Composure
You are inescapable;
give me a moment to
[de]compose
myself.
Artificiality
She hid a safety blanket made of
five razor blades
in her medicine cabinet,
where I stow my
chemical castaways
and the floorplans to a
prepackaged death.
The city lives in a perpetual daylight
composed of artificial sun,
and perhaps, so do we.
I cloud my depress and exhaust
behind habitual manic excitement
(name me Happiness)
and your ache to harm
illusions
itself into displacement
(name me Happiness)
As I write, the
sun has long since set itself to bed behind
a steel horizon,
yet the nightlined street is still bright enough
to pen this outside.
Every speck of nature here is
a testament
to man’s inability to shed the
delusion
of control,
and yet,
there is life here still.
We are still alive,
despite [to spite]
every instinct that wills us to
self-extinguish.
Perhaps the trees, the flowers, the grass,
even the daylight,
are Artificial,
but they are
endlessly
desperately
fighting to push back the cold winter night.
And so are we.
About the Author:
Pascale Jarvis is a second-year student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where they study creative writing. When they aren’t huddled in a chair, scribbling in a notebook, they enjoy painting murals, climbing trees, and kick boxing. One day, Pascale hopes to pulverize the gender binaries of society armed with pencil and paintbrush, and maybe a cup of coffee as motivation.
About All Accounts:
All Accounts and Mixture is an annual online feature celebrating the work of LGBTQ writers and artists. For this series, we seek work from authors who self-identify as "queer," while acknowledging that this designation is subjective and highly personal. Our goal is to provide a forum for writers whose voices might be mis- or underrepresented by the literary mainstream.