What Gets Left Over

by Auzin

Dreaming, I saw your face.
I said you look happy
you said yeah, I am
took my arm in a spasm of
chivalry I woke up
gasping, my eyes already wet.
Taxidermy — the only word I have for this.

“an alternate reality that
shocking,” he mumbles
lit cigarette and smiling
how his teeth look in my arm
rendered insignificant

one day your eyes won’t matter anymore because they’ll be strewn with holes from where worms are feasting holes growing slowly bigger and connecting like tunnels in a labyrinth of rotting flesh until there is just one huge hole one void where your cold body has disappeared into one chasm in the dirt yawning stretching filling with reeking new life

Rebirth is not beautiful or clean and it always brings a piece of the dead with it.

Originally published in Volume 3 of Hecate Magazine.

Auzin is a writer from the Pacific Northwest. She has published with Nowruz Journal, Rogue Agent Journal, and Agapanthus Collective. She was the Managing Editor at the now-defunct Hecate Magazine and is currently a submissions reader for The Jupiter Review. More of her work can be found at byauzin.com.