I'll disappoint you, too.

The doctor gives me a paper bag and demonstrates how to breathe with it, my hands are cupped over my mouth and I feel ridiculous and old and tired. I am disoriented. There are giraffes and rats and zoo animals arranged on the yellow walls and my vision blurs when I focus on the donkey holding a piñata next to the bear throwing confetti, parading next to a speculum and a list of abortion clinics pinned to the wall. What the fuck is going on. I look at the doctor suspiciously, wondering if she sees the animals too. She smiles at me and opens her mouth, trying to communicate something. I see her face move so I try to match mine with hers. Is this the way you want my mouth to move? For two months I only felt comfortable a) in bed b) sitting in a hospital waiting room c) with a man inside me.

I am an infant emerging into a hostile world too bright for new eyes. I don’t know how to breathe here anymore. Teach me to breathe, teach me how to take things into myself so that they do not destroy me, teach me protection, teach me to kill and construct my idols. I am an open capsule for you to slide your ideas into and my skin will stretch accordingly. My body is layered like an accordion, rip open one side and see how the layers collapse into one another when exposed to air, fine paper-thin divides strung and stitched to ribs, compressed. I will let you suck the meat off my bones if you play my body, joyfully, like an instrument I will open to you and let the air in, all my cavities are full of you and the wet snow and the music you make when I am absent.

Our story is biblical
lapses into silences
falls in and out of other histories
loops beneath
supporting, cradling
the grand narratives of strangers
conquering multitudes
murdering single
vulnerable
bodies
holding themselves out to you,
wanting something

I like clichés, sometimes. Like when you bite the back of my neck and tell me
You are a lioness only tamed through violence