apology

it is the summer after my spleen almost ruptured into the stain of a thousand sunsets: i am sitting in a therapist's office & she asks me to start at the moment i wanted to die from my own hands: i could have painted her this body in all its failed topologies: i haven't a home that isn't in love with the way it floods: but instead, i gave her a history lesson: 1967 the west bank is annexed by israel after nakba: catastrophe: my grandparents: exile: in their own home: when i say, anxiety stretches continents: when i say depression is an ocean we never wanted to traverse:

fast forward

1988: my aunt falls in love with a woman twice her age: finds mother in her after her own grieved a stolen country: decades of abuse from a husband with fists: in his blood: when she comes out they ask if she needs to see a therapist: a nice woman to excise this demon in her:

fast forward

today: a stranger with fists in his blood makes a growing country of my organs & i cannot love myself: or perhaps it was all a topology lesson: a stranger who cannot recognize me: tells the class of exact sequences: how topological spaces inherit the shape of their emptiness from previous generations of dimensions: a whole lineage of singularities: & at this point i too wanted to disappear: in the office of this therapist: who was perhaps a topologist: who asks me

so what shape does this anxiety take inside of you?

& i wanted to say tooth of a mouth: eye of a hurricane in my chest: organ with vast chambers haunted by their own empty: & so much blood it can almost be mistaken for a country: newfound inheritance: atheism found at the intersection of 3 merciless gods:

do you pray still? why have you stopped praying?

the therapist asks & perhaps the therapist is my mother: the one who found god at the bottom of liquor bottles the color of bloodied oceans: the hands that prayed for a son who left in search for home: desire, swelling in him like a ruptured organ: father, forgive me my drunk inheritance: forgive the stairs that collapsed beneath the weight of me: forgive the third floor window that tried to swallow me into the night's mouth: forgive the bodies i swallowed like broken teeth: the knees i spent trying to summon god in my own mouth: forgive my DNA strands for they are sculptors of brief suicides in this body: i'm trying to love the shattered window of myself: the hands: the rocks: the broken religion left behind: my inheritance is a body of vandalized cathedrals: light me on fire: strip my god from my breath: watch as i dance amidst the flames: