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Sickroom

by Sydney Kenney

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1.
I wonder what day of the week it will be the last time that you think about kissing me. Will you be able to taste the coffee on my lips when deleting my phone number? Or when running your fingers through the particularly long hair of another Friday-night love? Or on a Wednesday, in the supermarket, when you swear that you hear my laugh 2 aisles down, will you walk over - and stand there for a few minutes, pretending that you’ve forgotten which brand of peanut butter to buy? Will you get rid of that last drop of me by spitting me into the mouth of every girl on your cul-de-sac? Or try drinking me out of your liver every Saturday night? Or try kicking a hole in your drywall because you found my bobby pin in your pillowcase, and remembered how I used to pin you together like my French braid? Will you drive me out of your gas tank at 70 miles per hour into a tree, into the ocean - how are you going to get rid of one drop of me when you’re the entire ocean? And on the last day that you peel open those apple-skin, empty, bloodshot eyes will you remember all of the ways that we defined goodbye? I wonder how you’ll say goodbye, the first time that you think about leaving me.
2.
Grayscale 02:27
everyone around me watched my eyes drop to their knees like watching the colors fade from the clouds, as the sun made its way out things are always more beautiful in my eyes than in photographs, more horrible in my mind than in paragraphs, but I find the clouds just as pretty in grayscale, and if I were on a gray scale I’d finally be a 9 out of 10 because I can write down the names of colors and recognize them but I am not a painting, a picture, or a poem I am a single word written in pen but I don’t know the definition so I believe every word yelled to me out of trucks is a synonym. there are very few things I know about myself. I think I got lazy and started copying down people’s perceptions of me like it was last night’s algebra homework. they told me I wanted to be miserable. I do not know if that is true. I know that the sky right now is blue. But it is sometimes black, orange, pink, and I think it’s funny that we say the sky is blue because that is when we ignore it the most, and when I turn dark for a little while nobody seems to remember that I was ever shining at all. I know that I try and be small. And that sometimes it’s a lot easier to lose my mind than to lose the weight. I know that there is nothing I hate, more than trying to fall asleep with my chest gaping open, no morphine. I know that I didn’t expect expect anybody to call me a liar when I said that I loved myself. like my heart was available for checkout at the library, and my eyes were lined with shelves. I am not sure what is holding me together, but everytime I stand up I know that it is something. Occasionally I have the sneaking suspicion that it could be everything. So I’m gunna treat it that way. Ignore other people’s definitions of me because I know that there isn’t one. Stop trying to define others because I know I will never be able to. and hope that everyone around me enjoys watching my eyes lace up their sneakers, and start over again.
3.
Nowadays all I seem to do is take people who have faith in me and let them down, bleed them dry until blood is dripping down their sides in cursive goodbyes- they lift me out of puddles of mud, make wishes on my petals and set me inside their living rooms, so that all I can see is the sunshine through the drapes and their cloudy, shining eyes. But I can’t stay alive, I’ve got no water, I’ve got nowhere to wrap my roots or legs late in the night I’ve got nobody to stop me from dehydrating, my pores are draining and I’m staining your coffee table. You see no thorns on my body but you can’t see what’s under my skin so stop trying to get in. You can’t fix everybody so just listen- listen to the warnings I’m calling - I’m gonna hurt you. I didn’t mean to hurt you when I kissed him. I meant to feel, I don’t know what I meant to feel But it’s not what my intentions are it’s that my actions hurt everyone and there’s nobody that should trust me for more than a night – one monster on top of another – each hour until the sun rises I’ll care, I’ll care a little bit more: his middle name, his fears, how the streetlight through the blinds lines his unclothed body, what it’s like to fall asleep out of breath with our fingers intertwined. But when I walk him out the front door I’ll feel the weight of his kiss, something I can’t lift. Maybe he’ll laugh and say something like, “you’re the least stable person I’ve ever talked to – and I like you.” But my heartstrings are hanging about my lungs and ribcage like the previous night’s party streamers. Everyone tells me to snip the loose strings but I’m such a sucker for tearing everything apart by pulling at threads. So I whisper the reply, “Never call me. I would tear you to shreds.” I promise though my leaves are wilting this isn’t my way of guilting you into helping me. It’s just that I’m used to puddles of mud and other things that don’t stay for too long after the rain falls. I didn’t want to let you down. I had to.
