By Jacq Schroeder
Gemini 𖤓 | Aries ⏾ | Cancer ↑
My cat scratch got infected on October 28th.
By Halloween rotten pumpkin gut spills down my calf on the front step.
Cinderella’s glass slipper sticks in putrid orange puss,
An apologetic candy bar melts in her cavities.
A week ago plastic skeletons broke from the branches of my fathers old tree.
A noose, never removed, finally snapped.
Hollow bones don’t break clean, empty pinata spilling air out of marrow-pockets.
A trash bag of decay, raked leaves and splintered white polymer, sits by the garage door.
It still tastes like summer at a quarter past noon.
Shoes off I measure an inch under the door frame height I left in high school.
The cement under the floor is too low and the basement keeps flooding.
My mother’s bible is worn and waterlogged on the washing machine.
I sleep on the mattress my first cat died on, stained from my brother wetting it in ‘04.
The sheets are new, one year faded and soft, never tucked in.
In the back of my open mouth at night a spider hangs from my uvula.
The web he builds ties my molars to the bannister I broke when I was a kid.
My scratch won’t heal, gurgling and boiling now under the bathroom faucet.
Too scary to hand out candy, I stick a syringe into the wound and extract sickly slick.
One of the lights is out over the vanity, it flickers as I push the liquid down the drain.
By Christmas I’m all mess, pustules bubbling in a bowl where my bed used to be.
The tree is undecorated, my limbs too weak to lift the ornaments, my brother’s too old.
I won’t wait up for Santa Claus this year, the fireplace never got cleaned.
I watch a burning hour loop on a screen while mice nap in the chimney.
It doesn’t snow here, it never did, the morose gray sky a familiar sight out of uncleaned windows.
I can’t stay anymore after New Year’s day, nobody knows how to bathe me.
I’ve been crying since the ball drop, they say my eyes are just deteriorating.
The hospital gown sticks to me like a thin paper towel on an oil spill.
Winter break is over, my father hung a calendar under the nurse’s whiteboard by the door.
Eventually, maybe in March, whatever’s in my head starts to fester too.
My eyes give, my ears leak, my nose has been bleeding for two weeks.
The blank space of nothingness is a painting of the night my parents met.
The only voice I can make out is of the lover who tells me my sores are soft to the touch with burn marks all over his hands.
Something new was supposed to come in September, if I remember right.
I make it to July, my best friend gets so drunk on her birthday she ends up a floor beneath me with an IV.
The heat was always too much for me, born in June and crying as soon as I felt the humid air.
Now, through a screened window without a view, I evaporate with it.
Jacq Schroeder is a recently graduated student of Philosophy and Creative Writing at Washington State University, soon to be pursuing his Masters in Philosophy and Literature at the University College of Dublin. He has past experience as the Editor and Chief of the Literary Journal LandEscapes and as an editor for them as well. He enjoys writing body-centric graphic imagery in his fiction and poetry, usually centered around his own queerness and transness. This piece is focused on a slow transition, how alienating a home town is upon returning, and the feeling of stasis when transitioning.
A Curious Moon 