![i am shitting blood. are you allowed to say that in a poem? will the great ghost of langston hughes run me through with a broadsword? will my mom see this and say “honey, why?” every single day i feel like my soul is prolapsing. i’m out of metaphors, mostly. i’m tired of them, their casual nothingness like a wormhole. i wouldn’t know a simile if it jumped me outside my apartment. i grant myself a pity party. i invite all my past hurts, my most recent embarrassments, the voice that was surely murmuring in the back of an old boyfriend’s head. it was there, i know, mouldering up the place, putting its dirty fucking sneakers on everything, picking its teeth with my failures. i wake up to disquiet myself. i put coins on my eyes. i demand my own head. once, i was eight and having a panic attack. it was violent and sudden. normally i would say it was like a thunderstorm in may, ripping up the crocuses with its howls. this was not like that because it was just pain. just my own homegrown tragedy, untranslatable to even myself. in the now, my mom asks how i am doing. i say: i think my heart is full of bile, i think i would benefit from leeches, something capable of sucking out the sludge. my mind feels like a sewer grate in hell or maybe just boston. i feel jealous of every filmy-eyed hare hare in the park. o to be carried in a dog’s mouth to whatever peace is possible after running wild & free. i am used to coming home to pain. i know to grab the fob under the flowerpot, to knock my shoulder into the doorway just so. i take off my shoes and pad around in my sloughing socks. i say “hi honey, i missed you. like, so bad.”'](https://sandjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/PITY-PARTY-TABLE-FOR-1-by-Levi-Cain-SAND-ONLINE-image-754x1024.png)
Levi Cain is a gay Black writer from Boston, MA. They are a 2022 Mass Cultural Council fellow, a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and a former Sundress Academy of the Arts fellow. Their work can be found in Shenandoah Literary, beestung, The Slowdown, and elsewhere. Their first chapbook, dogteeth., was published by Ursus Americanus Press in 2020. This piece appears in SAND 24.
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From Pantyhose for Daisy by Dewi de Nijs Bik tr. Emma Rault
Poetry | Issue 26: Shifting (translated
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