I chewed, swallowed, and slurped

.

My mother used the same knife for over twenty-five years. That’s roughly as old as I am. Through the slicing, chopping, and mincing, the knife grew paper-thin. As I chewed, swallowed, and slurped, my intestines and my liver, heart, and kidneys grew. Along with the food my mother made for me, I swallowed the knife marks that were left on the ingredients. Countless knife marks are engraved in the dark insides of my body. They travel along my veins and play on my nerves. That’s why a mother is a painful thing to me. It’s something the organs all know. I understand the word heartache physically.

– an excerpt from “Knife Marks“, Kim Ae-ran

“everything else” – Nayana Nair

“warm”
this word has become cold
sitting at the base of my throat
my throat burns
and my everything else?
my everything else
-my pretty flesh and my ugly insides-
who want me to be there
and at the same want me gone.
i guess they want me to change.
this is my new low
where my organs are my imaginary friends
the only ones I can talk to,
the only ones who need me,
the only ones I can disappoint,
my new friends who are learning
the weariness of living for me.
I ask around for a lover who has a love for knives
and tolerance for madness of all kinds.
I hear a hundred thousand sighs in me
when the new replacement of romance appears,
asks me my name and digs his sharp canine teeth
on the last bits of my happiness as a hello.
The hundred folded cranes look more like ravens
and the one who promises me an end is now my only hope.
Now things are easy
now that I can’t hear myself breaking
now that I have this strange loud laugh to hide behind,
this person stranger than me,
taking up the blame of everything I have done,
helping me hide from everything that I have killed in my life.