I sit silently in a getaway car I cannot escape from, my knee bones melting together.
I witness his strong legs pushing down the gas until it’s floored.
He does not peek at my core dressed in leather,
instead his gaze is bewitched by the darkness behind the dashboard,
he drives into the aether.

-

My voice is stuck between my lips and my gut,
the seatbelt holds me like the most terrorizing lover,
the strength of a python crushing my lungs,
pushing out the air I wish I could use to cry out.

-

This lonely road is the only altar he’s ever prayed to.
Dark glass, his reflection ghosting faint over the road,
but mine is nowhere to be found.
I open my window, wind penetrating my crushed lungs by force.
Headlights of oncoming cars lit like votive candles,
each one a reminder of a crime I have committed,
one by one, passing judgment and forgiven.

-

The rosary tied across my ankle threatens to slip at every harsh turn.
I don’t reach for it.
I never do.
its existence just proof that I somehow still believed someone was watching over me.

-

I have found myself in his passenger seat many times over.
Been in this purgatory, in his care,
seen this exact scene over and over in other bodies,
from different pairs of eyes,
blue and brown, blind and crystal clear.
I never remember why it happens, only that when it does, my own face fades into all my previous masks.
For the length of this drive, I know everything, already forgetting before I’ve arrived.

-

I know he is not ignoring me.
I am the one who cannot resist,
even here, even now, some old reflex to be seen.
He’s just answering to something else,
something more compelling than my humanly flesh,
or what exists in between me and mortality.

-

I push my hair out of my face, revealing the lone tear on my cheekbone.
My head hits the leather lightly, dark mascara slightly smudged under my big eyes.
I pout,
let the corner of my mouth curl the way it always did,
like a bad habit I cannot unlearn.
“I want you,” I say.
My last trick, offered like a key to a door I’m not sure exists anymore.

-

The needle climbs past what the road allows.
Like he’s trying to get somewhere before he changes his mind about me.
The engine screams the way I wish I could.
He speeds like there’s a version of tonight where he doesn’t touch me,
and he’s trying to outrun it, tires burning rubber into the dark like an offering,
smoke thick in my throat through the window I cracked.

-

He loses.

-

His hand leaves the wheel.
Finds my knee, and drags slow, like he’s memorizing the shape of a sin he’ll have to answer for.
He doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t have to.
I am shaking under his touch.
My body doesn’t know the difference between wanting and dying,
not with him,
and definitely not tonight.

-
I was curious if something like him could want.
His fingers press into me like he’s checking if I’m real, or whether he is.
Something old and starving wakes up in my chest, ugly and grateful at once.

-

I don’t want this to be the last road.
I would beg if I still remembered how,
to stay exactly here, in the small violence of his hand,
forever almost-arriving and never arriving at all.

-

He looks at me this time around with tortured eyes.
I know he won’t listen to the sounds that slip out of my mouth.
I know he knows I like the ride, the thrill of what’s next,
the drive is the only moment of limbo I know,
the only place I’ve ever been unseen and still, somehow, known.
He never stops.

I light three more before I start. The candlestick is an altar built for a god who never speaks, for a presence I won’t acknowledge.

I dance alone in my room, and my head knocks the wall, the mouldings bite my scalp, teeth in old wood, marking me the way a hand would. Every bruise I don’t feel yet is a word in a language only you will read tomorrow.

I bend my spine like a contortionist. It’s bones now as soft as an orchid stem. My head dives backwards, my back like a drawn bow ready to shoot an arrow straight through your heart. tension holds in the curve, threatening your chest that I cannot see. I hear my back crack like a branch as I slowly move myself down. My vision now closer to what reality might be.

I look outside. The night is a mouth, windy and wide, and it swallows me whole. My eyes never truly find yours through the glass. But I know you are there. I can hear your halted breath, waiting for my next move.

My crushed lungs produces a sound that escapes my parted mouth against my will. The softest song I have sang in pain.

I have never seen my own face lit like this, except in the version of me that lives behind your eyes. You are the mirror I dance for and never look into. For my own sake I try to ignore you, but I cannot run from the goosebumps that make a home on my skin whenever I feel you watching me. Your gaze exalts my heart more than your soul ever has.

Some nights I wonder if you exist at all, or if I invented you the way sailors invent land when they’ve been at sea too long. I wonder if I sing too loud, if my voice lured you to my window in the first place. My body a shape to want, a shape to blame for wanting. I know I am hard to ignore.

My head hits something soft as I hear you breathe out for the first time in a while. The shock of it snaps me back into my own body.

Candlelight pools on the oil of my skin like something has finally found me in the dark.

Femme Fatale Placements

• As a self-proclaimed femme fatale, I’ve noticed that the classic femme fatale signature often emerges from contradiction rather than harmony.

• Capricorn, Aquarius, Cancer and Pisces Venus placements are key to this formula.

  • Capricorn Venus feels selective and unattainable because of its emotional restraint.

  • Aquarius Venus creates unpredictability and detachment.

  • Pisces Venus invites projection, letting others fill in the blanks themselves. And

  • Cancer Venus, while nurturing, places a lot of emphasis on self-preservation and turning intuition into action, even if doing so destroys a relationship.

• The second part of the formula is a native Mars placement, such as Aries and Scorpio Mars.

  • Aries mars is fiery, passionate and has a vitality that is notable.

  • Scorpio Mars is provocative, inherently sexy and is passionate.

• The signature becomes especially magnetic when Venus/Mars occupies the 1st, 5th, 8th, or 12th houses.

  • I want to single out the 12th here, because it’s the house of the hidden, the unknown, the things that operate below the surface. A Sun, Venus, or Mars in the 12th adds a layer of mystery that can amplify the femme fatale quality a.k.a the sense of someone whose real depths you never quite reach.

• The combination of these specific Venus and Mars signs create someone that is both dark and beautiful. both secretly nurturing, yet selective. Hot and passionate, yet mysterious and never quite attainable.

• A good example of this formula is Angelina Jolie who has a Cancer Venus in the 12th house and an Aries Mars in the 8th house.

• To me these combinations are the perfect blend of mysterious and dangerous, reminiscent of the Empress in tarot.

SATURNIAN KARMA

• Staying with the theme of Capricorn and Aquarius, I’ve noticed that charts with heavy Capricorn and Aquarius placements carry what I refer to as Saturnian karma.

• Saturn is the traditional ruling planet of Capricorn, and it ruled Aquarius too before that sign became associated with Uranus. In myth, Saturn (the Greek Cronus) is the elder ruler, the boundary maker, the teacher. Saturn is everything Jupiter is not: where Jupiter expands, Saturn constricts. It creates rules, lessons, limits, and hard work. Having a Saturnian chart can feel overwhelming, and in astrology it’s often read as a burden, but I want to propose another perspective.

• Without ever needing to seek revenge, people with Capricorn and Aquarius heavy charts often find that those who try to betray, hurt, or humiliate them are soon met with devastating consequences in their own lives. The Saturnian karma acts as a kind of divine protection and Saturn is not a patient actor.

• The person who wronged the Saturn native frequently finds themselves swept up in sudden upheavals to the very structure of their life: a derailed career, a fractured family, a collapsed social circle.

• Saturn, after all, doesn’t punish, It corrects.

let me know what you noticed this month.

let the my soul spill out like psalms.

A hymn of everything I wish I wasn’t.

A gospel of everything I can’t take back.

I carve the prayers from my skin,

peel them off in ribbons,

watch them curl like serpent tongues.

-

Still, He does not listen.

He does not see me.

-

I tear at my throat,

claw at my bones,

try to make a new shape of myself.

Something worthy,

Something holy.

-

But I have built this church with broken hands,

with fingers bitten raw,

with a choir of voices that never belonged to my body.

-

And now the altar is bleeding

And now the walls are screaming.

-

Still locked inside this body,

this ribcage cathedral,

A wretched thing that was never enough.

-

I bite down on the regret,

let it fester,

let it hum,

let it crawl into my mouth.

-

I am my own disciple

My own executioner

My own god,

and my own hell.

And I will never be free

James doesn’t sit when he talks to his therapist. He never does. He stands tall and avoids adding any more creases to his Armani suit. He walks back and forth in front of the seated therapist, who carefully follows the movement of his legs. Every step makes a bizarre sound, leather slapping across concrete.

