Two Poems – Cait Reynolds
February 14, 2018
Modern Love is a Fear of Radio Silence
My existential crisis is chronic
Dying with my doe eyes and fair skin
this insomnia is killing me
or at the very least
will make me look worn out
As a woman those two things are terrifying
and essentially the same
My pulse races uncontrollably and I don’t know
if I’m in love
if this is happiness
or a panic attack
My calm exterior is my greatest role
but the persona is finally dissipating
a crack in the mortar
a patina on far too young of a woman
Maybe an adult life of believing in
the wrong people
is perpetuating my skepticism
More than anything it’s made my constitution
far too fragile
too fragile for heartbreak
too fragile to expose love’s raw nerve
I wanted to believe in love
in romance unbound and transformative
it was not to be trusted
It’s a car crash I’ve walked away from
seemingly unscathed
But upon further inspection
my sternum is bruised
a few ribs out of place
to be touched brings excruciating pain
It left me starving, wanting more
It feels nearly parasitic
the way it feeds
I am Eve
I do not want just the apple
I want that snake to coil around me
Feed it to me
Devour me
Breathe life back into my sweaty, perfect corpse
Legs splayed open in Babylon
I Was a Ghost on Christmas
The snow was lightly falling in the yard
I had hoped that this winter
would bring me clarity
Instead it stoked the embers
of confusion
How could December
the month I was born in
the month of celebration
the month of yearly closure
be the month that everything
was falling into tiny frozen fragments
the cold nights that bled into a day
that harbored no timeline
time seemed to have no relevance
I was getting thinner
as were my nerves
perhaps due to
Letting someone touch my skin
and suck down my intellect
in the same fashion he could suck down
a drink
I was shrinking away from people
though I craved a closeness
that was ebbing away from me
At 4 a.m. all I could think of
was his breathing patterns
and California
I sobbed in the shower
hoping the hot water would
catch some of my broken
and take it down the drain
The snow was lightly falling
I, conversely, was falling
at an alarming,
unstoppable speed