GRIEF Poem: MIND TRAP, by Naira Jain

i can’t believe every door i open leads back to this attic. a rusty door, a squeaky door, a set of French doors, the Monsters Inc. door, a door you have to throw your shoulder against to shove it open, a door that feels like it will splinter right off its hinges if you twist the knob just so. all lead back to the place where you twisted me at unnatural angles and strung me up amidst the cotton candy insulation fiber. you are spooling out the threads of my skeleton slowly, so slowly that it doesn’t ache in the moment — but over time i notice my body beginning to fold in on itself as it unravels. if you made me into a blood eagle it would be more romantic, i think.

i’ve always hated menthol cigarettes, but now i exclusively buy them because they taste like the inner right corner of your mouth. like growing stale, not old, together. i pray with every inhale that they will be the thing to make my brain bleed and burst rather than your soft, battered body curled up inside my skull and raging to get out. please put the machete down. i promise i want you gone just as much as you want to remember the taste of fresh blood and fresher air, but my brain is the one fucking place that doesn’t have a door for some reason. i went to the doctor in hopes that they’d assault me with a stethoscope and tell me my problem was arrhythmic fibrillation and early onset schizophrenia instead of stale insulation fiber for a heart and a voluntary thought pattern that would
make Schrödinger’s stomach turn. but i sat alone in the operating room for six years because the office door only ever opened to that damn attic. put the fucking machete down.

Author: poetryfest

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