retrograde

By Hope Van Der Merwe

// carbon monoxide detector //
[END] [END] [END]
Clock: 4:03 AM
            fuck.

my movement professor says sleeping is practicing for death.
                                      they call it corpse pose.
                                      savasana
                                      sava = sanskrit for corpse, asana = sanskrit for posture.
                                      corpse posture. corpse pose. sleeping = dying. it’s all the same, isn’t it?

((( sometimes i’m afraid if i sleep i will die.
sometimes i lay awake until the sun fractures and
i have to blink away the crumbs of daybreak with rusty eyes.
sometimes my head gets stuck, useless attic that it is,
bankrupts itself over effigies of clothes-hanger-men salivating
in the shadowed corners of the bedroom
/heaving/hungering/harrowing/haunting/
image: bathtub of body parts/dismembered head torso arms/
my therapist says i almost have ocd [anxiety with rumination]
suggested i sleep with a nightlight to help me [stop torturing
myself] in the dark. )))

​Clock: 4:39 AM

​//: GOOGLE SEARCH //:
            < am i gay quiz >
            < how to tell if you are gay >
            < what do you do if you think you are gay >

​((( sometimes i can’t tell if i really am gay or if i just made it up [intrusive
thought] it’s like i don’t know myself sometimes [intrusive thought] tried to
cure myself but there isn’t a remedy strong enough for this [intrusive thought]
i drank laudanum twice and couldn’t even die right. tell me, how does one stop
trying to exorcise oneself when one is convinced one is in need of exorcism?
how to stop gutting oneself like a fish when one keeps handing oneself the
knife? )))

Clock: 4:44 AM
            i don’t think there’s a word for what i am.

​it is all rather complicated, isn’t it, this business of being?
i have found myself to be in unceasing retrograde.
i am not quite sure how to go on.

---

becoming

By Hope Van Der Merwe

i crawl across the murky threshold
of my womanhood

peach pit palms reaching
as if to fellate the moon:
i am exhumed.

there is something to be said
for this business of having--
to be possessed, in the possession of someone else--
i emerge from my catacomb reincarnated
with a vestal desire to be consumed:

at sunfall we smoke a joint outside the bar
choking on cheap grass over verses of feminist poetry

i am overfed on the image of her
standing there with calcified moonlight
stitched into her willowy frame.

this, i think, this is becoming.

tonight, the men swarm in droves
howling and whistling and salivating.
i am not a nice woman; i bark like a dog
bare my teeth
snarl so roughly that i am gutted.
if they are going to act like animals
why shouldn’t i act like one too?
it works. “psycho bitch.”

we take the blue line home. run a bath.
hold each other and cry.
i fold myself into her, softly fettered.
ready to be swallowed.

think, i have been a woman for a long time.
​
when will our bodies stop
being acts of resistance?

---

Hope Van Der Merwe is an actor, playwright, and poet currently studying at York University’s BFA Acting Conservatory. Her first play, Something Wicked premiered at York University’s 2020 playGround Festival and received a half-reading in an interview with Kate Hennig for The Canadian Plaything’s Playwright to Playwright series, sponsored by the Playwright’s Guild of Canada's PlayConnect program. Hope’s writing contributions to Unhushed Theatre Collective’s Swallow This Skin were also featured in Toronto Fringe’s 2021 Main Festival. This is her first official publication as an adult.