Why Does Someone Have to Die?

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I am afraid of Hell;
of a man holding a gun to my head and raping me;
of not knowing when to stop cutting; I am afraid if I am caught I will be beaten,
my lives taken from my body,
my body exposed to its vulnerability at some other’s whim

I don’t know what you’re trying to say.

I don’t know what I’m trying to say, what I am saying
if I am even speaking words or piecing together
a vowel, a consonant, an acute pain strung
into guttural-fuge, my voice
trying to speak the thing itself and failing

I want to tell you that there is a place in my body where a human being can grow
but also—
my body is walking death,
liable to flinging itself off a roof, off a cliff.
Every step is a question the ground refuses.

And in the dark, when the dead come to visit/

O, the dead! Here,
for tea again and some idle chatter
and(!) a beating heart -each
lub-dub reverberating in the hollows
“Would you like some scones? Biscuits perhaps?”
(chanay, samosay, halwa)
the carpeted floor glistening with the skin of worms
and a few rancid chunks of half
decomposing flesh that the cat delightedly nibbles

/When the dead come to visit there/ their
waves of paroxysmic mal-ody seize
my body in fetal cruci-fiction,
my tongue – cracked and sp(l)itting with the pain of a contracting womb
giving birth to tongues in shit. and piss.
No more tea. The infant
tongues have been lopped off. The guests have gone.
I’ve been wiping blood off the walls but it’s just faded
to a rosy pink like the scarf I bought from H&M the other day.
And the chores have to be done.