“Long day?” James asks the therapist. He laughs when the therapist doesn’t answer. “Well, I had a long fucking day,” he adds.

He had thought of reaching out to the best therapists in the city... or at least he had contemplated finding the best one outside his usual entourage, in hopes of avoiding a stain on his meticulously crafted reputation. After months of avoiding it, on an eerily quiet June night, he finally found one in the place he feels most invisible: Wall Street. Ironically, right across the street from his office. This is his first visit, and unprompted too. James doesn’t wonder if the therapist had another appointment.

“You know,” James starts, holding his breath for a second, “my office faces directly into this other guy’s office in the building next door. He never looks at me, but I look at him all the time. I always wonder what he did to get that particular office, what he did to deserve it. What life path, parallel to mine, led him to that window.” He sighs. “I wonder if he’s a loser who got the bad side of the building, the one that doesn’t face the Hudson, because he’s a back-office creep.” He contemplates this and looks around.

“Or maybe he worked his way up. Maybe he climbed the corporate ladder after fighting his way into Columbia or Princeton, and with all the blood, sweat, and tears, he somehow ended up on the same floor, with the same shitty view, in the same office that I was given… given by my father.”

The therapist stares again, lighting a cigarette, perhaps enticing James to continue.

“You know who my father is, right?” James asks.

The therapist points upward. James doesn’t turn to look, but assumes they both know his last name is illuminated on the building behind them.

“Yeah,” he adds, uncertain whether that tone is full of pride or something shameful.

The therapist doesn’t ask many questions. He knows men like James Marks. Arrogant and hard to control. He sees them walk by all day, the sound of their leather shoes resonating upward like applause.

“My father had another son fifteen years ago, with his new wife,” James adds. No answer. “I’ll always remember when he was born. May 23rd, 1972. I swear that’s the day I died. At least in his eyes.”

The therapist opens his mouth, but James turns again. “My father has never once been on his knees, not physically or metaphorically. I mean, no man on his knees builds an empire like he did. Yet a couple of years back, on that brat’s seventh or eighth birthday, I walked into my father’s home and saw him on his knees, playing with the kid.” James laughs. “I dropped the gift off and left. I was so angry I couldn’t contain myself. I don’t know why it got to me, but I couldn’t get the image out of my head. It was against every single thing I thought about my father.”

“What was the gift?” the therapist asks.

“A hundred bucks in an envelope.”

“What would a seven-year-old do with a hundred dollars?”

“Buy a G.I. Joe, I don’t know. What’s the difference? He’s a kid, we all spend money on toys. I could give you a hundred dollars, and you, an adult who should know better, would spend it on alcohol, or drugs, or women, or whatever it is you do. It’s more noble to give it to someone who doesn’t know what to do with it. No harm done.” James snaps.

The therapist looks down for a moment, but James doesn’t seem to notice. In fact, James appears to be cleaning his Rolex.

“Are you a Christian?” James asks, still wiping the dial.

The therapist looks up quickly, almost stunned. “Yes.”

“You think you remain a Christian if you do something you know is evil?”

“Would you feel bad doing it?” the therapist asks, but James doesn’t answer.

The therapist thinks. “I think God loves all his children, if they’re able to repent.”

“Do you really believe that?” James asks, mocking.

“Yes.”

“You think God loves us all equally?”

“I think he does,” the therapist says with confidence.

“My father doesn’t love us equally, and he only has two sons.”

“Your father isn’t God.”

“Sure.” James says it with a newfound seriousness. A cold wind hits him in the back. In this simple moment of calm, the therapist starts to see a storm brewing behind his blue eyes.

“If God loved us all equally… if that were true, there would be no man in the window across from my office,” James starts, agitated again. “He wouldn’t have the same office as me, a man who’s never worked for it the way I have. There would be some karmic retribution for all his hard work. He’d be happy somewhere else, where his contribution would mean something, not on Wall Street, wearing a cheap imitation of my designer suits.”

James paces, fishing a piece of gum out of his pocket. The therapist watches him do it. “I stopped smoking… well, I’m trying,” James adds, before cutting back to his previous intensity.

“See, I mean something. At least I do in that building. My father is going to give me his company, and I will matter. But him? He’s going to spend fifty hours a week in a shitty office facing the wrong side of the building for a sub-par salary. I belong there, water view or not. It’s my destiny, my legacy. But he’s just a single piece of a conglomerate that won’t remember him when the millennium ends... or when things go bad and he’s fired. It’s unfair, and yet God placed him there. And for what? What good is God’s love if that’s what it gives you?”

“He may-” the therapist tries to interfere, but James continues.

“Wouldn’t God, who made me exactly how I am, love me more by the simple truth that he chose for me to be born into a powerful family in New York and not in Iraq? What separates me from the kids who die in battle at nineteen? Does he love me more for making me six foot four, athletic, a chick magnet? Does he love me more for making me smart? For spawning me as my father’s son? Although, maybe for that, he loves me less.” He says it loudly.

His blue eyes land on the therapist like prey. “Would you be doing this? Would you be living this exact existence, if God had loved you more?”

There’s a loud silence, interrupted by police sirens that sound too close for comfort against the tension.

“If God loved us all equally, the world would be full of men like me. We’d be in heaven,” James says.

The therapist doesn’t seem to agree.

“You don’t have to look at me like that,” James says.

The therapist hadn’t said anything. He pulls his coat tighter, the fabric stiff, and the movement makes James glance at him for half a second before deciding not to.

“Like you feel sorry for me.” James almost laughs. “Don’t. People who feel sorry for me are usually about to find out they had it backwards.” The heat has gone out of his voice.

There’s another silence, but this one feels more charged, as if the moment had been suspended in time for a moment. James has nowhere left to take the argument. He’s argued God down to the pavement and there’s no one applauding, no boardroom, no father at the head of the table.

“My father gave the brat his watch on his birthday. I wasn’t there to see it, but my cousin Jude had the pleasure of telling me about it,” James finally says. “That watch was supposed to be mine. He promised it to me when I got accepted to Yale.”

James looks down, his eyes heavier, his skin, once soft and tight, now dragged down by something the therapist can only recognize as pain.

“My father thinks the brat is better than me. Smarter. More like him. I don’t know what a fifteen-year-old can even do to make him think that, but he does.”

The therapist stays silent, which only goads James into talking more. He knows the technique, and still he can’t fight the instinct to fill the awkwardness.

The therapist taps ash onto the pavement. James watches it fall.

“You want to know the part that keeps me up? It’s not that he’s loved. It’s that he’s loved for nothing. I earned every inch. I got into Yale, I became president of my father’s fraternity, I graduated with honors...I bled for the right to stand in my father’s shadow, and he barely turned his head. But the brat?” James laughs, short and dry. “The brat gets a parade for staying in the same grade as the other children. Do you understand that? My whole life is a receipt, every achievement itemized and paid for in full, and he gets the inheritance for showing up.”

He stops pacing. The stillness is worse than the movement.

“I used to think that if I just did enough, he’d see it. One more degree, one more deal, one more year of being exactly what he expected me to be. But you can’t earn your way out of the wrong face. The kid didn’t win anything. He was cast by that narcissist. My father can’t help but see it...the right hair, the right jaw, the right reflection in the mirror when he shaves. I auditioned for thirty years for a part that was assigned at birth.”

The therapist shifts. James doesn’t look at him.

“My father built everything he has by knowing what to cut around him. Bad divisions, bad partners, bad blood and he never flinched, not even once. That’s the genius of him. He understood that an empire isn’t what you keep, it’s what you’re willing to remove and carve from the body.” James’s voice drops, almost gentle now. “And then he got old and soft.”

A long pause. When he speaks again, the heat is gone entirely. He sounds reasonable. That’s the terrifying part. “Someone has to have the stomach he lost. That’s what an heir is. Not the one who looks like him, the one who thinks like he used to. His favoritism was never about merit, so it can’t be won. You can’t out-earn a thing that was never earned in the first place.” He turns his Rolex over in his hand, the one that should have been a different watch. “It can only be corrected.”

Silence.

“You think Cain forgave Abel?” James asks.

The therapist’s eyes shoot up, directly into James’s. “Don’t you mean, did Abel forgive Cain?”

“No. I meant what I said.”

“I don’t under—”

“Abel was favored. God himself made it so brothers compete for his love instead of being treated equally. So does Abel forgive his brother?”

