I’m Rev! I do silly things and struggle greatly with the concept of existing. You can usually find me somewhere between dreaming and waking up.
This is a play on the “came back wrong” trope, which can be found in popular works like Frankenstein, The Monkey’s Paw, Pet Sematary, etc. The poem is a spiritual resurrection arriving from an intense and obsessive want. The comforting hope for revival juxtaposes the heaviness of loss, and the speaker refuses to accept death’s grim reality. The poem ends with a recognition of dependency that is both enlightening and horribly devastating.
For You
when i decided to return you
to transform you into the trick candle on a child’s birthday cake
to make you breathe when your breath was left a condensate
to give you this lucky rabbit’s foot, to tie it against your toe
when at last i saw you in the morgue,
i struggled to believe it would work.
under my sheets, i feel your fingertips. fleeting rhythms
like delicate snowflakes with their limbs distorted and flailing,
whose frailness serves them just long enough to reach my skin
and melt before the evening sun.
meeting you, dead, brilliantly pale with crystalline eyes
and cotton-stuffed insides, i must admit, my stomach flipped.
i am not one to dance with the sanctity of life. yet you are here,
and how cold i have been without you.
dragging this corpse of yours is tiring. it is endless and it leaves me
wanting to dislodge the snaggleteeth from between the winter’s gums.
the light sandwiched in the midst of forever is just enough to keep still
my racking ribcage that trembles under your weight.
i wish this salt was not beneath my tongue,
but the arctic seas cannot always harbor grief. the song
on the wind that hums for you? know that it is mine.
know that i am asking you to stay mine.
i have torn myself to pieces again and
again, but it has always been for you. For you.
For You.
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