slothandstir:

Trigger Warning: Rape/Sexual Assault

I know most of my followers won’t watch this, which is fine. To those of you that do, thank you. I didn’t write this (obviously) but I feel like I could have.

“There is a reason my body

Creaks like a closing casket

Every time I fuck with the lights left on

It is the same reason my friend

Sets fire to photographs of birds

And follows the smoke with pleading eyes

We both had years when the phoenix didn’t rise

When we slept in beds of cindered feathers

And held hollow ashen beaks

The way other kids held ice cream cones

I’ve sucked the bones of a songbird’s rotting wing

And you think your pills are gonna fix me doctor?

You think I’m gonna chase this down with water?

The shame as loud as his next girl’s nightmares

I tied my tongue like a ribbon

In my baby sister’s hair

Like a bow around a gift I gave

To my mother and father

And my silence

Equaled every Christmas morning

Where we were still happy and grateful

But my silence

Was also his next girl’s eyes

Falling like timber when no one chose to hear

Her roots ripped up

Her ground eroding to

The din of an old man’s zipper

Twenty years later I wake in damp sheets

My body trembling to the ghost of her voice

Cracking like a frozen lake

And I don’t even know her name

Never saw her face

Only heard the rumor that he’d moved on

To the hemorrhage of another perfect thing

And now here I sing

Through cinder

Through microphones

Raised like white flags in war zones

Through poems

I have dug from my throat

Like fishing hooks

From here

I look back at my voice

Lowered to half-mast

How he must have stood there

With his dirty hand

On his dirty heart

Laughing like a broken levy

As his next girl woke with

Body bags beneath her eyes

And enough shame in her gut

To give the hurricane her own name

If I could see her face

If I could face the eye of her storm

How would I ever tell her

That I speak for a living?

Would I offer my own wounds as condolence?

Would I say his claws carved me animal?

Would I say at fourteen years old

I threw my bloody fists into my boyfriend’s face

Until his eyes swelled shut

And his tears turned crimson

And his jaws cracked

Until I was finally convinced his hands

Weren’t every mans’ hands

Would I tell her I’ve stood beneath street lamps

Waiting for the swarming flies

To identify my body as carcass

To swallow every cell of salt

And leave nothing behind

But the trellis of my untouched bones

I remember the fault lines in the corner of his eyes

The way he shook hands with my father

The look on his face beneath the swollen sun

Even his shadow looked guilty

The concrete made crime scene by his touch

Would I tell her this?

Has she ever outlined her own body in chalk

Would I ask if there is yellow tape

In her top dresser drawer

For those nights when her true love’s kiss

Is an anthem to a dead country

And you find yourself with

Rope burns around your neck

Begging the bodies of strangers

To not respect you in the morning

In the morning I shovel my blood

From the white snow

I wipe my frantic breath from the window

And I bind my breasts

So that something will hold my breath so tight

Not even the air in my lungs could be

Identified as ‘woman’

Woman

Are you a carbon copy of myself?

Is there a boy inside you

Painting your cells

With the charcoal of cindered feathers

So that you will never again

Glow in the dark the way girls do

Woman

If I knew your name

If I could face the eye of your storm

And the warning locked in my voice box

That never came

Would I tell you all of this?

And after that

Would I ever have the nerve to admit

That even if I could

I wouldn’t take my silence back

My father owned a gun

He would have blown that man apart

My mother owned a mother’s heart

Everything would have broken

Everything but you”

(via irrelephant11)