My life as astrology
poetry by Eliana Gray
My life as astrology
The mental pressure must have been great
The sentimental manipulation exhausting
I am a full moon in Libra
I am a new and dangerous vocabulary
I am the worst poem you've ever written
Performed on The Voice with poetry hands
I am a star sparkling in the sky in a fixed position
I am everything I refuse to understand and more
The full moon calls for compassion and humility
A full moon occurs when the sun is opposite the moon
On this day we go down to the river and wash our bodies
On this day we grab potato peelers and learn to exfoliate our souls
On this day we make giant proclamations
about promises we never intended to keep
Seeking satisfaction elsewhere would involve secrecy
Emotional comfort may be sought in sweet food or drugs
Here is where we learn to repel ourselves
Here we sit in a hallway
The hallway is long the hallway is dark and the light at the end is a fire
Like trying to cut off my tongue without using my hands
poetry by Eliana Gray
CONTENT WARNING: gun violence. Please read at your own risk.
Like trying to cut off my tongue without using my hands
Everything is terrible all of the time and I think we've all noticed by now
Slipped it into our shot glass back over our tongues it's easier to digest
something when you don't know what it is
After the shooting people asked me if I was ok and I said yes
it's very sad with the kind of inflection you would expect
from someone who is very sad but just getting on with things you know
because that's how you do it
After the shooting we walked to the memorial and my father wept and I held him
because he was thinking about everyone's stories and I was thinking about how I was
mentally superior for knowing that death happens all the time and how
the really important issue was how our gun control laws were going to change
and how I definitely wasn't going to pay attention to it
The day the shooting happened I closed my eyes
The day the shooting happened I kept turning my phone off
The day the shooting happened my aunty and uncle saw the police
tackle a man to the ground who was trying to pick his kids up from school
How involved we are in each other's lives by now
Like life is a party thrown by your Facebook friend suggestions
and all you get to see is absolutely everything
Because life isn't about death
Because it would be stupid to base your existence on something so inevitable
Like getting a crush in the refrigerated section of the supermarket and
clutching the soup packet just a little more sensually than you would otherwise
It's grotesque really
The way we peel the scabs off each other's backs
Watch blood piling in puckered flesh and write poems about health and
healing and emotions and how we all really feel
Which is how we stay connected to each other
Which is what happens when we talk to each other
Which I suppose is the reason everytime something bad happens
people start asking each other
how they really are
But bad things are happening everywhere all the time and I'm
pretty sure we've established that we already know this so how
is it that the nerves are still so raw?
And all this electricity
Pulsing unseen through the atmosphere
Waiting patiently
For the idiot with the metal flag
Eliana Gray
Eliana Gray is an award winning writer living mostly in ÅŒtepoti, Aotearoa. Their work is like their life- sad, confronting and quite funny actually. Their work has been put many places, including their recent debut collection, Eager To Break, which is available through Girls On Key Press. You can find them on the internet @foxfoxxfox and sometimes in real life. You can find their book here: https://www.girlsonkey.com/poetryportalshop/Eager-to-Break-Eliana-Gray-PRE-ORDER-p127089532 (photo credits to Jessica Thompson-Carr)