In the second volume of Writer’s Corner, we present work by Angie Mosher. Angie is currently in the fifth and final year of her BA as a Creative Writing major and will have her work published in the upcoming edition of UBCO’s Papershell Anthology. Below are three of her poems entitled Is it Still a Nightmare if You Don’t Remember it?, Leave that Girl Alone, and My Body, a Broken Thing. Find Angie on Instagram: @melodramaticlibra
Is it Still a Nightmare if You Don’t Remember it?
There are notes written, hastily,
lying on the night stand,
to give myself a memory for when
I go back to the other side, right side up.
Wake up.
The first memory is the lack of one,
the sudden awareness of a dark,
silent hole in my head.
Not leaking, no blood, no brain matter,
just an empty space I
keep breaking into bigger splinters.
Bitter baby blue pills,
dissolving memories as soon as
they meet the bloodstream.
Binding to the right receptor,
counting, collecting, choosing,
what will be taken in the dark of night.
The chambers of my chest shiver
and my heart goes blue like a bruise.
In the mornings, I go looking for clues.
I dig through the soil of my scalp,
scrapes of skin, breaking with the tremors.
The brain buries.
The body remembers.
Leave that Girl Alone
I do try to leave her alone,
the girl I once was. But there is always the old wound—
the throb of an abandoned child. That girl was wrenched
from the grasps of childhood, torn straight through
adolescence and made to be a woman grown at just
fifteen.
The child I once was becomes
something of myth and fairytales.
She exists only in stories that my mother tells,
things I can’t remember, lost between dream and memory.
In my life there will always be the happy before—
then, the inevitable, ever-after,
where I’ve lived since.
Still, she always comes back to me, and I will not
neglect her now. I do try to leave that girl alone,
but I cannot stop her from crawling to me on
a dark night.
Fear ages finely with the rest of
me and I cannot undo the will of fright.
What a cruel thing it would be to break
a broken child’s heart, and it is too much for
me to do so. It has always been too much for me—
the past and how it has grown,
but you can’t ask me to abandon it.
I will not leave her alone.
My Body, a Broken Thing
I tend to myself like a broken thing.
Gentle with the strands of my hair,
lines of my legs and roving hills
of my stomach, all soft things to be cared for.
The comb can be a violent thing—
so I wash my hair with tenderness;
coax it out with oils before I run the plastic teeth through.
On bad days I try to remember worse ones.
There have always been worse days, and I try and whisper it
like a kind reminder: you have been crueler to yourself than this.
I act as groundskeeper to abused and abandoned lands,
rake through the trenches of old wounds
until my skin shines again.
Until my body is familiar, again.
I try to find peace in being able to say, I did nothing
except breathe and exist, today.
I’m learning that the past is nothing but a snare.
It’s better to hunt for happiness with my bare hands
than with traps. Tomorrow isn’t going anywhere.
So I hold myself even when no one else will.
The body remembers. Every trespass and betrayal.
Love and joy and fear and tenderness, too.
If I am a broken thing then I will love myself like one.
I wrap my arms around myself and say:
I forgive you.
If you’d like to have your work published on The Phoenix, send an email to our Arts Editor Jayme (arts@thephoenixnews.com) with short written pieces that you would like us to feature.
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