The Eve Defense Up On My Substack

(x)

JERK

NO. You haven’t heard me. 

Words don’t flow like they use to, 

Movements don’t bloom like they use to, 

Moments don’t fly like they use to. 

You don’t even know the beginning of it. 

Chances? Won’t let me take them. 

Laughter, you know it so very well. 

Mocking is second nature. 

JERK- 

Oh wait, that’s me. 

I’m sorry, was it something you thought?

You contort your body like it's written in your code, 

Come hear me hiss. Fear not, I don’t bite-  Waiting for your calculated strike.

Regrets from a princess,

Or a knight

Let’s call it a night.

My heart beckons me to your every call.

It races, it leaps, frolicking in some poisonous daises.

Why doesn’t it know any better?

Each day is a lesson learned

Each day is a prayer earned.

My hatred for syrup is the same as my feelings- a sticky situation that i can’t get myself out of.

I want to cry

And i cry.

I’m angry

Again.

I’m let down

Again

I feel sick. Again. Not in control. Again. 

Shaken, misplaced, irregular 

I have all the words ready to spew out from my faucet, 

But they won’t come out, not right now, 

And not right. Just jumbled word vomit that smells like grief, aching, and anxiety. 

My insides feel all torn up. 

All messed up. 

Just like my mind. 

I’m currently trying to find out if I’m even alive. 

This stupid ringing in my ear, 

This stupid voice in my head, 

This stupid way that I look at him. 

Pushing my feelings aside. No longer shoving them down his throat, just my fingers that he loves to suck. 

My body that he loves to touch. 

My body that is hard for me to touch. 

Looking around to see others wanting me but I’m not sure if I even want myself anymore. 

Cause he used to want me in a way that made my heart fucking flutter. He used to want me in a way that proclaimed love was real. 

I promised to put myself first. 

I promised to love myself. 

I used to put myself first. 

I used to love myself more than I loved anyone else. 

I met him and fell down a landslide. 

Is it me wanting to get pleasure because it’s so easily accessible, or is it me wanting to get pleasure to erase those feelings, to take me to an out-of-body experience, to just make my brain empty and my body full? I want to be loved, and I want to be cared for. By him. But it’s not possible, not right now, perhaps not ever, just not in the way that I love and care for him. So I’m putting myself first. I will be organized, I will be on time, I will take my medication, I will make my bed and do yoga and see friends. I will have sex for pleasure and to fill that void. I believe that love just isn’t on the menu for me right now. Not right now. I know it will come, I vow it too. But I stop my beckoning. I hold off on the searching and the begging. I’m young. It’s about me. 

Colonizers write about flowers. I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks seconds before becoming daisies. I want to be like those poets who care about the moon. Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons. It’s so beautiful, the moon. They’re so beautiful, the flowers.

— Noor Hindi, from “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying,” DEAR GOD. DEAR BONES. DEAR YELLOW.

In this dream, you are in a pit.

It surrounds you in pitch black.

Its mouth swallows you whole.

Effortlessly, you sat comfortably in your hole, like it had a hold on you

You sometimes climb, but then you fall like you had no care at all, then you try and try again but only get stuck with your feet buried in the sand.

You are in this constant battle with yourself

while a blindfold covers your eyes tightly

I wish you could see what you mean to me

There’s a snake in the pit that grasps on to you

day by day you decline my desires

my desire for you to reach out, my desire for you to hold on

the stench of dirt that covers you from head to toe and your brown eyes that fight to stay open

they blink and blink with the strength of a human

Please don’t let go.

don’t let go of the red balloon

Refaat Alareer, an academic and lecturer at the Islamic University of Gaza, was martyred along with his family in a targeted assassination carried out by the Israeli occupation on December 7th, 2023. We must continue to stand against this genocide.

I wish I knew how to write

Love letters, sonnets, words that would trace your

Lips over and over

Till you feel you can’t breathe

And are only craving to inhale me.

UNTITLED SHORT STORY EXCERPT:

In the distance she saw a warm glow, a sigh escaped her lips. Almost home. The rain picked up, wind pushing it in every direction. Carrie picked up her pace, at least the rain would hide her pit stains.

Almost home.

She could feel herself running clumsily down the slick concrete and puddles. The light was still there but why did it seem so far away? The North Judah street sign was tattered but it was there, she was there.

Just a girl, wrapped in a blanket, with the wind whistling and the rain storming outside, doing her research for her thesis, in a paratextual friendship with twenty-years-old Mary Shelley she will never know about because we are two centuries apart