“Why Do You Eat Men?” The Sailor Asked The Siren.

What sort of torture is it to know what one has done wrong and know deeper so that it can never be fixed? Must ever inadequacy be magnified, extracted, and plastered in the infant space beneath my eyelids?

What is there to do but wait for everything to come crashing down in a sudden cold splendor, and remove the sand from beneath my feet.

My sister drops her head underwater and I follow shortly after. I close my eyes as tight as I can and with cheeks full as balloons, I hold my breath. We both breach the ocean surface and look for each other. And we’re right where we left one another, of course. I miss that feeling of certainty, of knowing who I’m swimming with. Now we are grown and childhood is a twinkle in my eye. I see broken pieces of it if I look hard enough, disappointed at friends that don’t keep their pinky promises, at my husband for leaving the chores to me when she never would. She hated the dishes, the dirty refried beans dad would let soak in the sink and float into patches of dark pinkish slime. But she didn’t let me do them alone. I sit at the beach with my legs long and in the sun. I am warm but not complete. I look around at the flurry of faces, the assortment of multicolored swimsuits striped and polka dotted. It’s charming, but I don’t think I’d know where to look if I put my head under like I used to.

In the blue hour, we find each other. Our voices are the only that exist.

There are versions of me you’ve never met. I carry so much hatred you never see. It’s like an ornate blade, you could mistake it’s hilt for jewelry on my neck. But it’s there, in the slit where words come out, to silence any iteration of me that could offend you. Any glimpse of a possibility that I could hurt you, I instead hurt myself. I’d suppress and push down and erase and lie a thousand times over if it meant you were pristine. If you could leave this world untarnished on my filth, leave me filthy. Leave me nothing but your memory.

Taken by the wind’s sweet pressure on my face, I am swept to the little church on the hill. Sugar atomized in the air; footsteps bringing life to the silent cedar floorboards, nothing felt simpler than there. My eyes are sealed as I soak in the feeling, finding a smile in the blustery darkness.

How to Kill a Crooked Ward

Though nothing can haunt a crooked ward, her neck often cracks and turns rapidly as if she fears something coming. As if eyes leech onto her rigid and bark-like back, and their hunger for her image alarms her, or the echoes left of her fallen mind. Nothing can hurt a corrupted spirit, but perhaps the past. She fears not a hunter, but a walking memory, pulling her back to her former self. How wicked a deed to dredge a dead woman's mind back to her rotting body, to convince her only to die.

Why is love not enough to keep someone here,

but enough to take them away?

There is an understanding in burning high rises that only it’s occupants can gather—that the rapid footsteps and baited breath do little for longevity if the staircase is ash and the elevator an oven.

No, the hurried panic is not for survival of the body, but a hunt for another. A body heat almost indiscernible undulating between the flap like flames—like pop ups out of a picture book. You may think it madness to seek heat in a fire, but this is a heat of the soul, a desire to die in embrace. To know a heart beat’s breath against your own.

An understanding that if life must be unkind, you must never let it be alone.

Our screams were never songs. Is that what you’ve been hearing all this time?

-Diary of a siren