead. wriggling lines of worry, newly settling in my skin. i keep finding grey hairs, like little miracles, on my temples; i've stopped dyeing my hair just to watch them grow in. i never used to think about growing old or my body aged. to think that i nearly stole this from myself. how wonderful, to live a life and have it leave a trace. how wonderful to exist and have the evidence written across my face. i'm alive alive alive!

good god, what a beautiful thing

#poetry #prose #to be sweet mother

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a comic/zine about coyotes

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ICARUS K. Cináed Cahill

[TEXT ID: the wind blows harder from up on the roof. if i lay back and stare at the sky long enough, i can forget  the sandpaper feel of tiles and the weight of my bones sinking down and all i will feel is the buoyant glow of sunlight. i used to dream that i had wings massive and feathered and dappled golden brown they'd hang from my shoulder blades like a curtain spread wider than my fingertips i'd wake up midair and plummet down into my sheets feeling too light, too grounded. i understand, i think, why Icarus fell. the wind rises, and the sun is warm i step off, over the edge if i close my eyes, i am swallowed by the ocean.]

#poetry #poems #text id #a transformation #icarus

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HOW LARGE THIS SICKNESS Keiko C. Cahill

[TEXT ID: do you understand how large this sickness in me is? i am standing over the stove, dinner half-made and a maw of knives in my stomach, and still i wonder if i really need to eat. how do you describe it to someone? it's not about my body, it's not about the shape of me, it's not about my skin, so warm and fragile under my hands. it's not even about deserving, or maybe it becomes so, in the fact that i do not have to think about it. in the way that it is instinct. and it must be sickness, to bargain with yourself against the roil in your gut on the exact ratios required to breathe and walk and think. it must be sickness, or it wouldn't come dragging all this shame with it. all this anger. and i'll let it slip sometimes, that i eat maybe a few mouthfuls each day and i'll feel some terrible sliver of delight at the concern in their features. some obsidian-sharp pleasure that, yes, they noticed. even as i watch their eyes for anything dangerous, anything in the name of my best interests because it's handled. i have it under control, i'm not a child. and maybe that's the source of the shame. i want so desperately for someone to look at me and say “oh, darling. oh, sweetheart, i'm so sorry” that sometimes, i worry i collected everything wrong with me on purpose. i used to take a knife and carve little pieces out of myself. like maybe i could find some secret thread and the whole of me would come crumbling apart. the thought of it now makes me sick. but maybe i'm still doing it anyway, just quieter and slower. i lie in bed and wonder if someday i'll just eat myself from the inside out. if by then, my body will be so used to hunger that it will wrap my teeth around the world and still not know how to be satisfied. i wonder if, even then, i'll be able to explain it.]

#poetry #prose #tw eating disorders #tw self harm #wasting game #how large this sickness

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The neighbor next-door to the house I grew up in was an old Iranian woman that all the kids in the cul-de-sac were scared of. I don't remember if she ever did anything to actually be worthy of this fear, the most I remember is getting a brisk scolding for nearly trampling her tulips, which had been well-deserved. Regardless, to our young minds she was terrifying. But her yard had an abundance of fruit trees that we were collectively obsessed with. We made games of it, daring each other to get closer and closer until we managed to sneak ourselves sour cherries and hard pears. None of us knew how to tell when the fruit was ripe so our spoils were mostly inedible, not that that stopped us from eating all of it or going back for more. In one of my braver moments, I even managed one of her most precious figs, though I shook with adrenaline the whole time. I remember splitting the fruit with my fingers, the squealing of the younger children as it squished strangely, the way I told them it wasn't gross, that's just how figs are. In the end, it didn't taste like much at all and it was decided that the fig sandwich cookies were far superior to the real thing.

I couldn't tell you why we kept sneaking fruit from my neighbor's yard. There were other fruit trees that we were allowed to scavenge all we liked, and we were more than happy to eat ourselves sick on crab apples and sour plums. Possibly it wasn't ever the fruit at all, but the game that we loved so much; a bunch of elementary school adrenaline junkies.