“But Abel was pure.”

“What about Cain? What about him? What makes him impure? Following the instinct installed by his own God? Reacting to his condition?”

“But he killed his own brother,” the therapist finally says.

“He killed his own brother,” James repeats, slow, like he’s tasting it. “You say that like it’s the end of the story. Like God didn’t see it coming.”

“Think it through, you build two sons, you give one of them everything and the other one you give nothing but the hunger to be looked at the same way. Same hunger, put into both of them, identical. Then you set them next to each other and you watch.” His voice is very even. “You already know how it ends. He designed how it ends.”

The therapist says nothing. The cigarette has burned down to his fingers.

“So don’t tell me Cain is the murderer when Cain is the instrument. God killed Abel the moment he decided to love him more, but he just used the brother to do it... because that’s tidier than doing it himself.” James’s eyes are somewhere past the therapist now. “Every father who picks a favourite knows this. He just doesn’t say it out loud.”

A long beat. When he speaks again, something underneath has shifted, quieter, almost wondering.

“And here’s the thing nobody wants to sit with... After... After Cain does it, God doesn’t strike him down. God decides and he doesn’t erase him. He marks him instead. Puts a sign on him so the whole world knows he belongs to God, untouchable, and then lets him go off and build a city and a name and a line that outlasts everybody.” James turns the watch over in his palm again. “Abel got loved and got buried. Cain got cursed and got kept.”

He’s not quite looking at anything.

“You spend your whole life trying to be good enough to be seen. And the one who finally gets seen, really seen, marked by the eyes on their face, the one who impossible to ignore, is the one who did the thing nobody could look away from.” His thumb stops on the watch face. “Maybe that’s the only prayer a man like that has left. Just that you won’t be able to forget me.”

Silence.

For the first time, James is completely still. Almost frozen in time.

“What would you do for a hot meal? For a roof. For the thing you’ve decided you deserve.”

The therapist doesn’t answer.

“What would you do?” James asks again, softer.

“What would you?” the man says.

“I’d kill.” James says it the way other men say their own name. “I’m going to kill him. Not today, not this week. But I’m going to walk that kid to a window one afternoon, and I’m going to watch my father bury the son he actually wanted.”

James walks towards the man and crouches, the first time all night he’s come down to the man’s level.

“You’re the only person I’ve ever said that to. And you know what the beautiful part is? You’re the only person I ever could.” James smiles, almost grateful. “I needed to hear myself say it out loud. To someone who counts. You count. You’re a child of God, right? You said so yourself. So now God’s heard it too, through you. Now it’s confessed.”

The therapist’s face changes. Whatever he thought this was, it isn’t that.

“What kind of monster-” The man scrambles up, his ripped clothes dragging through the grime of the curb, the stink of him rising into the cold. He grabs James by the lapel. “I’ll tell someone. I’ll tell the police, you sick-”

James doesn’t pull away. He looks almost pleased. Then he takes the man by the collar and drives him back down onto the concrete, easy, like setting down a bag. He’s never done anything like it before. He waits to feel something like revulsion, hesitation or the feeling that made his father go soft.

Nothing comes.

“Who would ever believe you?” James says. Not cruel, Curious. Almost kind.

The man yells, more shock than pain. Across the street a couple glances over and keeps walking. Homeless men always get loud after nine.

James takes a hundred-dollar bill from his pocket and crouches again. He doesn’t throw it. He folds it once and tucks it carefully into the man’s coat pocket, the way you’d slip a bill into a kid’s birthday card.

“Go buy your fix,” he says gently. “And don’t forget me.”

He straightens his jacket. Checks the watch that should have been a different watch. And he walks away whistling, lighter than he’s been in years.

I hear my stomach growl at me, wanting a lick of something that will melt quickly. Demanding more than the salt of my tears that find their ways onto my lips. My hands tremble in anticipation, my hair stands on its own. Hunger a placeholder for what I cannot fill inside me. I start to feel my ribs caving in, each exhale tightening my core in a satisfying pain.

I have consecrated my own starvation. Created something holy out of the not-having. Swallowed the doctrine whole until it became the only hunger I allowed myself. I am the one who set the table and did not sit down.

There is a wanting that lives in my sternum and does not leave when I ask it to. A heat that all my careful thinking cannot cool. That my own ideology cannot starve out of me, no matter how righteously I try.

I have made a religion of my restraint. Kneeling at the altar of my own withholding. Convinced that a woman starving on her own terms is still a woman in control. That my ribs caving in is architecture and not collapse.

There are nights when the theory goes quiet and the wanting gets loud. When I press my tongue to the roof of my mouth and it is not enough. When the hollow in me stops being a principle and becomes just a hollow.

I built these walls with my own hands. I know where every brick came from. And I stand inside them, mouth dry, furious at how right I was.

Hungry for something I cannot have.

Hungry for a body I cannot seem to carve.

Hungry.

His blood threatens to spill from the shallow cut, red filling the wound, yet it never seems to escape its depth. Even gravity is unable to rule over the indolent.

Oblomov does not wake.

Morning light harasses his peaceful sleep, and so he grabs another pillow, throwing it over his head like a handmade iron maiden, in hopes of isolating himself from any sensation, from the simple urge to open his eyes.

The iron maiden fails him, as all things do. He throws his arm away from the safety of his bed like a child tossing a ball. In its line of fire, he reaches without looking, without needing to look, and brings the cigarette to his lips. Inevitably. He exhales before he is quite awake. Smoke pools under the heavy covers of his king-sized bed, a warm fog of his own making. Suffocation in half-sleep, and still he does not mind.

When his eyes finally crack open, the distance between his mattress and the floor has grown overnight.

Rolling onto his back, he cannot grasp anything but his pen, with no words to lay down.

He is bored of the repeated sounds, hand on wood resonating around his lifeless room. The scheduled knocks of his butler create a disturbing melody he cannot stand to listen to, and so he sings to it, deafened to the mundanity of being awake.

The butler opens the heavy door that separates Oblomov from the rest of the house, placing a silver tray of food next to the bed. His once-toned stomach protrudes too far now.

He dreams of the dates he once went on; he rereads the same love letters from the women he has grown bored of, the fading ink leaving them faceless, suspended in time. An agglomeration of all the traits his mother preached his wife should have.

And yet, news of weddings he won’t attend keeps climbing the heights of his bed. Love is but a flower in the September grass, fall looming, poisoning it from the roots. No woman, no matter how beautiful, is worth withstanding the boredom of routine; no woman has proven worth that boredom. The wedding invitations pile beside him, unanswered, growing like a second life he refuses to live.

His parents’ legacy, their aristocracy, means nothing. Their house is but a coffin for the lethargic body of a slothful man. The house does not mourn for him; it waits, like the rest of the staff. It waits around the body of a man for whom the distance between his mattress and the door cannot seem to stop growing.

They grasp at any divine confirmation that the doom they feel, the blood-freezing melancholia I feel, has some fated higher purpose. That it has a valid reason to exist. A necessary evil to neutralize my bewitched soul.

I claw at any evidence that the God you pray to had a reason to make my mind a cursed affliction. I claw and I claw in hopes of making myself believe that the destruction I inflict on those who had the misfortune of crossing my path, has a worthy consequence. A means to an end. The blood stains the knife, but the wound heals. My art born from the pain, survives longer than the hurt.

I destroy everything I touch. I scream words I do not mean to faces I cannot bear to see frown. My heart racing at the adrenaline, the excitation of conflict. A high no drug, snorted or smoked, can compare to. Oh and I make it ache, and I make it hurt.

I continue finding poetry in the pain I’ve caused. Spitting out proses of my wretched making. I scream hard enough in hopes of hearing myself feel, to be a witness of my creation in real time. To be able to feel the raw emotions of a moment that I am but a character-in and not an active participant. The screeching of my once delicate voice, calls me back to the chair of my desk, the cold of its wood already in my palms. Warm cheeks and a cold sweat, running down my spine. A smile threatens to defile my act, I cannot rejoice now. Not yet. Dissociating myself and the poetry that is bleeding out of me. Fountain of screams between you and me, inspiring me to scream more beautiful words at you.

My back slams into a wall, skin pinching, I breathe too hard. My vision almost blurry, dilated irises like I am in the deepest of love. Struck by the beauty of destroying what I love.

