Jillian Clasky

CW: disordered eating, vomiting 

From Half Moon

Even last year I could smell you on my breath,
could feel you in the trench of my body, guns blazing.

Yours is a partial death, a death made of motion,
a restless drifting through time; again and again

you claw your way up my throat, into the open air,
my fingers the bridge on which you find your footing.

In my head I divorce you from me, pull our selves
apart like sticky toffee to lift the blame off my neck: me

a breath and you an attempt to make physical the things
that burrowed in the gorge of my stomach, that danced

like fire on my tongue, that ached to escape the walls
of my body no matter how hard I tried to cage them in.

Or maybe you were a coincidence or an accident or
a practical joke, a blemish on my past born of faulty genes

or circumstance. In my head I mythologize my life
but nothing here is sacred. Every time I cry, the earth

keeps turning. Someone is having the best day
of their life. Someone else is dying. Someone is falling

in love: a first kiss, a wedding, the birth of a child.
Someone is writing a better poem than this one.

The faces of strangers blur into 
a single, vicious beast and in the noise 

I lash out at a world that never hurt me 
on purpose. My skin sheens 

and my bones turn restless and rigid 
and I try to scale a wall but find 

no footholds. Only when I am alone 
is the world small enough to grasp 

and smooth into a softer echo 
of itself. I am terrified of loneliness 

but mostly I am terrified of letting 
you know I’ve been lonely 

all this time. I am terrified of sound 
but the quiet makes me lonely.

To move into a world where 
the floor is just the floor and not 
the stone-hard surface I turn to 
for warmth on the nights when 

I am coldest; where the sky 
is just the sky and not a blanket 
over everything that suffocates 
the planet with its brightness 

or its darkness or its emptiness; 
where the window is a clear pane 
of glass, a crystalline opening to 
another world, and not a mirror; 

where my body is my body and 
not an object I drag in my wake.

When I bend my spine 
protrudes like a crooked bough 
and I fear this night will be 
the gust of wind that rushes in 
and fractures me for good. 

My body was built not for wings 
but to keep me standing: these are 
the words I repeat to myself, 
the echo that beats against the back 
of my skull like a feathered thing, 
even when my skin is too thin 
to shield me from the cold.

Jillian Clasky is a writer from Toronto. She is currently studying English and creative writing at the University of Ottawa, where she serves as managing editor of Common House Magazine. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as PRISM international, flo., and Vagabond City.