Tristen Sloane (they/them)

CW: Physical and sexual abuse with sadism, smoking, medicalization, terminal illness, (loving/positive) allusion to deaths of loved ones

Pt. I

When the doctors first asked me if I had cigarette paper scars

I thought they saw through the makeup and stapled on smile to where

My

Father

Would have me kneel on rice, knees apart, bare skin goose pimpling like the pigs down the street waiting for the butcher

Shoulders arching back more knife than blade to press

My hands into

Reverse prayer

Everything, always backwards 

Sweat dripping down my lip

The sizzle and hiss of a circular execution field.

I always begged him to quit.

Asked it for the sake of his lungs like the boxing gloves he never bothered to bring with him to the bar fight.

Asked it for the wallpaper stained yellow, clashing with the red I could never quite get out of the hideous beige carpet when his work guests came

And we played

House, or its gross approximation

And I learned 

They smoke (my skin) like him

Too.

I don’t know what I told the doctor, but it took years to get a diagnosis.

By then, it was already severe

Ripping joints from themselves and breaking with fever.

I was dying.

I am dying.

But like my skin

My grief doesn’t heal right.

Stitches refuse to hold my rioting insides steady, 

Blood dripping through bandages-

A morbid metronome telling time slant

But, aren’t we all an approximation of the truth?

Grief, like skin, pulls apart in a clean seam at the wound hours after leaving the hospital 

Again 

Curled up in the dark, clutching where it hurts 

Where it hurts

Where it hurts

Until I am clawing back every scrap of myself left in alleys and eighteen wheelers,

Wringing my mother’s sheets of my own sweat,

Collecting all my stolen baby teeth in a mason jar like fireflies 

That just don’t remember they’re magic

Yet.

Scouring the floorboards for every hair I’ve ripped up by the root because I didn’t want to grow near my family tree

Didn’t want

Didn’t want

Didn’t-

Every obsession and compulsion another prayer in reverse.

Pt. II

Putting the mirror back together, whispering “thank you.”

I do have cigarette paper scars

Love letters of poor healing wrapping my body in its own best attempt at life

And how good that attempt is 

Each one carrying the name of a beloved who didn’t make it

Their memory a blessing 

Every story remembered like they just finished telling it before 

Crushing out their cigarettes on their boots

Flashing me a smile 

And nodding at their pick-up

That it’s time to go home.