Myka Gayles Greene
scene: me in my pink bedroom ripping posters of she who shall not be named off the wall. i created shrines to her on every wall; i studied her face, the curls of her hair, the siren call of her gaze. i cried on the floor because she was unattainable, the devastation was harsh. for a week i sulked and stopped talking, trying to mimic the grieving procedures i read about in victorian england. i had seven large posters in total and i crawled the eyes out of each before taking them down and ripping them apart. the icon was in fragments, like a rock thrown through stained glass murals of a church. i tried shoving the ripped paper down my throat, eating the nose, the lips,the hair of her, but my body refused to swallow. i reached down for the pieces on my bedroom floor and hauled them downstairs, past my sister watching tv in the living room, into the backyard. i put the paper in a trash bin we never used and went inside to grab the box of matches that was on a shelf above the stove. i returned to the bin and grabbed the soggy mounds of poster stored in my cheeks that hung onto thin vessels of spit. for a moment it looked like the great lakes coming out of my mouth. i tried to strike a match but forgot i never learned how to. i left the wet paper there and replaced the trashcan’s top.
fifteen minutes later i took a place on the floor next to my sister in front of the tv and felt something under my tongue. a near dissipated fragment of paper. it showed one of her fingers, the bottom half cut off, the tip visible and painted deep magenta. obsession is the aftermath of desire and the prelude of hatred. i haven’t learned to desire without anticipating that monster - the insatiable untrained in realistic boundaries. who devoured who?