By Joshua Zeitler
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Self-harm and suicidal ideation
You can knock on a deaf man’s door forever.
—Nikos Kazantzakis
Consider the music, I tell my sister
choosing her new name. How placing two stressed
syllables side-by-side could be a speed bump.
Anna Jasmine. Cora Summer. Quinn Aurora.
We pan for gold together. I remember
the black room, red felt blanket
for a curtain, where she played the music
she’d written. Pill rattle. Wal-Mart-bagged breaths.
This is how I’ll do it, she said. I imagine
the knife kissed the bone. The secret colors
of Camus’s life—I feel like bursting
into tears. I listened to Flotation Toy Warning’s
“Popstar Researching Oblivion” and burned out
cigarette butts on my ankle, kneeling
on the river rocks. I ruined all my socks.
Bought new ones, though I couldn’t afford them.
I had to crawl through a hole in the fence
to get to the shore, but it didn’t stop me.
I wanted to feel, physically, like Dickinson
said, as if the top of my head were taken off.
I feel, my sister tells me, like my body
recognizes itself for the first time. I can’t
tell what I feel. I must be happy
for her. Ibsen’s I must! I must! I must!
Joshua Zeitler is a queer, nonbinary writer based in rural Michigan. They received their MFA from Alma College, and their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Midway Journal, Pithead Chapel, The Westchester Review, Pacifica Literary Review, and elsewhere.
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