The Sybil Abides in Her Therapist's Waiting Room

The past peels me off like red pared down to 

parent rock (think barn, cadaver, three-wheeled

wagon upended in the yard). Before 

red was a thing brandished (cheek paint, sequin, 

weaponized tongue). More a rank admixture 

of pepper skin oxide, city burnt to bone, color 

collapsed into ingot, cutaway graph of a 

sea floor burnished to darkest dark. Furthest 

relation from the imitation Bo tree in this room 

that suggests healing is a catchy idea 

bored into a tainted ear-mind. Or is healing, on 

the page, no different from the hyphenations in 

this poem?— another tactic to distance my skinless 

heart, watch it bursting slow-motion in airless 

sanctuary, place of forever return. Skinless as light 

orbiting itself in the denouement of anyone's longest 

day. This failed apprentice, spinning wreckage into 

filaments of farewell: one word I count on to never 

change its meaning. Ending of endings itself, never 

as clean as I'd imagine or wish, or design.

—Porridge, February 2026