Brain on Fire
By Julia Safrin
Memories of us is a sleep paralysis demon in the dark corner of my room
It’s 3 AM and I can’t sleep
I’m a restless whirlpool tangled in my sheets
And the demon makes it’s way over in graceful malice
Dressed in dirty looks and snarky comments
Which smells like bad news
Like heartbreak
Like that sinking feeling at the bottom of your stomach
It reeks like rubbing alcohol
Slithers into bed with me
Spoons me in his scales
Slime and grime collide
Confine me
He makes me swallow my cries like broccoli
Like “Don’t make me go over there and feed you myself”
Like “chew...and now swallow”
“I said swallow”
And I do
Complied to abide
They burn going down my throat like raw lemonade
That tastes like our last argument
Like the end of our relationship
He whispers our memories in my ear like bedtime stories
In between salacious sighs
I can feel his slithery snakey tongue tickle my terrified tragus
Remembering hurts
My brain is on fire
Yet I can’t seem to burn our memories
Can’t seem to turn them into ash
To ash dust to dust
Because you’re not dead to me
Yet
I bet you think this poem is about you
And I wish I could look into your crystallized snake eyes
And tell you it isn’t
Not this one but the other one
Not both
Not all three
Not all four
Trying to disguise the fact that I miss you with every diss
Wish I could say that I don’t have a whole portion of my notebook dedicated to you
Just to dig a grave to bury you in
Because I’m smarter than to waste my time on you again
Because late at night when I can’t sleep I remember
I remember that before I hated you
Before I hated you, you knew how to make me laugh
How I thought I made a friend for life
How I could peel back all my layers and stand in nude vulnerability in front of you
And I almost throw up my swallowed cries
Almost let every single memory flood out of my body in a tsunami of tears
Every poem is a lit match
Burning away my feelings
The memories
The good times
The day the thought of you began to piss me off
The sound of your voice
The syllables in your name
The image of your face
Every poem is burning sage
Ridding my mind of your evil spirits
Of the psycho you really are
Of the way you made me feel worthless
Like loose change thrown into wishing wells
Like loose change, you don’t bother to pick up when it falls on the floor
Like loose change that gets stepped on in the city that never sleeps
Smothered by the dirt and germs underneath people’s feet
I lay cocooned in pain
The demon fades away with every flickering droop of my eyelids
Knowing his mission is complete
As I pray for sleep to take me away
In hopes that maybe I will have forgotten all about you by morning
When I told you to lose my number, you know I was serious, right?
After Laura Jean Henebry
You unfollowed me on instagram the other day and I guess that means you finally got the memo/ There’s a fraction of me that pangs with a pinch of pain to see you walk away/ That fraction/ Dressed in a black dress kissing the forehead of her knees/ Something that for once would leave you wondering/ Leave you imaging/ Leave you forced to bite down and swallow a cheesy pick up line whole/ No, this dress would not look better on the floor/ Leave you wishing that you were still the archeologist that dug up the hidden parts of me/ Laid them out for only your eyes to see/ And that part mourns/ A loss/ A colossal fuck up/ All the alternate realities in which we exist/ The rest of me, however/ finished grieving a long time ago/ I set sail from your seas in the dead of night/ Left you in sleeping oblivion/ I guess that wasn’t blunt enough/ What I had meant was for you to scribble my name out of your Walmart planner/ Hard/ Like you were hoping to get when you etched my name under in chicken scratch under “Tuesday”/ Like it’s dusty pages from the year before are a scratch off lottery ticket/ Drink so much you blur the memory of my face/ ‘Delete contact’/ Cold turkey/ Pick petals off of flowers/ Move on/ I love you
not...anymore
Cheers (After New Rules)
The days, weeks, and months I spent picking up the pieces of myself I lost in your whirlwind/ There were nights I cried and nobody heard me/ Let the water caress me in the shower to feel some sort of validation/ Go out wearing next to nothing/ Just to get a stranger to look at me/ There were nights I cried beside you/ Right in your arms/ And you didn’t even notice/ The same nights I could’ve died in bed laying with my head on your chest/ I’m glad I didn’t though/ Cheers to breaking down/ To the plethora of tears/ To the kisses that left me bleeding purple/ To the stages and seasons of grief/ To the anger I burned into a page/ To the one good thing you left me with/ The orgasms/ Cheers to every time “nobody has to know” crossed either one of our minds/ Pathetic/ To the nothing more and nothing less/ To that fucking in between/ Cheers to the pieces of myself I found amongst the damage/ To the day I met you/ To the way you turned my insides soft/ And set my soul on fire simultaneously/ To the butterflies, even if they did turn into bees/ To the bees and the way they stung/ To the laughter/ To the midnight bagels and PB&Js/ To all the 8ams we slept through/ To the way it felt like you knew me a lifetime/ Cheers to stupid men/ To you/ Cheers to me/ To the drip that has finally stopped/ To the “us” that never was/ Cheers to being over/ you
To the person who blasts music outside my bedroom window at random hours out from the parking lot:
Sometimes I pretend you’re serenading me/ To make me feel some sense of
hope
in the middle of
despair/
I think I hide it well/ Sometimes/ Staring at the same
boy
I was staring at exactly a year ago/ Stuffing the tears down/ Metallic fingers down my throat/ Just like I was a year ago/ It didn’t use to be like this/ I/ didn’t used to be like this/ but somewhere/ along the line/I fucked up/ the first hit/ puff of smoke/I’ve been addicted/ since