Exalted. thinking of what I’ll run to write down the second my tears finally dry up. Destroying to create in the darkest corner of my room. The ink runs dry without the heat of chaos. Knowing this is more than a duty, but my mortal flaw. If I don’t write it down, I’ll puke it out anyway. Heaving it all up, ribs aching, shoulders dropping. I write until it bleeds out of me, until the wound is clean. I write until the page takes what I cannot carry anymore.

Exorcism of all that is wrong with me.

Somewhere in these pages are the people I loved and could not stop destroying. I have made them beautiful and I have made them permanent and I do not know if that is cruel or the closest thing to love I am capable of.

And when I finally let out the demons that my soul keeps as company, and my tired arm writes down the last of my prophecies, I’ll die, my once so gentle heart, failing me. Bursting in thousands of pieces.

I’ll fall down to the floor, head first while the ink is still warm, knowing my purpose is done. That all the wrong and rights I’ve done have all led me to the last line.

And for a brief moment, when I’m dying,

I’ll be free.

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I- The Saint

Jeanne d’Arc died burnt at the stake at nineteen years old.

It might be considered hubris to compare yourself to a Saint, but I was never a by-the-book Catholic. See, me and her have a lot in common, hence the comparison. I am also French, I once had a bob, and I have, for as long as I can remember, hosted a chorus of voices in my head that whisper strange little prophecies to me. The only difference between my voices and hers is that I never thought to attribute them to God, which in retrospect, was a catastrophic business decision. I could have had a mega church in a Southern American state, a merch line and a book deal. Instead, I did what any self-respecting literary girl does, and attributed it to my genius.

I’m kidding. Mostly.

But isn’t it something? That a woman so smart, so visionary, so militarily precise, was burned for it? That the same qualities that made her a saint made her a target? I think about this every January.

I turned nineteen in January 2020, at my parents’ penthouse, surrounded by people I was already beginning to outgrow. The thing about being nineteen is that you are at a time in your life when you still invite your lame high school friends from out of town, and you have to witness the car crash that is their interaction with your new cool, city university friends. I sat at the head of the dining room table and watched them fail to merge. Like two tectonic plates that would never, no matter how much wine you poured between them, fuse. It was the Last Supper in its most distorted form. My judas being the simple belief that my teenage past and my young adult self could co-exist, breathe the same air, and blow on the same candles. They could not.

That birthday was the first night I understood that time had started moving and it was not some abstract concept that would never come to affect me. A bit like smoking a cigarette after your frontal lobe has formed, when, for the first time, as you exhale smoke out of your nose, you wonder if all that drunk smoking would catch up to you one day.

Most importantly, the night of my 19th birthday, I thought about how Jeanne d’Arc had lived, conquered and left a mark on the world, all before she was my age. And I sat at my dining room table, candles burning, friends singing something off-key, completely terrified. Not of failing, but of the fire. Of being the kind of woman who burns, but is forgotten.

Novels promote the concept of the passionate burning woman, but what luck is it to be reduced to the ashes of a supposed prime. your existence compacted to a singular moment of rage or passion, when the beauty of burning is not to be a birthday candle, but a fireplace. No matter how tall, how strong and how loud you may scream your prayers, your ashes stick to the ground.

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II- The Lineage

The thing about being nineteen is that you spend most of it auditioning. For what exactly, you can't say for sure. Maybe it’s for what you think being a young woman should be, or what you know yourself to be. All I knew is that I had opinions, a mauve lip, leather corsets and nowhere near enough story to back any of these things up.

In my case, I needed a lineage. I needed to know that the thing in me that was difficult, hungry and not quite containable had to stem from somewhere. I found it in three places: in Jeanne, the Saint; in Angelina Jolie the essence; and in my mother, the blueprint. A holy trinity. My own, untraditional trinity.

Nothing will bond two women faster than having once both been nineteen, no matter how many years sit between them. My mother knows and so does yours. She doesn’t have to say it.

My mother and I always talk about our going out stories together. Secretive as she is, she’ll often surprise me by dropping some precise and niche fragment of who she once was. Whether those stories took place in the coolest boîte of Cannes or a niche underground club in Paris, I always picture her the same way: French accent, bold red lip, and completely unreachable. Like mother like daughter! My own stories resemble hers, except my French accent, which I called my “international accent,” was worn with a deep Tumblr-girl mauve instead of red. Same armour but a different shade.

III- Transformation

Being nineteen sucks because you can’t stop giggling. Everyone around you knows how old you are because you look it and you move like it. But there’s something more specific than that: people will speak at you and not to you. And even if you are the smartest person in the room, you can’t seem to just… respond. You giggle at everything. Your brain runs in circles: I look so stupid laughing like this. And they probably do think so. That’s almost the point. You’re nineteen, which means you exist to be impressed, to receive the lukewarm observations some 27-year-old man managed to produce now that his frontal lobe has finally, mercifully, finished forming.

You start to wonder: don’t I have anything to say? And the fear underneath that question isn’t really about the man, or the giggling, or the particular night. It’s the fear that who you believe yourself to be: sharp, singular, someone with an inner life worth excavating, is an illusion. That she only exists in your bedroom, in your head or in your journal. Valid thought as you have witnessed yourself in real rooms with real people, and seen yourself completely dissolve. The thing no one tells you is that the giggling isn’t who you are. It’s the gap between who you are and what you’ve lived through so far. The sound that rests between what you thought and what you meant.

I mean, who would expect any 19 year old to have the life story of Elizabeth Taylor, and in that, is the curse of being 19. And so you giggle at things that are meant to be answered and you wonder if he too thinks you are dense. Maybe that's the whole point of the obsession with younger women. Not the youth exactly, but the giggle. The imminent laugh and the way a conversation can be steered so easily when the other person is still figuring out whether she's allowed to disagree. You can slip a drink into her hand and say something no person who has graduated university would tolerate, and she will smile, because she is nineteen, and she is still auditioning, and she does not yet know that you cannot be stupid to a man who cannot even see you.

But then, something happens, and the giggles stop.

IV. The Essence

Before nineteen, life is supervised whether you know it or not, no matter how overt. There is always a net beneath you that would catch you before anything real can happen. In fact, We all know the girl who claims to be tame by twenty because she did everything at fifteen; snuck out, got drunk, kissed the wrong boy after school. She speaks about it like a veteran who caught the last chopper out of ‘Nam. But, even if she doesn’t realize it, she was never in any real danger, no real path to truly figuring out who she is, which means she was never really anywhere at all. Walking along a fenced up cliff, obstructs the sublime of the view. By living early you do not end up living more, you mistake the fence for the horizon.

Nineteen is when stakes arrive.

The freedoms of young adulthood split the oldest friendships and the strongest bonds in the cruelest of ways. In this freedom lies the truth no schoolgirl wants to face: you are who you are afflicted to be. And some people just cant seem to cut their teenage umbilical cord.

I jumped head first into the specific darkness that nineteen offers girls like us, the girls who pray to my holy trinity. The places were not dangerous in the way mothers fear, but in the way that changes the shape of you permanently. With every outing, every encounter, every experience, your inner confidence grows. You learned your presence the way you learn a language: through immersion, through error, through the slow realization that the room responds to you differently than you expected. That when you stop giggling, and start being, you become without quite meaning to be, the kind of girl that gets looked at. Intoxicating and hollow in the same breath, the doors of fate start to open themselves to you. And through the many doors you choose to cross, you will meet a version of yourself that you will spend years either running from or learning to claim.

This is what nineteen actually gives you. Not freedom exactly, but something rawer than that. The first real evidence of who you are when there is no net, no curfew, no supervised version of yourself available to hide behind. The strange, private dignity of knowing what you always knew to be true about yourself, be born in real time. You cannot perform your way through a night that has real stakes. Eventually the room sees exactly what you are made of, and you do too, no matter how dim the lighting is. The performance ends when your experience shapes your presence. You cannot act to be like you, you just are. You learn the privacy of it. The specific scent of a night that you will not be able to explain to anyone who was not there, that you will spend years trying to write down.

And when I think of my fears on my 19th birthday, I can now see Jeanne in a different light. I was once concerned at my lack of meaning, but what would she have done for more time? Jeanne d’Arc burned at nineteen and I kept going. Past twenty, further, accumulating exactly what she never did; the sediment of who she was without the voices or the strategies. For that, I can truly see Jeanne in all her glory, and her tragedy.

