Sirens Often Eat Out Of Hatred, Not Love. So When The Sailor Girl Asked The Siren If She Found Her Appetizing,

What empties you?

The way I hold my tongue around my maga father as we watch movies in silence, and I wonder why I’m so forgiving of his alcoholism and not my mother’s toxic positivity.

The way I point out the birds eating peanuts my grandmother put out for them, when all I want to do is scream in my grandparent’s faces and shake their shoulders to turn Fox News off and wake up from their stupor.

I want to wake up too. I don’t want to know their hatred so intimately. I don’t want to love monsters, anymore.

If there is nothing worthwhile in me, how do I go forward from here? How do I live as a creature and not the woman I thought I was?

I felt a twinge at first in my stomach, like I’d eaten bad crab, only worse. Like I’d eaten two bad crabs. Horrendous to even imagine. As my god unraveled me by an invisible umbilical cord leading back to him, my skin loosened and bones leaned on each other like the limbs of a wooden puppet. Weirdly hollow, with a sudden cacophony of clatter, I simply disappeared. I come to you now as a memory. A ghost, maybe. Or a cloud of events so positively stupid and unyielding that not even a god could get rid of it. I’m sure you’re wondering how I pissed off a god I so dutifully doted on for years on end to the point of being turned to dust, I must tell you, the reasons are long and each grow more foolish than the last. It began the day I blamed god. And he blamed me back.

Living with my mother is like living in my office. She is my boss, my judge, my jury—my executioner. I hear her performance reviews of me in the living room, sat comfortably next to her easing into the armrests. I however can’t afford to be comfortable, I live on the clock and there is only a pinpoint for my big toe to precariously perch on as I teeter in and out of her good graces.

I am a mimic that sacrifices her true face to embody others, and I fool everyone but myself.

Life is happening, life is happening all the time. I can’t seem to catch it in between my fingers, elusive as rays of light. I cannot keep it high in my lungs, it leaves me like a breath. I am a meager stone in a fast coursing river and I watch what erodes me away. Life is cold. Invigorating. I wish I could hold its hand and study its face before it escapes me again.

I will make up for lost time.

I will make up for lost time.

I will make up for lost time.

I will make up for lost time.

I will make up for lost time.

I will make up for lost time.

I will make up for lost time.

Ode to the Red Boy

I see a red boy winking, perpetually still. His right eye is closed, his left open, unmoving. He wears pajamas, the Spiderman kind my brother used to wear when he was small. The red boy is on the floor of a hospital in Gaza, his blood caked on his face with soot and ash. His chest does not rise and fall, his eyes do not blink, but he holds his wink. One eye shut, the other open. A playful gesture, as if he's playing a trick on me. As if soon he would awaken and wash the red from his face like strawberry jam, and go play with his spider-man figurine in the sunlight. But he does not move, the red boy. The fluorescent light holds him still. His swollen eyelid does not so much as twitch. He is determined to fool me, and I am happy to be fooled. If it means he will one day wake up, I am happy to be fooled.

“Why do you eat men?” The sailor asked the siren.

“You ate us first,” she replied.

While the humans lose fingers in factories, the robots produce artwork with too many. Dystopian novels were amusing once, when I was not living in one.