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​                                                                                August 18th

                                                She slides her black ankle boot off her left foot, doesn’t miss a beat.  The
                                                window is eight feet tall.  Each floor is two stories.  She thinks this is
                                                perfect.  It’s riding up the small roller coaster humps of her rib cage,
                                                the ones that always come before a big drop.  She puts her hands up, how
                                                similar this is to being taken hostage.  The paint is a dull off white,
                                                peeling to reveal the splintering brown wood underneath.  She doesn’t want
                                                the elevator lurch of a sinking stomach. She didn’t know what she wanted
                                                and the picture is still fuzzy.  She picks at flakes of paint and watches
                                                them snowing onto the sidewalk below.  Maybe the picture is the problem,
                                                the pictures she imagines descending down a stairwell.  They’re nailed into
                                                thin air, into a complete fabrication of possible, into something that
                                                doesn’t even stand.  She presses crescent moons into the wood with her
                                                nails, grips the window frame until her knuckles begin to mimic their pale.
                                                She abandoned the first thing that felt right for the last thing that felt
                                                familiar, and that’s the only reflection of it through tonight’s distortion.
                                                Slowly, she pulls herself up into the window, stands on the radiator and
                                                stares at Cow Palace across the street.  She can’t stand the idea of alone,
                                                and when she has the epitomic stamp of love binding her she wants nothing
                                                more than the low moan of a door jamb in her own empty house.  She wants
                                                whatever it is she doesn’t have, and she doesn’t have a firm grip on the
                                                handle-bars.  There is a cool breeze blowing at her body, the type of cool
                                                she can never be.  The unfeeling cool, the detached cool, the cool that
                                                forgets your skin and goes straight to your bones, reminds you how hollow
                                                you are.  She has her arms up, she tried to get air and not think about the
                                                approaching drop, she tried to tie two hands together and meant the double
                                                knot to stay tight enough to link more than railways and causeways and bad
                                                trips.  The air smells like the ocean smothered in smoke.  The entire city
                                                exhales.  She didn’t expect to unravel so quickly. She pulled the cord at
                                                the right stop, she rode the fourteen bus into the ass end of nowhere and
                                                fell asleep on her own mind.  Her body begins to bend toward the sky, her
                                                body is all spine and petals.  She found you, smoking and polished,
                                                churched and hell-bent on nothing, deliberate in your painstaking numbness
                                                and wine drunk-pessimism.  Her world ended every time she tried to walk
                                                down your stairs.  The lights below her change to red, a bus burps black
                                                smoke from its tailpipe and people limp from the doors like wounded mice
                                                escaping a maze.  There were no records on the wall of any kind of
                                                permanence, any kind of normal. You wouldn’t belong to her history of bad
                                                vibrations and undesirable un-doings. She’s got too many loose threads for
                                                the fear rattling the bars of your smile.  She steps up onto the window
                                                ledge, splinters work their way under her nails. She kicks her right shoe
                                                out the window and counts how many times it bounces after the initial
                                                impact.  She wants the sunflowers to bend toward her instead of the sun.  She
                                                wants unreasonable truths and farfetched lies. She wants the bridge to come
                                                down so no one else ever has to jump.  She stands on the fourth floor,
                                                looking down at Daly City, imagining the inside of the mess she’ll make.  She
                                                projects it onto the sidewalk, a Rorschach of human splattered where she
                                                fell. She fell so hard.  She fell heavy and true. This won’t be by accident.
                                                This won’t be an act upon her. This won’t be a decision by default.  All
                                                her decisions are by default. All her decisions are still her fault; she
                                                wants to be the fault line on the California coast. She wants to bring the
                                                buildings down with her.  She holds one leg steady on the window ledge.  Her
                                                right foot steps over the windowsill and grips concrete with its naked
                                                toes, drinks in the red bricks, so dull and vibrant all at once.  Her
                                                entire body hangs like a sail, a Salem steak splitting her open. She
                                                crucified herself on the fog rolling in over Cow Palace. One foot inside
                                                the apartment and the rest of her was ready to jump.  She wants you to see
                                                her, beautiful and bold, a sail ready to balloon open into the wind.  She
                                                looks down at her shoe and starts to cry. She leans forward until only her
                                                fingertips tie her to this world.  She doesn’t want to belong inside of
                                                anything so small as a human hand.  She doesn’t want your grip on her
                                                waist. She wants the caustic negligence of your hopelessness so she can say
                                                she wants something real and be comfortable knowing there’s no possibility
                                                of home.  She wants dissonance.  She wants the feminine motif to be heard,
                                                she wants to crack open the sonata and let hell rain down on her. She
                                                doesn’t care if it burns, she thinks scars suit her well. Her left foot
                                                stays inside the room.  The fog swallows what’s left of the day.  She can
                                                feel her pulse in her teeth, her throat jumps forward with each beat.  Her
                                                throat says *Lucy, we have so much fight left.*  When the contents settle,
                                                she shakes them up.  When shaking isn’t interesting, she throws the snow
                                                globe across the room and watches the light refract off the broken shards
                                                of glass.  Cars honk.  Nobody looks up. Everything about her screams for
                                                disorder.  Except the photos on the stairwells and the cottage in the woods
                                                made of dark stone. There are a thousand books in every room.  There aren’t
                                                even any stairs.  It’s a one story cottage, barely big enough for two.  She
                                                wants the portraits to be nailed into something.  She cannot hang onto
                                                nothing.  She’s a white sail, puffed up with pride and full of hot air.  She
                                                lies so much she doesn’t know what the truth looks like anymore.  The fog
                                                started rolling into her room, pushed her back and made her body heavy.  She
                                                found truth on the fourth floor. If you didn’t talk her down, she would
                                                have jumped.  The Richter scale would have tipped in her favor, the golden
                                                gate bridge would have folded its hands over her to cover up the hole she
                                                left.  She is a part of you.  Her nails left bite marks on the window, she
                                                stuck her foot back inside her boot and rode the elevator down 8 stories.  She
                                                doesn’t want everything to break open on the pavement, she just doesn’t
                                                know any other way.  Each floor has two stories.  She wants to know what it
                                                tastes like at the bottom of the hill.  She’s never made it past the small
                                                humps.  Her hands are up, she’ll fly out if you don’t hold on, but if you
                                                hold too tight, she’ll jump.  There are always at least two stories.


                                                      MOLLY KAT has been writing since she was five years old. Her first poems
                                                      were scrawled in cerulean blue Crayola crayons. She is a graduate student
                                                      of Literature and Literary Theory at Binghamton University and has work
                                                      published or forthcoming in Omega Magazine, Foothill Poetry Journal,
                                                      Pedastal Magazine, Muzzle, Corvus, Toad the Journal, Samizdat,  
                                                      H_NGM_N, and many others. She is working on a manuscript called Lucy, from       
                                                      which AUGUST 18TH is an excerpt. Lucy is a third person experimental prose    
                                                      poetry narrative about a young woman exploring the parameters of existence post-   
                                                      trauma.



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