This is just a story.

That first night you held me
Longer than I expected
And I fed off you in the night
Like a moss, I embraced your skin.

It’s the last night now
Dry and disappointing,
Like the heel on a bread loaf,
This is what’s left.

...................................................

Extricating my body from yours,
You pulled out in multiple ways last night
And we slept as though I was not there
(the empty comfort of cuddling air)

I beg you to
Hold me lover.
I have no need of blankets
Give me the palms of your hands to wrap around.
Why is this bed such a desolate ground?

Posted by Alissa McCourt at 12:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Like the insect rustling across my blanket,
Your memory spooked me from sleep.
And I shook, holding my pillow like a weapon,
Keeping watch in the dark.
I am alone now,
With books as bedtime companions.
I hand feed myself when necessary,
Nursing back the appetites you took when you left.
The insects gone, it dissolved into the dark,
Oblivious to the damage its entrance provoked.
I thought I’d left this fear behind,
Filed away with all those other childhood irrationalities.
But now when I dream, you hold me,
and your kisses shake me awake into dangers I never anticipated.
Leave the light on love.
I vacate the bed in favor of a more naïve companion.
Curling into the couch, I give in to your ghost.
This room is yours. Take it.
I acquiesce.

Posted by Alissa McCourt at 12:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A Re-Education of the Organs:

21 years go by and during the last few you’ve noticed this new weight
That punctuates your existence
Putting pressure on your sternum and crushing your tits flat
Into the slats of your rib cage.
These last few years you’ve learned to flinch at the touch of
Your own shadow and disguise your female markings with
Bars of plaid and buttons on the wrong side,
Cologne to cover the pheromones,
Letting body hair grow like moss
Each tendril exuding an aura that screams
Fuck off.

There’s a new weight now that’s buried under your stomach
Like a mold spreading roots into previously functioning organs,
It oozed into the crevices of your brain and you’re back to 3rd person narration,
Hiding in a tense that gives you space from a self you don’t remember.

Its all reruns and flashbacks now,
static on every station with neon flashing episodes egging the insides of your skull.
You get used to the smell.
Its all twisted limbs and 2am insanities, flopping fishlike on the mattress
In a lake of sweat and the excretion of very bad dreams.

Its taken time gone by for me to try and ensnare in language the
Circumstances and happenings
The “what went down� on that December night between us
Two persons, together on my twin bed lavender sheets.
Time gone by and still I struggle to articulate, define
To wrestle into intelligibility the events of one night.
Suffering does not tolerate forgetting
And the body has dark ways of making itself known.
The heart is not content to cry alone in its bucket of dark.

I’ve learned this fear that lurks behind my eyes.
It drops pebbles in the depths of my iris to transform every strong jaw into a razor blade,
Every handshake into pillaging fingers
Every kiss leaves the taste of cum
Since December
Since you.

Posted by Alissa McCourt at 9:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In this dream
I am carrying an enormous burlap backpack full of books with blue covers. It hurts to walk, the weight is too much to carry. Men in white vans keep rolling down their windows to ask if I want a ride. They whistle, jeer, and call me “the blond� which is odd considering I am a brunette. I shake my head and wait for the next van to pull up, wondering how long I can hold out before I accept a ride.

-----------------------

In this dream
I am on campus walking out of class. He comes up next to me on my right side and touches my arm. I worry my heart is beating too fast for its delicate tissue; it may explode from stress like a rabbit, staining my ribcage with tomato juice. His arms glide around my sides and I fall into the familiarity of his body against mine.
I forget that he once pillaged my body and burned the soil of my soul.
I forget that his hands are nail files.
I forget that his body is a dying fish gasping and flopping on the deck of my breast.
I only remember how much I loved the smell of his laugh and the taste of his smile.

Posted by Alissa McCourt at 8:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In this dream
I am buried in the limbs of a tree.
High in the air, I am surrounded by emerald jewel leaves, squinting like the inside of a pomegranate.
Every so often, I am flung up past the branches high into the sky and fall back to my perch. I suspect trampolines are hidden inside the bark. If I scraped away the tree skin I would find springs and plastic mesh.
I am spying through holes in the glossy foliage to the earth below.

I see Him.
The man who’s ejaculate fed on my organs like a fungus, coating my lungs, heart, and kidneys with a yellow resin, crusty and rotten.
I want him.

He can smell my hunger; he can smell the slow decay of my insides. His eyes find mine high above him.
Without warning, he envelops me. Phantom hands are on my face, tracing lines from my jaw into the tangle of my hair. My eyes are strobe lights, punctuated with blackouts. The world is spinning green jewels and warm hands coated with fungus. I melt into the waxy yellow green moss in the crevices of the bark.
I acquiesce.

