Skin

By Cara Nelissen

​I’ve been sleeping with the white noise
machine ever since I heard something
 
breathe beside me. At night, I scale the walls,
suck up its excess moisture.
 
This house would be so happy
 
to see me gone. Like a homesick ghost,
I try for the edge of myself
 
and feel nothing.  You hold me down
and I locate my shape in the empty beneath you. 
 
This is not how we’ve imagined
ourselves, but now’s not the time
 
for abstractions. Your weight
on my lungs, I find my breath.
 
Is this what it means
to be good & would you say
 
it’s worth it. Do you think snakes 
grieve the skin they outgrow.
 
Do they crave
that lesser version of themselves. 

---

Before all of this, a Valentine’s Day party

By ​Cara Nelissen

where everyone writes their desires on labels
and stick them to their bodies. Unsurprisingly,
 
I overthink it and end up writing nothing. In a room
thick with pink smoke, six of us are on the bed,
 
a web of bodies. We talk about animals
and I say something like
 
I don’t think of myself as a crow
But I’m attracted to their emotional ambivalence.
 
J spits whiskey into my mouth
for nourishment and it works.
 
This is the least afraid I’ve been
in weeks. If I had written a desire,
 
it would have been this: a home
away from time, a shell between
 
my skin and the world. I want us to stay
like this, but we’re small upstream pebbles
 
pushed down by a faceless
river, only briefly
 
holding still
when we meet
 
a space
where our bodies fit.

---

Presence

By Cara Nelissen

In the winter, I move to a different part of town.
The streets are full of bones, but the Dairy Queen
is open until 5 am. A snowflake melts against my lip
and I want it to last. Some days I don’t
remember how I got here. Now
is not a good time to start living
in the moment. I hope you don’t
remember me. I feel
so different and the past
has become unlikely.
 
This is not a ghost story,
it just feels like one.                    

---

Structure

By ​Cara Nelissen

I’m at the corner store, waiting for the end of the world to go out of fashion.
I’m trying to maintain a sense of optimism, so I eat half a bag of Swedish Fish
and save the rest. I have forgotten whatever I said I would remember. My body
is a vacant home, vines rooting under my skin. I have only two fears now: everything
that might happen, and everything that might not. I text you to ask if you’re watching
the crows flying east at dusk. Notice how they always know which way is home.​

---

Cara Nelissen is a queer writer living in Vancouver. Her work has been published in various literary magazines and she is the author of the chapbook Pray For Us Girls (Rahila’s Ghost Press, 2019). She is the reviews editor at Plenitude magazine.