Lessons I Learned While Leaving My Body – Celeste B.

November 28, 2025

BELT

When I was eight,
my dad gave me a leather belt.
He said it was his dad’s belt
and couldn’t ever imagine losing it.
I would take the belt and tighten it around my neck,
mind you, I’m eight-
and just try to pull
as tight as I could.
I choked myself every night, hoping that this belt could lose me
before my dad lost it
One night my dad walked in on me
completing my usual routine-
he saw me, and his face got hot and red
(I didn’t know he could do that without the belt)
and he asked me
what the fuck I was doing.
I told him I didn’t want to be here anymore.
He told me to stop being a fucking idiot.
But I didn’t realize
Eight-year-old me was just trying
to save me
from being here.

Black Out pt 1

Seconds

before I consensually removed

myself from my memories

I saw myself staring

at a wall, through a mirror

when suddenly

a hollow pang

washed over my body

I felt the familiar embrace

of overwhelming calmness

releasing my rapidly racing thoughts

releasing my suffocating shame

releasing my empathy

releasing me

finally, free

I murder with dandelions and honey

My prey, oblivious, dance

to the rhymes and rhythms

I choose

continue flittering and floating

around this curated vivarium

I offer up this sticky, sappy, stew

a brewed bauble of gold and green

stems

an insects’ ambrosia

My prey; entranced,

perches onto my noir

faux leather couch

ready to plunge their depraved beak

into anything I have to offer

~A motion in which I am far too familiar

while he has the illusion of being free

I have the awareness of being stuck

Good Trauma

What do we call good trauma?
I know all about bad trauma, I relive it daily
abandoned at the hospital by lovers who swore to stay
pushed down by secret enemies from my perfect pedestal
just to hear the sound it makes when I
fall
high on lsd in school with a friend
who spoke to God, and apparently
he did not like my vibe
But what do we call good trauma,
the memory of the first time I
did mdma in the dingy damp basement of some random guy
and danced and twirled until my legs hurt, a good hurt, a neon-light type of pain
or the flashback to me being prayed over while imbibing spirit water made from the flesh of
mushroom Gods
and this enormous weight of being a burden
lifted, finally carried by someone other than me,
by a community of strangers and lovers
So what do we call good trauma? I don’t know-
I don’t seem to remember
anything BUT the bad shit