These Red Hard Things

You and I moved to a small room for a brief time.
Our family dead stepped over our flattened and sleepy bodies.
In that room my dreams were alive and
took the shape of moths too distracted by the
light shooting off your face to do anything but hover around you.

I took my high heeled white shoes,
the pointed toes like an accusation,
the rounded heel an apology,
and covered them with tiny red heart stickers.
These covered shoes-these red hard things,
I danced on your face with them at night
and reminded myself, like a ritual
that the heart in you was just an eggshell,
the bursting and running yolk of you was something else entirely.
In the mornings I tried to be a blossom
in the center of your chest, tearing itself open to the soft milky light.
These days
you still have to rip yourself open
to the unbearable things in this world
and to the unbearable things nesting in you.
I know it is hard.

I told you
It is not good to live among so many beached whales!

You told me
“You don’t understand.
I am a beached whale and
you have crawled inside of me and died,
a dead thing inside of a dead thing
inside of a world that will sigh in our faces
like spidery little earthquakes,”
and so when we opened our mouths,
flies spilled out and
we were a gray, hushed tone.

Author Biography

Kira Clark hails from Oklahoma City, moved to Austin and has settled in Portland where she is happy with the rain and melancholy. She runs a poetry open mic, competed in the Portland Poetry Slam finals this year as well as contributes and edits to an experimental flash fiction press, Housefire. Her writing also appears in the recently published book, Heartbeats.