Confused by the way you smile when we,

Grab onto each other, like you almost feel free,

Always holding your breath like you’re under water,

Forget you’re a son of God and I am a daughter,

We come so close to destroying our demons,

Yet Fucking and fear won’t lead us to freedom, 

Feel you so deeply I believe it’s the truth,

Yet I felt the same way when I tightened that noose,

The rush of your skin when you slide right inside me,

You take all my pain, fuck me til I can’t see,

You stop holding your breath when my arms are around you, 

Like you’re finally home, can’t tell me that’s not true.

Collapse into me, my nails leave marks on your back,

We don’t rest when we’re wicked, I know this is fact. 

Wounds

Letter by letter, I hear the wounds echo,

Each tone rips me open, reverberating,

Each sound wave crashes against me, 

Revealing small tears in my unhealed past.

Places I believed I had walked through, 

Where reality shows me I was still frozen, 

Soul not yet ripened or willing to truly know, 

The kind of knowing by which shame is released.

Those parts of me recoil from the light, 

Sodden and heavy with false representation,

Of myself, of my beauty, of my lacking,

Of my ever lessening stain of self loathing.

Obsessive compulsion, to cleanse the soul,

Too fast, too often, too sterile, 

Unveiling an unattainable picture of what should have been,

What the soiled, sick nurture has said is so. 

Love is not sterile, nor is the truth,

Embracing, longing for what is raw real, 

Dirty, disheveled,  pride in reverse, 

Freedom, accompanying compliance with imperfection, 

Foreign feeling of radical, redeeming acceptance. 

Rejoicing in gifts of visceral, venerable pain, 

A novel conception of weathered old wounds, 

And the bitterness of unclenching a fist, 

Allowing recoil from familiar chaos,

Creating space between critical me and condemnation. 

Courage through the burgeoning unknown,

Uncovering the grace of surrender, 

Softening the nettling of new naked skin,

Skin that mends, not masks, magnificent echoing wounds. 

Megan Forrest

January 1, 2022