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KINA VIOLA

Picture


SAD BOYS / CONVERSATIONS ON A.I.M
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.

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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