I've been trying to find moments in my past that I like, that I'm proud of. Part of the process healing from trauma and self-hatred, but I also like to think of it as making room the the little girl who used to live in my body. Apologizing to her and learning to love her again, even for all the ways she hurt me. While I'm embarrassed now to admit to harassing my elderly neighbor, I like the kid I was in these memories. I like that she stained her shirt carrying enough stolen fruit so that even the really little kids who weren't so fast or sneaky enough to get their own could have some. I like that she smiled and had fun and that I can still remember her like this, like she was happy. These are the pieces of myself I want to keep, the parts that I want to still find within myself.

Too much of my memory is something I am still hiding from, decades later I'm still flinching. Do you understand? This is why I can't let go. Do you hear me? I need to hold on to stolen fruits.

#poetry #prose #can you hear the rain? #my chest as a tomb #stolen fruits

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K. Cináed Cahill

[TEXT ID] i don’t know who’s to blame. my mother was there, but her hands never learned how to hold me in a way that didn’t hurt. was it her fault i did it alone, or mine for never reaching for her? some days it's like the walls are stuffed with corpses and the air is screaming with rot, but i can’t show you or they all come back to life. they were dead just a moment ago, i promise. i know they’re breathing now but i can still smell it on my skin. i can feel the knife, but does it count if i can’t name its shape? [END ID]

#poetry #Poems #the knife hurts twice #4.5.23 #text id

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some days, i think i will never forgive my mother. but isaac did not run from his father even as the axe swung down. do you think he hoped, even then, that abraham loved him?

#poetry #Poems #the knife hurts twice #love as a kind of violence

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like a lion, like a lamb

#q #i am the knife

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a venn diagram of love vs. grief

#my chest as a tomb #q

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something bad happened to you, and you died, and you came back wrong.

not wrong all the way. the little ways. you forget important dates, stopped going out with friends. it's harder to make you smile. you're apathetic towards things you used to love, afraid of places you used to go to cheer up. quieter. flinching. different.

you came back for love. you're still here for love. what pulled you back was a brightness so loud that even death couldn't outshout it. death heard the call and smiled at you and said okay. go home. somebody is waiting for you.

but you came back different. like lot's wife; you've turned into salt. you used to chirp through life in hops and skips; but now you lose skin just standing up. you have to move slower, skimming across this world without-touching-it. most things feel dull - until they're suddenly all-too-much. life, and being alive just rushes up and over you and you get hopelessly crushed.

you try to explain it to them: it is ugly, but this is what you are, now. the huge golden hoop of your halo now a little bronze ring. you are still watering your plants and wearing the same clothes. after all, you worked hard to come home. this life; so odd and off-color, now that you are wrong.

but they waited for you - it's just that they wanted the "you" that happened before this. the "you" that could sing in the show and hug people tight and look at a blade without breaking down to cry. the you with a smile in pictures. god, holyshit, it's like looking at a completely different person, isn't it. that other-you; the one they actually wanted.

you are the consolation prize. you are the body that forgot the ghost. you are the memory of the bad thing, and the death after; like you are wearing that memory as a banner. you are a fragment, an assembly. simulacrum. you don't make eye contact in mirrors, afraid the light will glance off and your true nature will flash back at you.

you hear them talk about it in their hushed, desperate whispers. sometimes they even admit it to your face; harsh and violent, acid thrown at christmas dinner. god, can you just fucking be normal again. you do not remember what normal is. you had to climb so far to get back here; you are far too exhausted. you want to open the glass door of your heart and show all the gears. can you help resolve whatever got messed up?

you try so, so hard. you came back for them. because you believed they would love you, even when you were so horribly broken. because you believed they would be patient. because you believed unconditional meant "without exception." you cannot do things the same way. you just get tired too quickly these days.

you want to put them on a couch and pour them the tea with hands that shake more than they remember. you want to line them up and draw them a map of where you have had to wander. you want to show every bruise in a backsplash; the little helpless ant of your soul carrying all that weight, over and over. you want to say: yes! it is different! but i did it for love!

you want to say: "i'm not the same, but i'm yours and i'm here. can that be enough?"

#a transformation #The Crossroads

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bg practice from a photo i took some summers ago, biking home.

#can you hear the rain?