And so when I blew my candles that January night, fearing the stake, I did not realize the same fire I would spend my nineteenth year fearing turned out to be mine. Not something coming for me, but was something already in me, already burning, the same fire that was in Jeanne, in Angelina, in my mother. I stopped being afraid of what I was and started being curious about how far it goes.

V. Maman

You spent years outrunning her, skipping the family dinner because something better was always happening somewhere else, annoyed at her worry because you had already decided, at fifteen, at sixteen, at seventeen, that you were someone who did not need to be worried about. You built your independence like a fortress, not knowing you were a toddler building a sandcastle.

The irony of being a teenager is that you spend most of it performing a freedom you do not yet have. The net is there whether you see it or not. Your mother is there whether you call or not. And you do not call. Of course you don’t. You are fifteen and the world is a stage and you are the main character and she is a supporting role you have temporarily written out of the script.

And then nineteen happens and the script runs out.

The teenager never calls her mother. Her life is consequence-free, nothing has settled heavy enough on her conscience to need to be spoken out loud, nothing has happened yet that requires the particular comfort of someone who knew you before you knew yourself. She is sneaking out and completely protected and she does not know it, and so she rolls her eyes and says she’ll be home by midnight and does not mean it. She does not call because she has nothing to say yet. Because nothing has happened to her yet.

Even if your nineteenth did not come with the glitz and glam that mine did, every nineteen year old has found herself somewhere she did not entirely plan to be in between moments of pure bliss of becoming who she was meant to be. Every nineteen year old has had a night that cost something, not in the dramatic way, not necessarily. The mascara running at 3am, tears over the grief of who you were ten minutes ago or the the shell shock of having grown so suddenly and so completely that you do not quite recognize the girl in the bathroom mirror, except that you do. Since she is more you than anything you have ever seen or been before. That is nineteen. That is the fine print of finally, actually, living.

And when it is over, when you are outside and the air is cold and the night is settling into something you will spend years trying to remember, the first thing you reach for is your phone. You, against all teenage instinct, are already reaching for the one person who does not need the context, who does not need the backstory, who has been waiting for this call since the first time you rolled your eyes at her across a dinner table and decided you were done needing her.

And you call her.

Because you have finally lived something worth telling. Because she is the only person who will hear the whole story and recognize in it something she always knew about you, something she could see from the time you wore pigtails and pink dresses. Because the armour you borrowed was hers first, worn before you were born, worn in cities that glittered, worn with a red lip and a French accent and stories she has still not fully told you, and may not ever. Because she was nineteen once too, which means she has stood exactly where you are standing, outside in the cold air, changed in ways she could not yet articulate, reaching for someone who would understand without explanation.

Because the fire in you came from somewhere. And now you know exactly where.

She always was the ending of this story, but you were just too young to realize it.

“Mommy, can you talk right now?”

the final offering of an abused pack

kept for a special occasion,

gives in its dying breath,

on a Wednesday.

the bud,

now tainted with poisonous red lipstick

decorates the sterile snow,

extinguished by frost.

-

summer is long gone,

and so are its European cigarettes.

-

I find solace in the pain of life,

stilettos that slip on ice,

I gush at the sublime,

of all that has withered,

the beauty of a dying winter.

-

my cheeks are as red as the roses,

dying in my room.

-

I wince at the hot-blooded nature,

of my being.

my limbs kept warm,

by my delicate

and disgustingly blue veins,

twisting themselves into labyrinths under my surface.

-

I hear my name,

trance-like state,

I breathe in,

one last time,

to feel my lungs crystallize,

pain at every breath.

-

the coldest of winds knows how to be gentle to me,

its delicate grasp hugging my frail winter body.

-

but it never lasts.

-

No tenderness exists for long,

for freezing girls like me.

cold and harsh,

gusts pushing my hair into my mouth,

catching itself in saliva and rouge.

-

and in this state,

I stand in my fur coat,

warm and tempted,

alive and slowly dying,

nature’s most beautiful feat,

more winter than woman.

born on a cold morning,

yearning to burn in the dead of night.

Like a pendulum,

Motion so slow and precise,

Wood creaking in a comforting sound.

I fear time and change

The clock threatening my creativity

will, one day, run out

And when that moment comes,

I imagine my mind will be bored at the thought of expression.

Or maybe it will be too tired of hearing itself

Running in circles.

Banishing these songs to my existential mind.

No more ink seeping through paper

Like sap from bark.

-

I criticize my poetry,

Believing my poems

Cannot convey the depth

Of my inner thoughts.

As if I did not know how to phrase them.

-

I fear that one day I'll realize

My lack of vulnerability

is a lack of talent.

-

That even with my intellect

Maybe I never planted my own fig tree.

Its roots never seeped into the soil Its branches full of potential

Have no fruit to offer me.

-

Figs waiting to be sweetened

But never seem to ripen

Because the tree

Never grew at all.

Frost poisoning its roots from birth.

My potential,

Lost in translation,

Never planted.

-

The trail I am on,

Being the only path offered to me.

The others but an illusion of choice.

I’ll be nothing but a failed farmer.

With no fig to pick from.

A failed poet, with no tree to hang from.

6’0 from the top of my Manolos.

Velvet cord

tying my hands behind my back.

Shibari martini on the menu.

My eyes go wild in their sockets,

looking for an explanation

as to why no one has yet grasped my wrist,

handpicked like a ripe apple,

and led me into the basement

to eat one too many pomegranate seeds.

But God knows

there are no crosses on the door

to keep me out.

I look and look,

Trying to find him.

finally,

I lock eyes with a fox

tall, strong,

towering over the line,

his black shirt

tight against his arms.

His mouth opens wide,

but no sound dares come out.

Hypnotized.

As if turned to stone.

As if my presence

had a consequence.

He must have looked

into my eyes too long.

I yearn for final judgment

like a good Catholic.

Holding his stare,

I wait for him to give me a sign,

a swift gesture

in the dark autumn night

to summon me,

a finger to crook,

the mercy of a nod.

But all I can feel

is a burning sensation

from the gaze of the girl

fused to his bony hip.

Then the door opens.

perfumed smoke

and choking party victims,

spill out

of the graffitied mouth.

Behind them,

the bouncer emerges.

And I understand my mistake.

Wrong man.

Wrong eyes

to bear witness

to my deranged ways.

The bouncer calls out to me,

grabs my wrist

like every Saturday,

and I walk past

the stone statue

and his angry girlfriend.

Imported Seven Stars,

rests between my ring finger

And the one finger that works too hard.

Tormented men move around me

Pushing each other out of the way,

Their shoulders colliding together,

Like hammer and nails.

-

Women wearing transparent fabrics

Leave the club

in a winter storm,

Kept warm by the snow.

-

The coat check girls move around,

Scattered and organized

Like a wave in a cold ocean

Spreading thin on a deserted beach.

-

I hold my blue ticket,

Waiting to get my expensive coat.

The Dom Pérignon in my blood

No longer shielding me from the wind.

The door reopening its mouth,

Every time the bouncer breathes.

-

“Wrong ticket” the girl tells me

-

I rip my head to face her,

Taking back the ticket she had given me

Mere hours ago.

It had lived in my Chanel bag

Tucked away and kept precious.

The ticket is me.

-

“Impossible” I reply.

Her faces corses, suspicious.

Suspects in an alleged heist

Of my own coat.

Wrong ticket, but not my mistake.

-

“Its alpaca wool” i tell the other girl.

She turns and shows me faux fur.

Acrylic or polyester.

Crude and lying Plastic fibres.

Insulted, I repeat slowly,

“Alpaca wool”

-

We continue this dance.

More faux fur proposed.

More exhausted words.

Until one girl refuses to keep looking,

As if disappearance

Was the easiest path out.

-

I raise the unlit cigarette,

the tip hovering near her nose.

“Thief,” I say, too loudly,

for a room that pretends not to hear.

-

The crowd hesitates.

Music stumbles.

My anger feels theatrical,

expensive and stupid.

But I know the ticket is mine

Its ink stained my fingertips

I can feel it seep into my bloodstream

We are now one.

And my coat is not leaving without me in it.

-

“Don’t call me babe” I bark to the girl,

Who now has a tear running down her pale cheek.

-

Then the bouncer steps in

a wall in a black jacket,

He recognizes me from the table.

