Tag / fear

by Leah Hamilton

Your Body is Not My Body

Your body is not my body
You don’t need to take those rocks from your chest and hurl them through my windows
I’m already broken enough

but the one thing that isn’t
is that I refuse to be afraid of heights

and every morning I get into a hot air balloon and float up into the sky.
that’s joy, flame underneath and bright colours up top
because down below is just a pit of all we could carry

My body goes through metamorphosis, heaviness into light to save itself

without doing that

I

just

sink

suffocating in a mine shaft filled with stormwater

so I go up, whether you’re with me or not but you can follow me out, if you want to

And even if
even if
even if we are on fire, so what?
you can grow many things out of ashes.

You say you’ve been burned before but I already lost my wings, time and time again this body has been alight
that horrible scent of charred flesh
then plucked like a dead canary, feathers ripped off
bloody back, kneeling down prostrate and praying to nobody in a tunnel with no end.
but now my god is eros
see I’m not afraid of flying, and no matter how many rocks you hold
this balloon can still carry you.

by Leah Hamilton

Beast

I tell her she has brown eyes like me.
Her brother has blue eyes like Dad.
Parts handed down like quilts, eyes from so far back and so far across the sea I don’t even know where my own body was made.
And I see in my hands, heart, lungs everything you gave me, that scarlet bloom of sickness in my chest, bursting up into the air.

I remember hiding under the table, my whole body shut tight, hoping you wouldn’t see me

searching for just a stupid rubber ball.

That ball was the end of me and my clouded eyes that didn’t really see anything at all.
I was blind and yet when I saw you I was blinded more than I ever thought possible, a crouching baby beast feels such electricity in the air and just knows that it’s wrong.

And did you put this wrongness into me too?
What on god’s earth did I inherit:

brown eyes like my mother, brown eyes like my father

and the passion of both enough to split a thousand knuckles wide open.