Fourteen Months

Aug 1, 2010 | 2010 Summer - Bodies, Poetry

By Casey Lyons

12/17/2009

Fourteen Months

and still you chase me in circles.
The violence you brought forth
reverberates like a note
my inner ear keeps hearing.

Fourteen months,
and still you disrupt my sleep.
You hang around unwelcome
in the space behind my eyes.

I dreamed some weeks ago
that you confessed,
repented,
and I dreamed last night that you’d been framed.

But my waking wish
is that all my memories of you
were in my appendix,
so I could cut them out with a blade.

Instead they’re in my uterus,
waxing and waning,
part of my circadian rhythm,
and I cannot bleed them away.

Casey Lyons is a queer feminist poet from Kentucky and has worked with a variety of GLBT organizations there.

Related Articles

Love Punch

By Jennie Harper I was 39 when I learned how to make a proper fist. “I know,” I protested as my date adjusted my hand. “The thumb goes on the outside.” But my father only passed down part of the protection. The thumb must also wrap around the middle bar of knuckles,...

read more

Imbalances

By Sara Collie I am 10 or 11, navigating some pre-teen cusp of selfhood when the question rises up, engulfs me, troubling that long sunstroked lunch outside the Cornish pub under the looming cliffs where I watch the waitress tuck her hair neatly behind her ears,...

read more