KINA VIOLA
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SAD BOYS / CONVERSATIONS ON A.I.M |
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1.
All the boys who are now men I met in high school were sad in high school. Were sad on the internet their fingers falling off to tell me how sad they really were: teardrop-shaped sad, little-boy- blue sad, not their mother’s sad, something like electricity. 2. Something like a spark plug needs to be filled. Sad boys demand attention and a hole to fill and a charge. There’s a reason lightning strikes like a broken phallus there’s a reason it strikes down things that grow web-like that mimic light that look bright like god. What looks like god could kill us, lick us right down the middle. 3. What looks like god could lick us right down the middle. We’re in a house made of glass watching videos on a screen and he keeps kissing my neck. I say stop, he keeps going, it’s a dream. I am paralyzed. He keeps kissing my neck with disgusting sad lips and finally I yell MY BODY IS MY OWN and start running, my shoes are also glass, they are stilettos, climbing the glass staircase proves difficult, when the sad boy catches up with his arms all splayed WHAT DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND THIS IS ME THIS IS MY BODY, AUTONOMOUS THIS IS A WOMAN YOU DON’T TOUCH WITHOUT ASKING The doe-eyed look tells me no and I want to shoot the deer in the head. I wake up sweating. 4. What is a body but a web of parts, a webbing of the many parts with their separate uses. My neck is not the neck in the dream. My neck is not underneath a strange man’s kisses. What is a body but the aftermath What is a body but the aftermath What is a body but the aftermath of lightning. It leaves a scar a fractaling a feathering It leaves a plow mark in the fields like a tiller It pulls everything up It leaves a mark in the aftermath It leaves 5. Under the right light, my thighs are so hungry they could eat each other, each tiny pockmark a mouth and then in a different mirror they shrink back to who they were in the morning. Like magnets they hate each other. Beside the bed I put on some socks and get on with it. What is a body but the aftermath. 6. I want to shoot the deer in the head. The same deer made me a mother. |
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KINA VIOLA is an associate editor in book design at Big Lucks Books and a recent transplant from New York to Oxford, Mississippi. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Jellyfish, The Collagist, ENTROPY, Split Rock Review, and other journals.
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