Grey Vild is a Queer Art Mentorship and Brooklyn Poets fellow and a MFA candidate in poetry at Rutgers University. His work can be found at Them, Vetch, Harriet: The Blog, and elsewhere.
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In the fog light of leaving the holler,
you still refuse to leave me. Grass slicked with morning, sick with loss. The long road home, blur and tangle. Dappled treeline, crystalline breath-wreathed face. The long road home, a contagion. The long road home, a call within a call. (Don’t stop.) The long road home, from fear to glory. (please) The long road home, as night slips in like a— The long road home, from ghost to shadow. The long road home, twinned to nerve. The long road home, (please) a fearful thing. (please) The long road home, tangled wire of smoke. The long road home,
What he doesn’t know
I am not really dead. Not yet. I am still, miles and miles of legs. What happened, in the cage that night. In that cage within, so many cages. I hardly think about it anymore. It happened so often. You learn to let some little yellow curtains carry you away in the mornings. Into, the evenings. I still, refuse to let my own legs be personified. Refuse to let them kick me into submission, curled at the knees, tucked in like wings. If now the cage refuses to open, it also refuses to close. What you think you know. How many months, years has it been. Yes, I am still wearing that little blue dress. I know it’s just a thread. (I gestate your death like it’s the last thing I’ll ever birth. My only.) Quit being so dramatic, where we are fused, this animal brain, your mind within my mind. (Then why did it seem so perfect, so alive?) I am always invisible, within the picture of you. I was always this razored edge, the split and the seam, my curls shaking dusk laughter. The problem with you, you think all beginnings are endings. Or all ends, beginnings— why would I care from here every river spills silver like my lips splice at every, tell, tell, tell. Maybe I’ll put you to sleep now. Maybe you don’t deserve the rest. What use is deserving, anyway—
