Listen. Or do not listen, for the silence is already screaming.

I have stayed in this room until I became the room. The night sky is not “above”, it is a liquid stain the exact color of my internal organs. It is a terrifying reminder that I am still functioning, a clock of flesh. Tomorrow is already a pale insect crawling toward me, carrying its burden of hope, that bitter, metallic taste that coats the back of the throat.

I have discovered the voids. Between my fingers, there are gasps of nothingness. I save them for the him who does not exist, for the intruder who has yet to arrive. My chest is a hollowed cathedral; there is a space between the inhale and the exhale where I die a little, a gap between the word and the meaning where the soul trips and falls. Do you see? It is in the blink. It is in the tap on the shoulder that feels like a wound.

The Anatomy of the Dark

I closed my eyes expecting a garden. I lied to myself. Under my eyelids, there are no roses. There are no hydrangeas. There are no poppies. There is only a grainy, primordial dark, a salt-water soup of unwept tears.

And my tongue? My tongue is a heavy, wet stone. Underneath it, the words are rotting. They are rusty, discarded things. Forgotten names. Songs that are too dangerous to sing because they might actually be true. There are stories inside me that do not know how to be born; they have no doors, only teeth.

The Hour of the Beast

Listen, listen, listen.
Warm milk and honey are for children who still believe in the surface of things. They are useless when 4:00 AM arrives. That is the hour when the air turns to lead and seeps into the pores, crawling beneath the skin to vibrate against the white of the bone. It is a slurred rhythm. It is the sea. It is the wind. It is the voice of someone dead who still wants to speak.

By 5:00 AM, the distinctions dissolve. The sea is the voice; the voice is the wind. By 6:00 AM, I am a collection of knobbly knees and thin, desperate arms. I fold myself like a letter no one will read. I try to force the bloom. I want to see the poppies in my ribcage.

But the heart is not a garden; it is a compost heap. I see only the blackening petals, the thorns, the wilting.

But, listen to me, for I am speaking from the center of the earthquake: one day, the vision will come. Not in sleep, but in the raw, terrifying light. You will see the bloom. Your lashes will tremble. Your hands will shake with the horror and the beauty of it. You will see it all with your eyes wide, wide open.

It is a state of grace. It is unbearable.

©️ Beatriz Esmer