"Contradictory Desires" When I was six I wanted to swallow the moon, so I got a step stool, and I lined up my profile and I opened my mouth wide to the sky. Got up higher and higher and forced my jaws shut and pretended that I needed a toothpick to separate a stray star from my molar gums, and that the weight of everything bruised my throat going down— so I couldn’t speak for weeks but all the darkness in me now lived in the world and the light puddled and pooled within my guts. When I’m high on poetics like I am right now, I imagine the intruder in me, clawing at my stomach lining, living next to the dying moon, or even within it, dissolving in soulful acid, wilful, livid. Self-doubt started as a seed, a consumption riddling my brain and colouring my lungs virgin white. I cough it up on Tuesday mornings on the bus, an altar of hands, the incense exhaust smoke— a sickroom within my head with only one bed and one nurse because everyone else has left by now. It’s exhausting to spell out the words and to speak them too. My body is my mind and both of us thought we would simply do better soon. But all the growth went to the grove inside of me, where mass pumps the planets through my nerves. There is where I find this thing, next to the moon, begging, raising its crowbar spirit, shaking my arteries like the bars of a prison. Stories told me that the iron would choke the magic out of me but it’s impossible to draw the lines, impossible to be sure, when it runs through my blood and my bones and my brain. Grainy vignette on storybook page, “See the beast!”, the needle, the hospital stage. Dormant disease, recipe for an eventual refill, the medication you don’t yet need but know you will. At night I sweat a brand new dream, alone to die, no sole moon in the sky because I absorbed it decades ago, or at least I tried. Gruesome and sanitised at the same time, stars speckling out my vision and blacking out the pills. There is a wall between us, a curtain, a cosmos, because I am envious of clean blood, the kind that never spills. And even now, mercury is in my veins, fighting to get out, always. And my ideas filter through dosages of heavy metal before they ever reach a page.
Sabrina Angelina is dedicated to the intersection of love and violence, a term she coined to describe classical Romanticism's tendency to pair passion and suffering, tragedy and pleasure, together. Consumed by this concept, she writes on Substack and curates the White Lily Society Instagram page dedicated to arts and culture.
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