2 poems by Lauren Perry
Blood
Run a metal blade over my skin
See how long it takes to break
Test the pressure, make the pain last
Watch it penetrate, watch it release the red
Watch the blood drip onto white linoleum
I have plenty more
Plenty more to spill, at your whim
Now take a ragged edge, something worse
On that delicate skin, thinnest, whitest
Push as hard as it takes to break the skin
In a different place
Leaving less friendly tears
But the blood will drip all the same
Slightly more quickly, dripping, mixing white and red
A tear might trickle down my cheek
You won’t see me blink
Keep ripping the pale exterior
It doesn’t touch anything but skin
Wrench where you’ve cut
Dig if you must
The shining white tiles become dull with pools
Darker as they fall, revealing deep red
As they spread across the floor
I’ll stand there, let you hold my arm
Yank me in any direction, I’ll stand and watch
The pain from a knife is nothing
Walk away and the pain will be something
If I slump to the floor, in a pool of my blood
Perhaps I’ll see the time was wasted
Wasted on you, with your jagged blade
Cutting deeper, wishing to find something more
Something more in me besides red rivers
But that’s all I am, nothing more
I will never know what you were looking for,
Underneath my skin
I can’t put back spilt blood, like spilt milk
Nothing to cry over
I watch your back as you turn and leave, knife in hand
Your cotton shirt, beneath lies the coward of a man
I gave you my bare skin, my flesh
A dim kitchen light shines on me now
Tearless, breathless
Sitting in my own spilled insides
A little blood to be cleaned up
I may have scars, but they’ll remind me
Of everything I know I am
And everything you couldn’t find.
Scotland
It is here amidst the hanging bells and elusive ruins
It is here where the grass sweeps green in all directions
And a quiet fog hangs between here and Wallace’s tower
Nothing has ever been so still and certain
With hundreds of years of similar beauty
I wonder who stood at the banks of the loch
And watched the swans tread the ice in the morning
The trees have secrets they wish to tell me
Of girls and of heroes, dressed more regally in brown
Than I could ever be in purple
They are still there
Rustling the white flowers that lie just important as
The tallest of trees
I don’t know yet if I am the one they’ll tell
But I long to know all that is kept quiet
Here, where legends are more than just that
They still live and breathe
I can feel them
Watching me stare in wonder
I can feel them pushing at my back, to wander further
The sky has opened up, and sometimes the sun on the stone bridge
Makes it feel impossibly real
Perhaps I lived back then too
And that is why the wildness of this place
Calls to me, beckons me
Past the fog or the clouds above the castle
In stained glass somewhere, I’ll find my face
I’ll find the story that is waiting
The wild Scottish trees keep history better than any scholar could
It is more permanent than parchment
It is the fierce soul of this quiet place
And every day it will reach out its hand
And I shall take it, follow it, into the whispering wood.