Alice

The trees shall have ink dark roots by the lake when they fish my body from the water.

Girl found dead.
Her hair hung in streaks before her face, on her lips there was a trace of blood.

The night before it was so black that all I could see was
                                                                                                the hands that stretched through the wall to come greet me
Their thin fingers, the bony knuckles, the knobby wrists—
                                                                                                                  They scared me.
                                                                                          They weren't real, but they did. I think one day they may kill me.
                                          I'll run, and run, and run but they are stuck to my eyes
Everywhere I go will be a stranger knocking on the window. Everywhere I go I fear I have woken up dead. The barrell of a gun is pressed against my head, the taste of iron stuck in the back of my throat.
I'll wake with blood on my hands, and it will be real enough. I can smell it. It makes me nauseous. I see it everywhere – in pomegranates and in flowers and cranberry sauce and rather than sugar I only taste bile.
I bolt at the sound of footsteps,
                                                      and I only know to find the water.

I tread it without care, trashing when I begin to sink, like I want to live, like I don't understand why death chased me here

Because I do want to live.
My wish not to live was only created
because of my wish to live.
But a black goo stirs in my brain. It drips from my nose and from my mouth like mucus. It is in my spit, it clogs my blood, makes it hard to think.

I'm sick! I'm sick! I'm sick!

I need to quiet down,
I just need to think
but all my thoughts are rotten,
all my thoughts have been touched by poison
I need to cleanse, I need to purify, I need to rip apart to pick out the monster that clings to my body
I need to untangle the vines of a parasite,
and it will kill me to let it stay and it will kill me to take it out
They have been knotted to my heart, knotted to my nerves, knotted to my brain
But my blood rejects it. My blood spits it out. I can't swallow it down.
The monster cannot live here. My immune system will kill us both.

So I eradicate me to eradicate my sickness,
I force my own head underwater and I
gasp and struggle for breath

I race into the blackness and I
fervently try to claw my way out

But the water is sweet, the water is deep, she drags and quiets me
                                                                                                            down
She will weigh me to the bottom and cradle me like a mother
until grim death takes me and
                              strangles me
Her arms are cold but I nevertheless think I know them

The poison knows them, anyway

Is it me or the poison that craves to die?
Am I killing my weakness or is my weakness killing me?

I'm not persevering, not really. This is not any noble sacrifice, this is not martyrdom—
It is blind hysteria, delusion, frenzy

But in this light my blood looks black
like the ink is finally flowing out
and I feel for a moment like
I've won

Until I see it pooling up around me, and then I see the poison take shape,
and she is the one forcing my head into the water.
                                                                                          She stands over my dead body and she grins.
                                                                                          My blood is in her teeth.

And so my face will grace the headlines and I shall be known as
my own victim and
my own murderer

They will fish me from the water and they will know it as a suicide

but really it was this. I did not want to die. I wanted to live so badly
                                                                                                that it killed me.