A Note About Goethe

How to… be better. How to be different. How to not be a porcelain man. How to see love and drink without choking, how to eat without making a mess. Jess says I am her world. I say she is my world, she says, we have different definitions of the word world. Ha-olam, I thought we were el mundo. She says my stretch marks run and raise like the ridges of mountains, I think my thighs may be algebraic slope, y=mx+b and how many more rises can we see before we fall into negative space? I haven’t cut myself in a year and a half but I’m always looking for loopholes, how to be better, like the butterfly lighter tickling my knees. Or the flame on a tea light kissing the underside of my wrists. If I sharpen my nails, drag them across my forearms, will it count? Fuck it if I don’t tempt myself, have a Leatherman multitool under my bed, how to be better. How to not be a porcelain man. Chemo is what kills you, not the nodule in your breast. Benign, for now, Covid wasn’t the first pandemic. Maybe if it were the fifteen-hundreds, if I grew up a glove maker, the worst drug I’d do is mushrooms, the worst tragedy I’d write is King Lear. I love her like breathing, or maybe, I need her like breath. My chest will rise with expectation and fall with humanness, I cry about the differences that glare at me through the whites of her eyes, I sleep to meet death. I sleep until I wake up with tears in my eyes, I let them fall and pretend they are knives, pretend they are dripping with blood like that of my ear’s pierce from the safety button. Love... where? Friends leave, daughterhood bites, edged teeth like a mean old dog. I smile like I’m looking for affection, have to study for a midterm, have to sink into flesh. I can’t take any more accommodations, I’ve always been a better employee than student. I want something to happen. I want to get cancer. I want to hurt myself so profoundly I end up in a residential. I know if I do I’ll lose my job, my friends, my freedom and my GPA. I make incantations out of the names. At my roommate’s party I fall and Ty tries to pull me back up. Mephistopheles said, I am part of that power that would do evil constantly. The first time I bought a vibrator I was fifteen. I was nineteen the last time I’d love a man. I didn’t get a nosebleed until I was twenty. I still chew on my tongue, either a stim, or tardive dyskinesia. I said it three years ago. It ruins my weekend plans. My history professor talks about religion. Ghosts exist, but you must not talk to them. (Poor devil. What can you offer to me?)

Ronit May is a twenty year old social work student at Ramapo College. Their work has been published in The Closed Eye Open’s Issue XI, The Blood Pudding, StreetLit, and more. They are working on their second chapbook, A Sentence Is A Garden You Stumble Through (Hoping To Pick A Word So Beautiful).