Arsonist Lover
She breaks cinnamon
sticks against her
teeth and pretends
to breathe fire, of
dark red smoke that
might curl from her
tongue. She imagines
pressing her mouth
to his and meeting
his teeth with her own,
making him feel a slow
burn as she presses
him against wall and
sets him on fire
with her own hands.
Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now
We all listened to Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now
and laughed, as we tried to twist cigarette smoke
into rings. It was dark and we were crowded around
the old record player, trying to hear past the skips and
the jumps.
It played the way my heart beat. Eagerly and all at once,
lurching forwards and backwards without bother. We
all laughed but it was my heart playing out on the record
player, spinning in a lonely circle, again and again and again.
I grew like a flower on a wall, pale and unimportant as the
other flowers grew up in the cracks of sidewalks and along
old abandoned warehouses. Those were the flowers we
all stopped to admire, with their lipstick-ed confidence
and bright faces. We never stopped to look at the miserable
flowers along the wall, with their wilting faces and desperate
smiles. Those were the ordinary ones, never kissed in the
pouring rain and with the horizon humming with thunder and life.
We all listened to Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now
and laughed.
So Tiring, Being That Girl
Being that girl was tiring but
you held yourself together,
a bit of wire pulling skin
and bone into a shape of a girl.
You tried to be that girl
who ordered almond milk
chai teas at the coffee shop
but you missed the fullness
of the real thing and instead
became that girl in the leather
jacket, heart stapled to your
sleeve. It throbbed, though,
against your wrist. You could
never ignore it and had to
twist into that angry girl at
the protests. You cared far
more about the sign you
carried than the cause you
walked for, and eventually
your heels blistered in those
black boots you stomped in.
You blossomed into that girl in
flower crowns who read the classics
out on a New York park bench.
It was a shame when your face
burnt bright red from the sun
and blistered, because you liked
being that quiet girl who drank tea
black and fed the stray cats.
Instead, you memorized old
black and white movies and
wore red lipstick that stained
your teeth. You considered
smoking but remembered
the pictures of lungs
split open, black and oozing.
The idea of being cancerous
made you feel like all that you
ever were was that girl made
up of charcoal and left smears
of ash in her wake.
Rachel Small writes in Ottawa. A post-undergrad student from Carleton University’s History program, she is currently a writer and editor for AtticVoices. Her writing has appeared in SPINE and Pulp Poet's Press, and she has work forthcoming in The Hellebore and Apathy Press. You can find her on twitter @rahel_taller.