by Liam Strong
Halsey, drink the lord’s womb to a catacomb. there’s innovation in collapse. your fore-mothers & fore-siblings undulate with whorled bickering. the government might as well be god. the government might be god. god might be–okay Halsey, you win, here’s a Milky Way, here’s a school of worn whetstones, here’s a citation for sober driving, here’s your Pearl Jam shirts as mildewed washcloths. you’re a complete sentence that doesn’t need a period.
Halsey, you fill in your name where it says Reason For Cancellation. you are your reason for being. or whatever–it’s what you might hear at the Lutheran church down the block. maybe you don’t need a reason to just be. but what of the cursed colors of the universe, the ones that sound somatically pleasing, the ones that lurch with burden. beige, opal, chartreuse, mauve, pickle. without color, what is pain. what is blueberry. what is fucking. Pussy, Halsey! Pussy! It’s as the divine prophesied! let me be one! just let me bleed like everyone else!
If it’s not a geranium in a garden, Halsey, can we just call a forest a kingdom of weeds. maybe the verbiage is askew. maybe it’s what’s weeded out, what is categorically invasive. which is to condone that nothing belongs anywhere. or whatever adolescent monologue we’re still hung up on. It’s hopeless, to be honest. Halsey, all our gods are invasions waiting to strike our homes. all our devils want is to morally pervert the parasites in our lives. it’s old school. & by that I mean angsty. & by that i mean we get flummoxed about which petals are special or not special & not the sky that feeds us. it only appears that there’s nothing there to weed out by hand. not unless you reach far enough.
Your body. Halsey. your. body. an effigy. what are you warding off. which man do you not want seeing your bones strewn about like this. which man. which.
Of how to write psalms, Ashley. of the frenetic clasp. of the palms like a locket. of your ribs meeting the sky like beggars. of praising the seasons for doing their thing. of wax towers & patient tangerines sculpting them down. of the marriage between the tissue & him. of the grove of ash trees you make your dwelling. of the smoking & toking & smoking & embering that doesn’t escape my throat when i speak of your death. of every name in the world & every word & typographical device in it too. of the space between, which must mean something. of what doesn’t. of a name you bury deep below. of what’s beneath our pre-histories, of what keeps getting excavated & sulked out. of what doesn’t deserve to be praised any longer.
Liam Strong (they/them) is a queer neurodivergent straight edge punk writer who has earned their BA in writing from University of Wisconsin-Superior. They are the author of the chapbook Everyone’s Left the Hometown Show (Bottlecap Press, 2023). You can find their poetry and essays in Impossible Archetype and Emerald City, among several others. They are most likely gardening and listening to Bitter Truth somewhere in Northern Michigan.
