Astrid Bridgwood

Live Burial  

I wake up flesh. Nothing more than body
To be hauled from mud like a dead thing,
Skinned and charred over fire to feed.  

Body with purpose: meat and fur. Body I am,
Living in this girl like an open wound
Spirit trapped in skin and soaking sinew.  

Blood and bile like baptism. Body like birth,
birth like execution. Stigmata-stricken
Body like blind belief, earth-claimed.  

God loved me once, I’m halfway to sure
He had to. Loved a body still-born,
I was Other once-blest I’m halfway to sure. 

Something soft, light wavering between
Two hands, delicate lace-webs
A constellation of breath in cold air.  

I was a whisper, body caught between teeth
A secret shared between mouths; there! 
Alive in the dark, body like prayer.  

Bubbling at the wrong places, curdling on
My palms. Sun scorch me clean, dry wind
Desert-whipped, body picked over.  

Bones bleached to purity. Again: absence
Othered, like something holy. Pull me back,
Bitter rage in my mouth. Body like a pyre. 

Red Ink on White Cotton

And most days break like sweat over my chest, sleeping naked with hands twisting against dirty sheets, salt in my mouth like a curse or a blessing. God isn’t as tangible as he used to be: sacred spirit felt in the crook of my tongue as your name fell in bursts of shocked spit painting want vivid into backseat-humid air; when I tasted you like sacrament could be knotted into human skin. Flesh is flesh: desire made ravenous— my teeth on your neck, your blood in my hair. Blonde soaking red like she’s starving for it, the hunger of a body kept caged at your arm. Portrait of a Girl straining at masochism with her sadist whispering angelic into the shell of her ear, the altar of her shoulder. Lips against yours like this could be called belonging instead of ownership. When did I let myself become unanimous with your sick-slick fingers, tripping on your tongue like you named me? Like suffocation was prayer, like God could hear me with your hand wrapped around my throat.

A Baroque painting, I picture us: Bodies in Torment, oil on canvas. I swallow hard and expect you to thank me, your eyes to meet mine, for there to be some warmth in your mouth instead of disgust when you taste yourself caught in my teeth, the back of my throat; another poison-sour promise to stay. It’s laughable. One blink and I’m back home, bare skin meeting my own bloodless bed like barrow. You sat vigil over my body as a grave of stones. I have a certain taste for suffering, for an unbound wound; leave bruises in delicate webbing over my chest wrists back thighs, let there be memory in tender flesh and black eyes. I wonder if you ever felt guilty. I went to confession once, sat in a half-built booth iron-barred and empty, felt through the wall the shuddering horror of a body holier than mine. There was no forgiveness in that box, just shame winding itself like snakes around my fingers, venom stinking; sin scented on my skin. I pulled out clumps of hair and left them blooming on the floor. My Fall From Grace, colorized and framed by penance.

When I finally left you it was surgical; a cacophony of cuts, careful scalpel. I am corpse open on the operating table. When a body finds itself inexorably woven into another’s skin, the separating (the breaking) is a violent, visceral thing; clinging of flesh to flesh and lung to charred, blackened lung. I left my nails buried deep into the fat warmth of your stomach, your biceps; places I clutched when the ocean rocked me heavy and sick to sleep again. The places I didn’t want to leave. A roadmap of where the next girl should hold you, where she should sink herself and plan to stay. I want to take you by the horns and shake you dizzy, ask you how I’m supposed to love after this, how I’m supposed to let another slice me open. I am a ghost haunting the body of a girl, warring with flesh long-since robbed from me. Who else will go wrist-deep in my chest and call it delicacy, gently weaving fingertips through the open chasm of my ribs for that heaving, wretched thing I named trust. Who else will kiss my fevered skin, push his fingers to my pulse; tell me feel it, this body made righteous by your touch.

I blessed you and you buried me. Again and again; each little death exhaled into your mouth, your hand clamped torturous over my lips parted and glassy. I will never let another man pare me from bone like a beast for his table, roasted flesh spit-cored and brine-cured to be chewed, swallowed, live in his stomach like conquest. There I was, gagging on his fingers: nothing sacred here, in the bites left to scab. My church of an empty bed, spread into exaltation like a saint. I will wake with blood on my tongue bitten through, with the agony of dreaming settled and softening to ache. Rosy-cheeked and grinning, that echo of girl-before slides into place between bones, under nails, behind each ear. Fed by the gold of a new morning without you— a morning that is mine, a night that is safe. Hunger sated; safety is a shorn thing, scarred like a lamb and shivering with new-ness. The world like open arms, the world like embers before a forest fire, the world like holding your breath before a kiss. The world like warmth, balm to burned skin of the sacrificial. I have left the bloodsport of desire, the violence of my body like oblation— I take bruised skin between my palms and weave it whole, relief in the myrrhic sigh of my rabbit-heart resting.