Looks at the coat check girls,

Who were ready to burn me at the stake.

-

He takes the ticket.

He does not argue.

He looks.

From behind the counter

my coat emerges

dark, heavy, unmistakably mine,

as if identity can be returned

once the right hands touch it

The music now sounds normal

And pleasant.

-

The crying girl stands before me,

Knowing this dance was the worse of the night

And it was all her fault.

A woman once holding my coat prisoner

Now seeking bail.

-

I hug her with my alpaca coat on,

In hopes she remembers how it feels like

-

Outside, the cold waits for me again.

Inside, my blood is still champagne.

I light nothing.

I walk out wearing myself,

grateful to the stranger

whose job is to throw people away,

but who, tonight,

handed one back.

For a miracle,

For a Parisian philosopher to think up,

A rational explanation for this bloodshed.

-

Too many nights spent awake,

Their eyes dry and red,

They are itching for their prayers to be digested.

But they are waiting in vain.

-

The bells of the church ring for a 4th time today,

Each warning swallowed whole by the pines.

-
The bishop stands over the 67th body,

Tallow candle in hand,

The wax burning his fingertips,

But he cannot feel it.

-

No sermon comes to mind.

The bishop knows that a mouth full of scripture

Is still just a mouth.

-

He shields the body of the maiden with his robe,

Hiding from the girl’s mother,

That the beast ate her daughter’s catholic heart,

And nothing else.

-

The beast watches from the tree line.

It has seen the bottles appear on the windowsills,

The holy water drunk like medicine,

As though their body could be made unwantable.

-

The body cannot be made unwantable.

-

No solutions come,

No catholic chants keeps it at bay,

They’re sending men with worn out hands,

Out into the hunting grounds,

Wearing corsets and robes,

In hopes of catching its attention.

But the beast cannot be fooled

By illusions of the flesh.

-

The 80th disfigured victim was found by June,

The king unable to protect Occitaine,

He sends his best hunter,

Imagining a crusade between man and evil

-

Coins adorned with icons of the Virgin Mary

are melted into silver bullets.

He stalks the night, and points his holy weapon,

Shooting the beast

With a promethean gun.

-

The beast falls without a sound,

But not for long.

The beast existed before the lamb,

And no stolen fire will be its demise.

-

summer threatened to disappear by august,

Too many graves in need to be dug,

For the amount of hands and shovels.

-

The beast attacking the purest of believers,

Leaving blood on their rosaries,

Not taking any confessions.

The heartless victims buried without sacrament.

-

The eyes of the beast piercing her back,

Marie-Jeanne Vallet, the maiden of Gévaudan,

Alone on the stone bridge,

She stands with a spear and a body that dares not retreat.

-

The beast approaches slowly,

Its yellow eyes older than the first fires,

And the first holy prayers.

Did he who made the lamb, make you?

Did he who made you, make me?

But the beast remains silent.

A quiet understanding, between two beasts.

-

The beast pounces onto her,

She does not pray,

She picks up her spear,

An unlearned and ancient strength,

Stronger than her body.

She pierces the flesh of the beast with her spear,

And for the first time,

The beast fell

and stays down.

-

The beast lays there with her in silence,

Bringing into death an ancient truth,

No hell has the Beast escaped,

For no God does the beast bid.

It was born in these pine woods,

It came from its dark basalt soil,

On the same hills gentian flowers blossom

And mothers bury their first borns.

-

The beast came as things come,

Gaia does not forgive or punish,

Hunger does not ask who received their last communion.

-

Its head in a bag before they asked Vallet’s name,

The beast was burned twice

And its ashes buried,

Only its heart resisting the flames.

She moves through life like a hitman,

lurking in a hotel bar,

shopping for a new victim.

Every month the same story,

Flowers, drinks, rolexes with no pulse behind them.

soft launches

on the same bar benches,

-

The wheel of fortune turns for matters of vanity,

Expiration of the fantasy,

the rented flowers are losing their petals,

And the bar is calling its last call.

-

Hunger perhaps a compass,

And no matter how much she starves

trying to find anything to carve,

she bakes the same cake.

Wedding piped into the vanilla frosting,

Her husband’s surname sugared on top.

but the cake always collapses before the candles are blown,

inheritance and nobility licked clean from her pretty fingers.

-

still high from last cycle’s fury,

she hides her story,

trying to invent a woman who can escape her purgatory.

shaping herself around whom she admires so dearly-

oh…

And who might that be?

-

approaching her new favourite person,

star-gazed eyes,

Standing close enough

to measure the space between my ribs,

Figuring out how to mold herself into something

that resembles me.

-

She spends nights observing,

the way my body rests,

the way my eye twitches.

hungry for some part of me,

she wants to swallow.

-

Starting to embody me,

She’s puking out sentences out of order,

made from pieces of my own thoughts,

Chewing words she cannot understand.

-

Every man afterwards,

seduced by borrowed skin.

falling a reflection,

a woman draped in a dress

made from silk

she wove from my hair.

-

But no thin skin can cover

the truth hiding beneath

beyond the first drink,

the lacker peeling,

revealing her, unpainted.

-

and now and then,

I catch you

still sitting at the same hotel bar,

sawing at your teeth

in hopes to cut and devour,

only to bite into the softest cake,

melting before being bitten.

-

No mystery in a woman

who cannot bear to be anything,

but no villain either.

Just a young woman,

who wonders why her cake keeps rotting

When it’s always being made from the same recipe.

-

And I’ll still care for you in a twisted way,

the same way you still walk around town,

holding my essence beneath a fur coat,

keeping herself warm,

in my absence.

Or maybe I just come close enough to feel it.

It’s dark, too dark,

dimming lights that swallows the velvet couches whole,

the floor, the tables, the faces I only half recognize

transforming them, hiding them in plain sight.

The air is thick with perfume, liquor, smoke,

and the bitter sting of something cut too many times.

A dozen golden birthday balloons bob somewhere near the ceiling,

forgotten.

The ice in my drink is melting,

My little sister is somewhere,

dancing and laughing,

from the corner of my eyes

blond hair and a gold dress fly around the room,

celebrating time passing,

Her birthday being the event of the month,

half the city was invited,

the other half wanted to be.

-

And I,

I am here.

I am always here.

-

There’s a line on the table.

A ghost of a smile.

A prophecy waiting to be fulfilled.

“You were made for me,” he whispers, pressing his card against my fingers.

“I think I manifested you.”

I roll my eyes.

I watch him bring his own fate to his nose, let it vanish into his body.

He turns to me, eyes black, pupils wide enough to fall into.

He looks at me like he summoned me,

as if I was some ancient demon.

or maybe I’m too young to be perceived as my true self.

My own vices seen as influenced, malleable and peer pressured.

Perhaps he sees me as something he set in motion,

with the help of prayers and powder.

-
But I am not.

I am a soul of my own construction,

and my own destruction.

Behind my small frame and intense stare,

hides a thing I cannot hide for much longer,

something I cannot explain,

at least not yet.

-

I lean forward. I let it take me

It’s not enough,

It’s too much,

I feel it in my ribs, where my heart should be.

The room is tilting.

Or maybe I am.

I reach for my drink, but my fingers don’t close around it.

He catches my wrist, holds me steady.

“You’re fine,” he says,

But his voice sounds far away.

Like it’s coming from another room.

Another world.

-

I blink, and the walls grow teeth,

I blink, and the floor opens up beneath me,

ready to take me back.

I blink, and my body doesn’t belong to me anymore.

“You’re fine,” he says again, but there’s something creeping behind his voice now,

Something like worry,

Like fear,

Like he didn’t manifest this part.

-

Someone is laughing too loudly,

Someone is leaning over the bar, waving money at a bartender to impress his date.

Someone is breathing into my mouth,

whispering my name like a prayer,

like a curse.

-

My body is shutting down slowly,

I can feel it,

and I can’t stop it.

I should tell my sister happy birthday,

But I dont want to scare her,

I want her birthday to be about her

and not her troublesome sister.

I should tell someone,

anyone,

that I think I’m dying.

Instead, I just let go.

I fear I wont live to see the day tomorrow

but my sister’s laugh reaches my tired ears,

rocking me,

comforting me.

-

I open my eyes again,

It’s past 3.

I am lying perfectly still.

I do not want to move.

He is beside me,

Fingers tracing circles against my wrist,

Hiding a pulse check behind an act of tenderness.