Posted by Alissa McCourt at 7:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Burn:

“Can I see your journal?� he asks.
“No� I reply.
“Why not?� He demands, “What don’t you want me to see?� He sits back in an imitation of relaxation, but the subtly condescending dimple in his left cheek is a warning siren. With each twitch of his lip, it deepens, and I wonder how such a small indentation can create such a vacuumous silence.
My inner monologue is a scathing rat scratching at the backs of my eyeballs, but I’m only brave inside the safety of my skull, so I say;
“You just can’t.�

“What if I just take it from you? What if I don’t give you a choice?� He murmurs quietly, as if I will be seduced by a purr. “You haven’t yet discovered what I’m fully capable of.�
His words are a caress, a gesture implementing the intimacy of a cheese grater in action.

My limbs stiffen against him as my blood frosts into glass crystals against the membrane of my veins and my fingertips compress, leaving indentations on the journals cover. His eyes linger, caressing my visage as one would apply a poultice of blistering wax.
He leans forward and kisses me. He doesn’t kiss me all that often. Mostly he breathes on my face; his jaw slack; a gasping fish pressed against my cheek. His hands slip around my waist and I collapse out of my chair into his arms on the floor. I feel him pull off my last layer with a tugging motion, it’s an odd sensation, like peeling off a gummy price tag, I’m sure there are little sticky bits left behind.

Damn these nights,
Of self-medicated torturous blunder
Finding yourself beneath this weight again,
As if turning on the faucet behind your eyes will save you from him..
Too late.
This one penetrated deep,
Like an ill timed burn.

Posted by Alissa McCourt at 6:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Love and Eels:

On the final night they spent together, he made pasta. No one had ever cooked for her before. She was intoxicated by the comfort, the domesticity of the act. It was probably a symptom of something Oedipal, not enough care from her father or some shit. She’d tried to brush the thought away. Freud is an ideological recreational drug best used sparingly, and she was no first time user. Side effects: rage, diabolical wishes that ones vagina actually would grow teeth and initiate a spree of vigilante justice, the consumption of all the condiments in ones fridge (including an entire can of cake frosting and half a carton of sour cream) and occasionally the death of independent mental capacity. She’d concentrated instead on exploring the grooves of his bare back and shoulders hoping her hands or mouth might uncover a flimsy crack in his demeanor, a place to burrow up under his skin.

Freud spent a portion of his youth dissecting hundreds of eels in search of their reproductive organs, attempting to disprove Aristotle’s hypothesis that they birthed from the guts of the soil. He was unsuccessful and changed the direction of his studies, leading to his eventual explorations of psychoanalysis and sexuality. 132 years later, a woman holds a man, and she wishes for a knife, or an organ, capable of penetrating and infecting his body, dissolving him into a shuddering mass of adoring jelly inside a translucent sack of skin. This is what he has done to her, and they call him a man. She stays quiet and acquiesces to his pillaging hands and loveless kiss. Thanks to the elusive gonads of an eel, there are dangerous books about women like her, women who dream of reciprocating the piercing, destruction of their soul…

Posted by Alissa McCourt at 7:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

That was my Love:

Part 1:

“Are you this ridiculous with every strange woman you meet?� I chide softly, smiling at him through the side curtain of my hair. His lip twitches with foreign emotion, reminding me of the consistent unreadable quality of his mouth. His cheeks subtly undulate and bulge, stretching to conceal the epicenter of this shaking. I wonder if he is meant to be appreciated without vision, like Braille, maybe his lips have to be touched. My heart is ringing obnoxiously loud and it’s probably only a matter of time before everyone catches on where the noise is coming from. I hate being the idiot who can’t remember to put her organs on vibrate.

He considers me out of the corner of his eye.
“You have the most astounding laugh,�, he replies quietly.

Part 2:

While engaged in a stare down contest with a pen he left on her desk, she makes a mental promise to herself to never again allow a man to fix or touch an object she can’t later dispose of after the inevitable fin. Unlike this pen, which will soon find residency in the garbage under the sink, the closet door he reattached is a little more permanent.

The objects he fixed for her tremor slightly under her gaze. If he’s gone will the lamp come loose? These surfaces pulse, rippling like waves with the echo of his thin fingers, as if he’d impregnated the walls with rhythms akin to his blood flow. Couldn’t she have changed her own light bulbs?
She turns off the lights and tentatively sits on the floor near the fridge, fearing what unearthed memories lurk beneath the tile. Do memories live autonomously? More importantly, are they subject to the laws of osmosis, capable of diffusing through the semi-permeable layers of her thighs? She considers phoning her mother to ask if her 9th grade chemistry notes are still boxed away in the basement. Someone must know.

