The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: In the Cosmic Fugue by Jocelyn Heath

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content warning for self-harm

Letter Home

See this? Like a cut raspberry smudged on my skin,
the long slow pull of a “slipped leg” against the sharp edge.
A tree branch on the way up, outside my dorm window:
hickory, flaking bark into cupped hands.
The long slow peel of a scab to the acrid green beneath.

I sat in that window. I sat in that tree.

All that term I sat and watched
the computer screen swirl top right to bottom left,
top left to bottom right, coming back always
to begin it again. And that’s what I couldn’t do—
get back to the rhythmic roll of days from hall to hall,
book to book, feigning a search for “the one.”
Safe because no disappointment would ever come.

It came to me on the branch of that tree:

first verse of a song I had no theory to write,
no chords to rise and resolve from the lyrics
I fought against singing.

Queer hushed the trees.
Queer hummed the wind.

And when that strange love spreads like fire
through the thicket of veins, boiling eye waters,
choking thought, singeing neurons black, then—
yes, then, you can understand the only way
to put it out was to cut it, vent it through open skin.

Is this what I tell you, now that the match is struck again?
Is this the truth that can jump a fire-cut?
Sit there and read, mother, read one last night in unknowing,
before the touch of my skin will scald you with understanding.

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