Gemini
They call me mercurial,
quicksilver, smooth, and uncontained -
I am the rising steam suspended,
the shifting wind,
not one person split between two bodies
but one body with two copies of me inside.
I am not a duel between them
I am duality.
I am the vibrant whole of myself
and I am my anxiety.
Twinned, my own reflection,
the sharp edged mirror broken that I keep inside
a brain that feeds me poison
and the hollow shell I inhabit when
I have to smile and feel and convince
the world that I am here and I
am not the writhing mass of conflictions
and pain, a black hole, pressed down
into a fingerprint in clay.
I’d like to shake my hand, since for so long
I have been the shield protecting myself.
An arm reaching constantly for the other,
toward my own hand outstretched on the
opposite side, I could reach it I think
if my seam unraveled and down the middle
I tore myself apart.
Hannah Madonna is a writer from the southern United States whose work often explores nature, feminism, and living with anxiety and depression. She works as a reference librarian in a public library and starts an MFA program in 2020. Her poems have appeared in Vamp Cat Magazine, The Wild Word, and Cauldron Anthology. Find her on twitter @hannahwritegood crying about something or sharing pictures of her cat.
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