Helga Floros: I Keep Promising to Do Better

Photo: Joanna C. Valente

loving someone is the most embarrassing thing i’ve ever done

i bake you a cake. i buy knives.

i cut my fingers off one by one.

you ask what made me do that.

i shrug. nothing. everything.

does it matter? do i? the blood

makes a real mess on the floor.

i want to lick it all up like a dog.

i want to eat your shitty heart.

would you let me do that? dig

my teeth into the muscle and

rip it apart like flimsy gossamer.

i think i’d like to go real animal.

we’re out of bandages. i’m crying

now. i bleed all over your carpet.

neither of us knows what to do,

so neither of us do anything.

eden

god and all his skinny angels

lock the gates to heaven

& leave me to rot right here.

an ant under his magnifying glass,

my skin catches fire like a house

i never asked to live in.

a girl by any other name

would be just as easy to chew

& spit back up as a llama’s vomit.

it’s not that i want u to love me again.

i just wish we’d never met.

or at least, you’d forget me.

i keep promising to do better and then i do worse

siri, is it still called relapse

if it happens twice every day?

i want to be so clean i scald you but

my motivation to change is a mayfly.

like a comatose landslide,

a drugged-up marionette, an

old dog too dumb for its own good—

loving how sick i get, i drink

my milk curdled thick.

siri, how do i stop being a knife?

i want to be gorgeously 

bright & happy & empty

of sin. i read the average human body

replaces most of its parts

every 7th to 15th year.

siri, what if i’m the missing link?

that thing between animal and human?

i don’t want to hurt myself,

but if i don’t, who will?

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helga floros likes being asleep. they have work in occulum, peach mag, witchcraft magazine, & elsewhere. they tweet @helgafloros