“You’re here,” he says, voice thick with relief,

Like he pulled me back himself,

Like I didn’t drag myself out of the dark on my own.

“You can’t die,” he murmurs, pressing his lips to my shoulder.

I almost laugh.

Like I haven’t already

Like I didn’t leave this body hours ago

Like I didn’t feel it try to take me.

-

But I stayed,

For what, I don’t know.

For him?

Surely not, I could barely stand the guy.

For my sister, still out there, blowing out candles?

For the people around the table,

still dancing, still moving, still living?

Or just for the hell of it?

“You’re here,” he says again,

Like he’s still convincing himself.

-

I close my eyes

Listening to the chaos around me

Happy I get to this same dance,

next weekend.

you used to bring me

on slow spring mornings,

I remember our life

in black and white.

-

I kept your ghost pleasant,

gentle,

carefully folded into my years

yet I still find myself

back at your tree again.

There was a moment,

an event,

something the universe refuses to let me name.

All I carry from it,

is the sickness in my gut,

An emptiness

when I try to piece it together

-

I see you;

brown hair,

green eyes,

green like the forest that raised you,

like your mother’s eyes.

-

Or were they blue?

Blue like the ocean you swore you’d reach,

like a cloudless sky.

-

No …

that can’t be right.

I’m not sure anymore.

Subscribe now

-

I am torn between who you were

and what is missing

a stretch of time with its bones removed,

a history surviving only through

shattered images

of something I witnessed

and tried to undo.

-

I fought it.

I clawed at fate

bleeding finger tips

grabbing at the bark of the tree

over your body,

But I was never the author

of your ending.

Whoever wrote it must have been sick and twisted

-

Nothing could have saved you

from your own convictions,

from your desire to burn the world,

so someone might feel warm.

-

And in all the savagery,

I can picture your head

and its perfect features.

Every time I want to remember you,

I must go back to the tree.

To see you bloodied

And lifeless.

Your death,

the only moment your body

Had ever known peace.

Your eyes rested as if you were in a deep sleep,

You jaw slacked, revealing its true form,

sculpted and strong,

yet so delicate for such a harsh soul.

-

Death was the only mercy

your body had ever earned.

No frown graced your brows,

no war hid behind your eyes,

your mouth softened

into the boy you once were.

-

My arms cradled around you

Wondering when I would get to see you,

one last time.

I could not have conceived,

That you’d be punished,

That I would live a hundred lives

Without you.

Spending my time finding spectres of you

In men that walk past me.

cursed to search for a man I barely remember.

-

Instead, I kept being born.

Again.

Again.

Again.

With every birth,

Every life,

Every family created,

Every illness survived.

Every death that soon came.

I’d find my way you.

Until our time was up.

-

I soon realized

I’d never hold you in this realm.

you’d never breathe again.

Never laugh.

Never love.

But I’d also never witness slow tears dripping down your face again.

I’ll never have to face that strange

Affliction you carried with you.

the plague that lived deep beneath you,

That deep rooted anger

That followed you under that tree.

-

At every waking moment,

every breath taken against my will,

You are my death.

And your earthly body,

Or the remains of its existence,

Ties me back to the deep forest we once called home.

-

In every life,

In the moment between our meetings,

I find myself at this tree

Flooded with memories of you.

As if caught in a rainstorm of recollections

My soul had tried to burry.

-

I am now older than you were,

Hundreds of times over.

I have been born, lived and died more than

I can count.

And yet,

When I walk past your grave

I can’t help but fall back into you

Something you won’t allow.

In my deaths lies our next meeting,

But you did not do all this damage

For me to waste my lives waiting.

-

And still

when I pass a quiet tree,

in early spring,

I wait

for footsteps

that never come,

and flowers

that never grow back.

-

So I stopped waiting for you in spring.

I stopped looking in crowds.

I stopped listening for your voice.

Because the only time I see you

is when I’m dying

and every ending

is just me

walking back to you.

My skin shivering and grasping at the air,

searching for warmth,

and finding none.

-

Even the ocean behind me

seemed stunned into stillness,

as if confused

that I had crawled out of its mouth.

-

For a long moment,

I only laid there,

my body sinking into the ground,

listening to the hush of the tide

and the rasp of my own breathing,

the two sounds braided together,

like a warning,

and a promise.

-
As my breath and the ocean became two,

I pushed myself upright,

knees buckling,

hands sinking into cold sand

that felt almost like a grave.

-

The horizon was a smear of ash and pearl,

light bleeding slowly,

through the ribs of the world.

-

There was no village.

No voices.

No familiar cliffs.

Only a forest rising before me

dark, watchful,

And in the distance,

half-hidden between the trees,

a thin curl of smoke

sighed into the morning air.

-

Something lived there.

Something human,

or not.

I could not yet tell.

But the knife was still in my hand.

And I was still alive.

-

I slowly stood when the wind

Was impossible to ignore.

I entered the forest,

Pines like needles

Moss adjusting to my footsteps.

-

Quietly and slowly

I notice the birds no longer sung their ominous songs,

As I approach the wooden house,

I see him.

An axe in hand.

Cutting wood with the violence of a man.

-

He sees me before I intend it

I wonder if he has a wife,

Kids,

But from the way he looks at me,

The way his gaze lingered places

I didn’t want it to,

I could guess that nothing soft or sacred

lived with him.

-

My dress now transparent from the seawater

felt like a scarlet letter.

He looked at me with the type of hunger

Only a man could hold within his soul.

His gaze quiet, infected with a kind of certainty

That comes from a life lived without witnesses.

-

I step back

He steps forward,

pushing his axe away

hands empty now,

more dangerous than before.

-

His boots crush the pine needles

a slow, deliberate sound

that made the air feel thin.

-

I felt my heart climb to my throat,

The cold returning in a sudden wave,

attaching itself to my skin,

as if the ocean had found me again.

-
I walk backwards,

my front facing him,

scared that if I look away,

took my gaze off of him,

He would appear in front of me.

But even as I was monitoring his every move,

His body moved swiftly through the forest,

while mine was held back by exhaustion and a soaking dress.

-

When he reaches for me,

His arm pushes forward,

His fingers brush the white fabric of my dress

as if he has every right to it,

I pull away

but his grip tightens,

rough, certain,

a man used to taking

when no one is there to say no.

-

He grabs and tosses

I fall onto the hard soil,

My body hits the ground,

making a similar sound to the axe he has just disposed of.

-

My head turning

The birds yelling,

He holds me down,

His face lowers to my chest,

Still damp.

-
His laugh rips out of him,

Mocking,

as if meant to be heard by only himself,

Voice low and deep,

As if he had not talked out loud in days.

Something in me squirms at the sound.

Annoying me. Angering me.

-

He pushed his bodyweight like a blanket,

hovering his head like a snake.

I reach under my skirt

Before he has a chance to,

And as he finally looks into my eyes,

I catch his lustful stare,

Full of life,

I take it in for a moment,

Before I take it away.

-

My hands fly at his throat,

Slashing.

No sound comes out of his mouth.

The wind mutes him.

The branches slap against each other.

As my once ocean-washed body,

And beautiful white dress,

Slowly become deep red.

Blood pooling down from his vocal cords,

onto my chest.

He collapses.

and I crawl out from beneath the shadow of him,

as though dragging myself free

from a second grave.

-

For a long moment

The forest does not move.

Even the wind seems unsure

Which one of us remains dangerous.

I rise up.

My knife feels lighter in my palm.

-

I wonder to the clear pond,

Thirst grasping me like the man did.

I walk, missing some steps,

I remove my red dress,

I crouch, plunging the dress in the water.

I catch a glimpse

Of my own face

Covered in his blood,

My body once clean and purified,

now stands before saltless water

red and hot,

The first moment of warmth I have felt in ages,

Graciously given to me

By no God at all,

But my own two

very feminine hands

and a heavy burden.

-

No ritual can cast out

the animalistic nature

We all reach for survival.

No ocean, no forest, no man,

Could stop my path

to life.

My path back to this clear pond.

-

And although one day my dress will rot in the pond,

the sky will open itself,

peel itself like a rotten fruit,

People will forget my language,

and My life will no longer mean anything,

I know that every God they have prayed to while pushing me down that cliff,

Only answered me.

