There is a terrible, rotten thing inside of me.
And if I ever let it outβ
It would eat you whole.
I hear it some nights,
a low, swampborn soundβ
like frogs calling for the end of the world.
Like something dragging its wet belly through the pews.
It stirs beneath my ribs,
A black serpent, slick and patient.
It feeds when I sleep.
It yawns when I claw at it,
mocking my desperate hands.
When I beg it to leave, my nails split.
Still, it sleeps.
Some nights I kneel over the toilet,
retching prayers and bile.
A litany of blood.
Strings of me hitting porcelain.
Something holy in the acid.
I beg to be emptied.
I beg to be clean.
The thing only humsβ
a sound like wings beating inside a coffin.
It stirs when I leave my body.
When I forget the shape of myself.
When the βIβ dissolves into static.
Then it rises,
and I can feel it sneering through my face.
She is gone again.
The soft half.
She wanders offβ barefoot through the kudzu,
past the porchlight, past the cicadas,
past the red clay roads that never end.
She leaves because she must.
Because the body has split too many times,
and the crack never healed right.
Now sheβs all mist and mercy,
and Iβm all blood and ruin.
I am the leftover.
The husk.
The blasphemy.
I speak in tongues of rust.
I let every tender thing spoil.
Every mouth that loves me turns red.
Every touch becomes communion.
And stillβ
I keep breathing.
The serpent keeps feeding.
Now I am only the thing here.
The thing that festers.
The thing that ruins.
And I ruin everything I touch.
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