Posted by Alissa McCourt at 4:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In this dream,
I am standing on a graying prairie in autumn, the air is filled with the moans of flora morning their ephemeral charms.
I am attempting to find myself.
I stand with a thin silvery rope clenched in my hands, pulled tight by unseen forces straining against it in the distance.
I haul myself forward, one arms length at a time, but with each gain on the rope, I feel the air compress into a razor and my skin splits against its pressure.
I keep reining in the rope; my limbs grow textured with red stinging gashes, meticulous and in a grid pattern. My thighs are waffles.
Finally, I spot my tug of war partner at the end of the rope. It is a magnificent grey ostrich, regal and shimmering. This bird is what I’ve been missing, the piece of myself that’s run wild, the piece I need to tame, no, not tame…but exist with, touch. I need to know that it is real, that it exists underneath my fingers. I need to merge with this feeling.

I am close enough to stroke the aging feathers, to see the black marble eye searching my face. We stand quietly trembling, together as a pair in the heart of a dying landscape.

The ostrich whips its head back and runs, the rope rasps across my hands, dying itself red and wet.

My stomach is slumping out my feet. At certain angles around my knees it catches, sticking slightly, like oatmeal.
All I have to say is ouch.

I watch the bird disappear into the horizon again and I wonder if I have enough skin left to do it all over again.

Posted by Alissa McCourt at 3:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Night Terrors:

In this dream
I am standing in a room extending endlessly in all directions, strung with draping white fabric and exuding the faint smell of latex.

I turn and in the midst of this blank oasis is a blond baby, sitting and staring. Her hair floats against her skull like wisps of cotton and her skin is too pink, raw, like the shiny flesh under a scab.

I blink and the whites of my eye seize the chance to suck my irises back into my eye sockets. Like a trampoline, they pop back with a squeak and I see that this little girl is no baby.

She is a massive swarm of baby mice, blind and raw pink skinned. The swarm pours over the ground like a tidal wave inside a glass of spilling water. The clicks of tiny teeth echo the sounds of hunger. My skin itches in anticipation.
Is this a nature video?
I’m not quite sure I understand the metaphor

---------------------------------------------------------------

In this dream
I am riding alone on a motorbike through a construction zone at purple dusk.

The street lamps and car lights are glowing fire orbs, floating like fuzzy cotton balls. I am navigating in-between roadblocks and street rubble and my hands are shaking. My bike shudders and wobbles with each breath I take.

The wind buzzes against my face as I pass under a bridge and I careen through a red light. The stop light is the sun, which sets under bridges in the Midwest. No wonder the air is purple.

Emerging from the hot light I am snagged by a small series of rubber balls. These are police lights, and they bounce like tin cans trailing behind me. I hit my brakes and fall to the side, bringing the bike down on top of me. I curl underneath it and weep into the asphalt with relief. I wasn’t headed anywhere pleasant.

The police officer is wearing construction boots and has flowers in his hair. He pulls me to my feet and positions himself behind me talking in a light and pleasant tone, only I can’t understand anything he says. The words are out of order, like beads strung on a necklace.

His tone is so kind, perhaps he doesn’t understand that I don’t want his hands on my thighs or his face in my neck.
But we share no common language, he can’t hear my repeated “No.�

Posted by Alissa McCourt at 6:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What she meant to say:

Like a well know song
You slip into my heart.
But lower,
Hanging like a sock filled with water.

Forgive my porous nature,
But I sweat you.

Posted by Alissa McCourt at 3:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

1. Pillow Talk

I woke up this morning and you were a wet dream
That forgot it wasn’t supposed to be real.
I walked home still covered in the sugary grime
Of your flesh memory.
It won’t scrub off in the shower.
You’re stronger than soap.

2. Ebony

Heavy with the ink of one long perverted love poem I didn’t mean to write,
These pages scream, echoing like bells.
Do you picture me with black hair?

3. Siren Song

I got lost in you
While drowning on recycled breath
In the cradle between your shoulder blades.
can you remember a time when we didn’t do this?

We loved each other, didn’t we?
I’d forgotten.

4. Gods girlfriend

My journal is you.
I see it in the shuddery stilted way
I scraped my hand across the page.
(like a cup kisses concrete)

I consumed the cut glass validation you offered,
Cutting my lips on each caress.

I’ve been wasting time.
The ink knows.

Posted by Alissa McCourt at 6:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ritual:

My teapot is chirping with resounding rings,
As if it is bending
And it will soon break.

This twisting noise escalates
And the water shrieks
In a cloud of injected smoke.

Boiling hurts.

Posted by Alissa McCourt at 6:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Cocoon:

I tucked myself naked into my bed
And I wished for the day when I could lie there
Senseless
Wrapped in the nothing of my blankets

But I am afraid to sleep.
My dreams are where I am most dangerous.

Posted by Alissa McCourt at 6:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Old Breath:

My grandfathers breath wheezes like a cat locked out on the porch.

This room is filled with leftovers and I want them reheated.
I’m not at home here.
The customs are unfamiliar, like a museum, I expect guards.

I’m attempting to navigate
with maps of old photographs,
the old stories.
I guess you had to be there.

I hear my sister’s fingers tapping a computer keyboard,
And I follow these clicking breadcrumbs home.

Posted by Alissa McCourt at 6:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)