I leave before sunlight
could wash me out of bed,
because a photographic headache
is all I have of last night’s weakness,
and the way you look right through me
tells me all I need to know;
your heart has no twitch
and my body has no sway.

© Nancy Botta, 2019

I used to like roses,
and a stiff drink-
maybe?
I can’t recall now,
it makes the scar itch.

They said I argued too much,
“quarrelsome and prone to hysterics”-
footnotes to an epithet (or is it epitaph?)

Sometimes my skull aches,
and sometimes I forgetthereisaspacebetween
my
self,
like a pocket of air
beneath the skin.

(helpless blood pooling
into a nice white space)

I don’t know why
I’d bang and scream,
why I’d claw at my arms
and let things vex me so much,
claw at their eyes
and let them vex me so much.

Troublesome;
but they had a cure,
a treatment for tempests
drinking from tea cups-

I told them
I told them
I don’t like the blankness
filling up my mind—

did you know
I used to like roses
and a stiff drink?

© Nancy Botta, 2019

How can we possibly
sew our lives together
when the hurt we’ve woven
unspools from our mouths,
when all our severed threads
leave us knotted up yet unraveled?

© Nancy Botta, 2019