I AM ABOUT TO BE HAPPY
Can you feel it?
You are art and you are not art
Yesterday I thought it was good to be dead
I babbled, a wildwoman boiling your pelt
I wore you as my t-shirt and mouth
I said it was good for you to be art
Save me from death, let me rise from the dead
Today I bury your body
LUNAR SHATTERS
I came into the world a young man
Then I broke me off
Still the sea and clouds are pegasus colors
My heart is pegasus colors but to get there I must go back
Back to the time before I was a woman
Before I broke me off to make a flattened lap
And placed therein a young man
Where I myself could have dangled
And how I begged him enter there
My broken young man parts
And how I let the mystery collapse
With rugged young man puncture
And how I begged him turn me pegasus colors
And please to put a sunset there
And gone forever was my feeling snake
And its place dark letters
And me the softest of all
And me so skinless I could no longer be naked
And me I had to debanshee
And me I dressed myself
I made a poison suit
I darned it out of myths
Some of the myths were beautiful
Some turned ugly in the making
The myth of the slender girl
The myth of the fat one
The myth of rescue
The myth of young men
The myth of the hair in their eyes
The myth of how beauty would save them
The myth of me and who I must become
The myth of what I am not
And the horses who are no myth
How they do not need to turn pegasus
They are winged in their unmyth
They holy up the ground
I must holy up the ground
I sanctify the ground and say fuck it
I say fuck it in a way that does not invite death
I say fuck it and fall down no new holes
And I ride an unwinged horse
And I unbecome myself
And I strip my poison suit
And wear my crown of fuck its
MY OWN NOTHING
I went under my skin
Which was my old skin
And under the skin of my soul
Which was an old soul
Though new to me
There was so much silence
I was surprised to like it
I saw that all my wounds were only dust
And when I turned to dust they would be vanished
And saw that I would have to be the mother
I have to be the tit and friend and child
And stroke my hairs and say peace
The hairs on my head and the hairs on my soul
They are bulbing in the rain
They look like crops and I am scared of them
Because one day they will be dust
And silence knows they will be dust
But what will become of silence
When everything else dusts
I have to know the silence will hold on to me
Know it not by head or by reflection
But touch it in the emptiness beneath my dust
Already returning me to light
Melissa Broder is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Last Sext. She is also the author of the essay collection So Sad Today. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, the Iowa Review, Tin House, Guernica, Fence, the Missouri Review, and the Awl among others. Broder holds a BA from Tufts University and an MFA from City College of New York. She lives in Venice, California.