4.
White Noise 02:08
my ex-boyfriend had a speech impediment and I couldn’t understand a word a word a word And from the breakup I got all of our friends and his 64-pack of markers Except for (insert random name) who was always a dick to me anyway because I think he’s a little gay and has a crush on him and except for that ocean blue but I think we lost that in the move so that really went to either party in a way his voice was like written pages, and I couldn’t read him without watching his lips or at all in the dark, but even though his words became a bit too much to translate after my eyes slid shut, it was still so much nicer to fall asleep in a library of his white-noise whispers than anywhere where the wind could touch me. there was never anything he said to me that meant anything. every kiss he placed on the vein of my wrist surely gave me more ink poisoning than any forget-me-nots scribbled there with ballpoints, and though his murmurs became lullabies (I wonder if they still play when I am gone) I will learn to fall asleep to my own heart beat, I lost the ocean blue marker and I will not be able to draw myself drowning in regrets for secrets untold and questions never asked like did you ever feel more from losing me, then you would after ridding a bad cold did you notice the extra space in your bed doesn’t compare to someone to hold is it freezing cold? That was also the color of your eyes I lost in the move. The color of trigonometry doodles and tree bark blood pouring out of our initials. The color of the sky right where we met, when the rest of the town was looking at the clouds and didn’t even know what was going on.
5.
Ever since I learned to cut my own blueberry Sunday-morning pancakes, and where to slide the plastic knife between my baby carrot fingers, my mom would always tell me that putting too much butter on things would make my heart sick. And as my sticky cheeks nearly scowled, I would wonder how something I loved so much could make me stop loving. How something that only seemed to make everything better, and relentlessly melted in the little nooks of it all, could destroy me. But now I understand. Because the knife you were using to spread yourself into my pores is deliberately twisting into my calloused, overgrown fingers. I’ve been thinking about the volume in the valleys of your dimples and the density in the pauses between your words a thickness like maple syrup of which my mom would always tell me to measure out in teaspoons.
6.
Sickroom 02:38
Do you remember where our mother would take us once a year for that blood pressure boa-constrictor and a lollipop? The front room divided into two, for the ill and the well, and sitting at the furthest corner of the well side, how out-of-place we felt, barely belonging , Do you remember the first time you had to lie on the doctor’s questionnaire? Have you ever tried any illegal drugs or alcohol? Have you ever purposefully hurt yourself? Do you remember the first time we both had to lie? Do you remember your 102 fever and the first time you felt the thickness of the sickroom and hating the cherry taste of children’s motrin? Do you remember the blue chairs lined in a circle, white walls with tacked posters of kittens telling you to hang in there, the first time you felt the emptiness of the sickroom, and hating the taste of the past 7 years? And wanting to put tacks in your shoulders and hang yourself on the wall so that everyone in that room would ignore you like that poster? Do you remember our father with his tool box and his hammers, as we were growing up it became increasingly impossible not to notice that he was carving you into a sword and me into a shield as if our mother had given birth to 2x4’s you shouted so much it surprised me you weren’t constantly losing your voice, I lost my voice before I learned to speak. Do you remember going into my drawer and looking for my wallet when the high got better than me placing you high on my shoulders how many times our parents sat us down tried to fix us but had no idea how Do you remember when I stopped coming home? Lightbulbs on the front porch burning out because they would leave them on all night like lighthouses, but I was busy sending SOS symbols to strange men in bars Those nights you could see our father sweating like the glass of vodka in my shaking palm and we were both playing with the condensation to try and keep ourselves calm. I remember that I liked grape lollipops and you liked raspberry. We thought that if we didn’t breathe when walking through the air of people who were ill we would stay safe. Do you remember the way our parents kissed our foreheads before bed? How we spent all night, holding our breaths.

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I hope whether you're in good or bad place right now, you can feel something from what I've put together.

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released March 26, 2014

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Sydney Kenney West Palm Beach, Florida

spoken word poet from southern florida.
the new york times calls her 'wiggity whack.'

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