Living and Dead things

the dead thing in the bog had no name, 

at least when it died. i remember 

the dead thing being alive and i remember 

killing it with you. i remember 

that when 

they told me nothing gold can stay, 

i thought of the rust the rain left on the 

transmission tower the night the dead thing jumped ship, saying nothing all the way down – i 

remember thinking that should they dust for prints, 

they might find ours interlocking, 

pressing down on the metal together, interwoven. 

i remember new years 

when we were 

white cake vodka drunk and your boyfriend 

twisted the knife into your abdomen with a gun to my sleeping head, 

and i remember how i clung to you 

until the storm was over – 

or, moreover, how i let you cling to me, 

long after the water had calmed: how i was your eyes 

until you let go of me. i didn’t tell you the dead thing 

hung off my other arm, dying, 

whispering in my ear, 

whispering things i’d have to be off the pills to understand. ah, the pills. yes, it must always come back to the pills. just the way it must always come back to 

diphenhydramine toxicity. do you remember 

when we saw that girl get raped and murdered and 

the police took an hour to show up? 

she was the dead thing then – dead the moment 

those men took her into the shed – 

and we were alive, 

bloody under our sweatshirts, 

unshowered and sweaty: were we alive things then, i wonder? 

we were green, fourteen, high and maybe-fucking, 

as alive as it gets, 

but i have been reborn, 

so i suppose i died, sometime, 

somewhere. maybe that time i

drank the mouthwash worked. 

maybe that girl was only raped. that was the pills. anyways 

– i am unaware if you were ever an alive thing. 

i remember 

how dead you felt under me. 

i remember 

your yellow gray hair, 

i remember the transmission tower, 

i remember being on your lap when he slid into you 

unwanted, 

i remember i never got to hold you one last time as if you 

were a dying dog, 

i remember warning boyfriends about you 

and about how       they could never understand 

what violent loyalty exists in the space between alive and dead. 

but i do not remember if you have ever been a stark alive – 

you have bled, of course, 

but there is a lull where corpses bleed blood 

rather than water. perhaps you were a green dead, a nerudian dead, 

walking around in the garden. 

if blame is what got me wet, perhaps 

  i’d assign you eve and myself 

adam. 

but it is not. it could never be. 

do you ever wonder about the conditions 

under which we moved through our limbo? 

high society women are jeweled with the result of 

extreme heat and weight – 

and so do you credit yourself with my success? 

you made me who i am, i couldn’t have done it without you – 

and maybe you’re right. i’ve published piece after piece 

about the things i cannot say to you. 

am i your family crest, 

your crown jewel, 

the tiara stolen 

under your new boyfriend’s nose? 

do you paper-mache my poems about you and 

the transmission tower and the dead thing to your walls?

do you piece together who i have become in your 

absence through line breaks and verb tense? 

do you wonder if i like myself more now that 

i am no longer the reflection in your narcissian pool? 

i cannot satisfy you with an answer, the way i cannot satisfy myself, 

either. oh, how i lay aching and hollow in an empty 

dorm room with the blue flame burning my cheeks, 

wondering what about you has changed: have you colored your hair? 

are your siblings out of foster care? 

what do you do for work? 

are you in school? 

are you still going to become an art teacher? 

that glow in your muck-eyes has long died 

but had it survived infancy,     how bright might it be glowing today? 

i do not wear you around my neck, not any longer,

but might you be a ruby now? a surefire, in-the-flesh alive thing? … 

what do you think i have made of myself? 

are you aware of my engagement, of my sex change? 

of my haircut, even? … 

it is short, now, just grazing my ears. 

it is the shortest it has been since my birth. 

oh, how i loathe you, and oh – how i wish you had been watching 

the hairstylist over her shoulder. … 

i want to know how many bones the dead thing broke when it hit the water. 

i want to know if its face is intact, 

if we can do a reconstruction, 

 if it is too far gone. 

i told you – drop a rock or two first, break the tension, 

we don’t want to mangle the poor thing – and then you 

took me by the ankle. you told me you were getting sicker by the day, 

and i touched your face and took a bit of your skin with me. 

oh. the dead thing was crushed. beyond belief, 

the newscasters say – do not bring its mother in for the identification, 

she cannot handle it; we can use dental records, dna. 

anything so she doesn’t have to look at it. 

it will be a closed casket. 

they say we can each take something home with us, 

we were its friends, after all, or at least the closest 

thing it had to friends.

i choose a lock of its hair and tie it around my wrist; 

you choose the fruit in its pocket, smushed into juice. 

it’s borne of the garden, you tell me, 

and you’re owed it. 

oh, how bountiful our crop had been those four years. 

how tumultuous it had been. what wonderful springs, 

what vicious summers. satan and his scales licked at us and 

traced our achilles with his fangs for many a season 

and we held out a while, don’t you think? 

 we lasted as long as we needed to. 

 we fed the babes, 

 we kept the animals clean and sheared 

according to season.         we were friends-to-lovers-to-girls-to-boys 

according to season.         four seasons under 

                  the scorching sun and four seasons buried 

        under snowbanks would drive any ol’ girl-to-boy to 

          violence. 

you know that just the same as i do – 

so don’t go calling me a killer, now, not with all the death in the iris of those muck-eyes. not with what i know you to be. any paper crane might 

crumble, in your hands or mine. 

it was a mercy kill; the dead thing thanks me. 

it leaves healing winters and quiet snow at my door. 

it gives me blue flannels at christmastime and 

my hip-bones against his in april; i sheathe myself 

six pink inches inside what peace i am given – 

you take what you can. 

i am sorry to call you out on it 

but you followed me back up the tower in the dead thing’s wake. 

you shout against the wind that it didn’t need to die, 

  at least not so quickly. 

i love you too much to remind you of your hand on my ankle 

and so instead: how much sad did you think i had in me? how much bog water did you think my lungs could filter through? 

i couldn’t breathe. i wish i had been a mercy kill. 

the dead thing got what it needed – what we all wanted, selfishly, as we lay in bed together. living or dead, you took the glow 

from my chest and still it was not enough to replenish your own, 

and so we can never return to the garden.

About the Author

Riley James Russo is a teenaged author split between Ohio and Pennsylvania who aims to capture the human condition through horror-adjacent poetry, novel, and the odd screenplay. She has self-published one novel, Good Dinner, available on Amazon.