By: Emily Jukich

Memorize

I want to run my fingers down your chest
like a reader following the lines on a page
Scanning over
the braille of your skin
I need to be able to see you in the dark
as one more way to hold you;
one more way to not lose you
Cradled in the pocket of your arm
All I want is to feel the calm
without the thirst
Even though I can’t ever shake that
half-empty stomach feeling,
the way eating sugar when you’re hungry
makes you feel more hollow.
This nauseous ache
that I might be betrayed
That my mind conjured
this work of fiction
And eventually I’m
going to read
the last
word

###

Old Souls

Awake
Untempered
Your breath more intimate
than your touch
A silver strand fell from
your hair
which you hate
as you are too young to be grey
I laugh——genuinely
Pluck it from your cheek
A thread of moonlight
between my fingers
It is a poem and your
hair is flecked with them

###

Incase no one ever told you

I am so tired of hearing
how much I have to love
myself before
anyone will love me.
Parents have told me
Friends have told me
Poets have told me

Imagine being as unworthy as you feel.

Imagine every poisonous part of you
suddenly justified
every single time an Instagram philosopher
tells you how unlovable you are
because you don’t love yourself

Imagine being so undeserving of a basic human need

There will never be a taller mountain
nor a darker hole to unroot yourself
than on the journey to self-acceptance
and I know because I’m walking this road
with you

You are worthy of what you have not found yet

LUSH bath bombs and charcoal face masks
aren’t going to pull out the venom
living in your skin
A few kind words are stones breaking glass
since you won’t believe them
because loving yourself?
That shit is hard
when no-one can understand
why you don’t believe you should exist
but

you are worth the journey

For there will be moments
Brief
Unexpected, like a sun shower
where your light will spill
out like a slice of amber
and you will glow
and you will breathe

and you will realize,

That’s what they meant,
That’s what they saw before I did.

###

A kind of fresh start

I need to make amends to my Rag-doll body
for not becoming the warrior’s hilt I said we’d be

I was supposed to find our battle cry
instead I coughed up spools of thread

and watched them unravel,
the way smoke curls away from the source

The way a train snakes around a mountain

and I watched this journey
go on without me

as the last of my seams split open;
my insides scattered to the air like ragweed

Dancing naked cotton

Perhaps all of me will collect itself one day
Arrive back on my doorstep in a tight, neat

arrangement and I will invite it in for coffee
and we will start to learn each other again

Like new lovers, or a girl who feels herself for
the first time, not just over her underwear

Like old friends, broken and soft and healing