One particular morning, the sun seeping through the curtains next to my bed woke me up slowly, and by the intensity of the light, I knew the day was about to be the hottest yet. In fact, it was the first official day of the “Cerberus Heatwave” of 2023, where the south of Italy reached temperatures of 45 degrees celsius. I decided against following my parents around town and found myself a shaded and cozy sun-bed next to the pool on the upper deck.

Birds chirped, people walked down the streets half wet from sweat and the water they would pour on themselves to feel some sort of relief. At one point, my new friend Andrea, the good looking bartender, walked down to the pool area, finding me there, alone and lounging. he brought me a drinks menu and a bottle of crisp cold water, “You need to hydrate” he said. And I followed suit.

Just like every woman in her 20’s, I’ve had my fair share of espresso martinis And i’ll admit, it’s mostly because they are offered everywhere and not because I particularly enjoyed them. In fact, I am not a coffee drinker, nor do I enjoy the taste of bitter espresso. However, by this point in the trip, I had had one too many Aperol spritz hangovers and the thought of a fizzy drink made my heart sink. Instead, I told Andrea to make me an espresso martini, SBRIGATI!

The first sip made me question my neutrality on espresso martinis, it was unlike anything I’ve ever had before. Smooth, sweet, but not heavy or creamy. And so, I began ordering these martinis around the pool for the entirety of that afternoon, charging them to the room of course.

When my father got the bill at the end of the trip, I learned that each martini cost 27 euros. did I know that? No. Do I care? Not really! I told him we couldn’t put a price on this good of a martini, and he said we could and that that price was 45 Canadian dollars each.

When I came back from the trip, I was fully converted. I needed to recreate that martini. And although a trip to my city’s little Italy, simple syrup and a good coffee machine helped me recreate it, I decided after a while that I needed to adjust it. Make it even better. And so, today, I will share my recipe that has named me the official “espresso martini” maker in my friendgroup.

THE RECIPE’S BASICS

although the name of the drink calls for espresso, I find that people respond better to normal coffee. I know, insane. If you are some die-hard espresso fan, please disregard this ingredient, however, I do suggest you try it as all the espresso addicts in my life all came to agree with my take on this. You can choose Nespresso pods (usually some stronger caffeine level) or any other type of coffee. the important thing here is that the coffee is hot, smooth and up to your standards. I usually do over the stove top, using Italian roasted beans.

Now, here is the magic ingredient: Canadian maple syrup. Listen very closely. if you live in the USA I know you believe you have tasted Canadian made maple syrup, but I guarantee you havent. I have travelled a lot within the states, and even the eastern-north does not serve real maple syrup at their restaurants, even when advertised as such. This is important as Canadian maple syrup is unlike anything corn syrup of simple syrup can offer. It is truly divine. What you are looking for is QUEBEC made maple syrup. it can come in glass bottles, plastic bottles and cans. Quebec represents 72% of maple syrup production worldwide! it is the best for a reason.

Now that we have these two very important pillars of the recipe out of the way, let’s make our martini!

THE RECIPE

in a shaker, you will need:

• Half a cup of ice (more if your shaker is big). At this step we want the shaker to be 3/4 full with ice so when we shake the martini, a thick foam will be created. I personally don’t do a dry shake (no ice) before a wet shake (with ice) as I dont find it convenient and the hot coffee needs to be cooled down before being handled this way. The trick to making foam without the use of egg whites is the high temperature of the coffee and the motion of shaking it with ice.

• 3 ounces of HOT coffee of choice

• 1 1/2-2 ounces of maple syrup depending on sweetness level you want

• 2 ounces of vodka, vanilla or normal

• OPTIONAL: 1 ounce of Khaluah. if this is added, reduce the maple down to one ounce.

Shake until your shaker forms frost on its exterior, which takes 12-18 seconds, and then strain into a martini glass.

ENJOY! Let me know if you try it out!! <3

My body only used to furs and the fireplace I would sleep next to on the hard wood floors,

I felt betrayed by the harshness of the water .

My skin feeling like it was going to break like glass.

And yet,

Even with my whining and screaming

My father would force me to swim

Until the water no longer felt like a punishment.

Until my head would start to float on its own

And my body no longer feared

Not touching the sand.

He said I’d get it one day.

That this is love.

But i couldn’t understand

Why the torture of these winter swims

Would one day be something I would be grateful for.

-

Until that faithful day

The summer had come to an end

Faster than i was prepared for.

A cold strong wind ripping through our village

Acting as a reminder of whats to come.

-

Harvest had come early this year,

The frost already threatening the crops,

Threatening its roots.

The coldest summer

Required harsher remedies.

It needed screams,

Rather than songs.

-

In between knitting and keeping my fire alive,

I saw the villagers approach,

Slowly,

As if approaching a wild animal.

-

The elders talked,

The woman watched

And the men stood back,

Making sure I knew

There was no where to run to

And no one to protect me.

-

My hands are slowly pressed together,

Silk wrapped around them,

The familiar weight of a knife

Slipped between my palms,

A token, they said, for the monster below.

I caught the eyes of an elder,

Before she looked down in shame,

“The ocean needs fresh blood”

She told me.

-

They chose me

With the same calm certainty

They used to choose who would mend nets,

Or sweep ash under the chimney.

A quiet consensus.

-

My father had been gone a year by then

Buried under winter stone,

His voice surviving only in the memory

And now, without him,

I was small again.

A girl wrapped in ribbons,

A harvest offering

To an ocean they insisted held a beast,

A creature with a hunger

Big enough to swallow European boats.

They carried me to the cliff’s black edge,

As they sung songs my ears failed to listen to.

The only sound i could process

Was the blood inside my veins

Rushing to my brain

A cacophony behind my ears.

-

And though my voice cracked,

I did not yell.

They lifted me to the cliff’s edge

With hands steady from practice,

Eyes calm as winter stone.

No trembling, no whispers,

Only the wind brushing my cheek

As if offering the last kindness

I’d feel for a long time.

Then their palms pressed forward,

And the sky broke open beneath me,

The world narrowing

To the long, helpless drop

Toward the dark.

-

Before I even touched the water,

Their footsteps had already turned away.

Bread still needed kneading,

Nets needed mending,

Children were sent to chase the hens

From the grain.

Someone laughed.

Someone cursed the early frost.

My fall folded neatly

Into their daily rhythm.

My sacrifice but a brief pause,

A moment of uncomfort in their lives,

Simple and over,

then life resumed.

-

And as they will eat dinner with their families, grow old and

thank the Gods for a successful harvest,

They won’t remember the sacrifices it took.

They wont remember my name

The same way they forget the last girl,

And the one before that.

They will tell themselves the Gods demanded this

That the cold summer needed a body

To bargain with the coming winter.

That sacrifice, repeated long enough,

Became a kind of truth.

Believing such stories

Made it easier to forget my face,

Easier to believe cruelty

Was necessary.

-

The ocean met me like iron.

The cold devoured me.

Sound vanished.

Light fractured

For a suspended moment.

Then the water closed over my head,

And the world narrowed

To one violent breath

I almost didn’t take.

-

Salt filled my mouth,

The deep tightened around my legs,

And for a heartbeat

I believed the monster was real

A shape rising beneath me,

Born from their fear.

But then instinct surged,

My father’s voice rising

From some buried place

Only grief can keep warm.

I kicked upward

And the monster vanished

-

Night stretched endlessly around me.

The horizon refused to move.

Sea-foam clung to my arms

like pale, drifting hands,

Each breath thinner

Than the last.

Yet I swam,

Stroke after stubborn stroke,

A flicker of will

Against an ocean large enough

To erase names,

Villages,

Entire lives.

-

The knife stayed in my fist.

Its handle slick with salt,

Slicing the waves

Every time I reached forward.

It was the only warm thing

The sea did not take.

-

By the time my feet finally scraped sand,

The sky had begun to pale.

Not sunrise,

Just that colourless grey

The world takes on

Before morning remembers to arrive.

-

I collapsed onto the shore,

My chest heaving,

Salt burning the cracks in my lips.

Every limb trembled,

Each breath a thin thread

Escaping from my ribs.

-

The cold gnawed straight through me.

My dress, once white,

Now wrung out by the sea

Clung to my body

As though trying to disappear into my skin.

It hid nothing

Not the bruises from where they held me,

Not the tide’s rough grip,

I was meant to be swallowed whole.