Secret Garden
2023-2024
Abandona Puesto
By Saint
By Saint
Espero que implosione,
Allá en lo hondo,
Y en tus últimos momentos
Mis manos en tu cuello,
Agua llenando el vacío.
¿Acaso no te acuerdas?
Cuando la llovizna cubría
Nuestras caras,
Sudor en la frente.
La última vez que me viste,
Sentados en mi cama,
Ya sabias que te irías
A lo profundo.
Abandona puesto,
Y al final,
¿Que has echo
Con lo que palpitaba
Dentro de mi?
- Dentro de mi pecho?
The Vivisection
By Jameson Gillihan
By Jameson Gillihan
When I met the doctor, thinking nothing wrong,
He promptly diagnosed me. There was something wrong.
Let me feel your heartbeat, he said, let me hear its hum—
Recognize the reticent resounding of its drum—
Shouldn’t it seem stronger? Shouldn’t we hear more?
Are you unfamiliar with the rhythm of your core?
I have the solution. Put your trust in me;
Correct your constitution and you’ll be who you should be.
Well, harm me handsome, doctor. Make me work like new.
Help my heart to do the things the heart is here to do.
I signed the consent form. He wasted not a beat
and set a surgeon’s date night with the heart he hoped to meet.
Feeling all aflutter, I anesthetized myself
and woke up bruised and bloody on the path to perfect health.
I received instructions from the doctor for my care.
I made no deductions of the doctor or his care.
He wrote I may manifest some pulse- or piercing pain,
that healing’s halfway mental, that something in the brain
would have to intertwine the old nerves in between the new—
through this agonizing process, my heart would be debuted.
Time passes so slowly.
I couldn’t wait.
I had been so
wholly
impatient.
I couldn’t take it.
I needed pain.
I needed to know this all wasn’t in vain.
Invested in this injury as proof that I had changed,
I dressed in scrubs and surgeon’s gloves to operate again.
Sharpening my scalpel, I carved into my chest,
I opened, operating, I was bleeding, I was bled—
The wound unfolded freely, the blade I barely felt;
The place he’d cut to cure me was the place I cut myself.
Perhaps this was my treatment.
Perhaps I’m built for pain.
Perhaps what hurt me once gave me the means to hurt again.
Now I was left wanting. I spindled strands of vein
to part the chains imprisoning the precious flesh he’d saved;
Squeezing fists of viscera, I squinted to compare
this body with the one I’d been before the doctor’s care.
Would I know the difference? What was there to find
behind the ribs I pried apart to witness his design?
I grasped it in my fingers. I pulled it from my chest
and freed the famished muscle from my penitential breast.
Rich and ripe for harvest, ravenous and raw,
the organ oozing in my grip hitched wide its dripping maw.
I recognized it readily. This heart—
It was wrong.
This heart I knew at once though I had never known my own—
This heart—
It hungered.
This heart beheld a feast.
In my palm pulsed the surgeon’s heart—
Finally released.
King
By Nightshade Lily
By Nightshade Lily
The king sits high
On a skeleton throne
He sighs a long breath,
In a kingdom alone,
The skeletons grab
The skeletons cry -
You mangled us here
You let us all die,
Now look at you sat
All proud in your throne
Gazing over,
a kingdom alone
we gave you truth
we gave you life
what has it done? -
they cry out in strife
the king stares off,
into unknown
as he breaths the last breath
of a kingdom alone
Rind
By Ava Mae
By Ava Mae
My wandering mind lands on a garden.
A place of plump peaches and peace.
And here I realize,
The rinds of fruit baskets leave much to be desired.
Beyond that flesh lies the tender meat
That is to be taken and tasted and told of its beauty.
And I am content in knowing,
I am the rind.
I am skin sought out to live in a garbage garden.
Gone is the pity placed upon me by this produce.
She is longed for,
She is loved,
I am lost.
Left to the dirt and damned dumpsters.
Her sweet songs sing bellies starved to full.
Her sweet songs sing bellies starved to full.
A gift I cannot give.
I am a girl.
While she is a god.
As Persephone to the pomegranate’s pearls,
Pomona’s abundant apples.
She is a symbol of so much pleasure and peace.
While I am only purpose.
Plant me to parent her.
Pick and part me
To behold her beauty.
It does not hurt, it heals.
To know beyond my bark
I am beauty.
I’ve made and mothered more words than I can speak.
And to know that is what lies behind these teeth.
That heals.
Helping harvest the fragrant fruit within me, too.
A Grave Image
By Grace Healey
By Grace Healey
The stone cherub in the garden is
An existentially petrified emblem of youth.
I remember the day we found it
Storm sodden,
Driftwood imposter in the sand of a far away beach.
Angel child doomed to drive home and sleep on top of my
Chocolate lab.
I’ve been growing up my whole life and it’s odd because it feels like stages but I know seconds
don’t hold hands as they walk away from you.
I lost the little girl I should have been at fifteen,
but I still feel pieces of her sometimes,
when I go out and water the garden.