Julia Laxer: If This Wasn't So Painful
Photo: Joanna C. Valente
MAPLE
The perfect yellow, never the same. Thin shears of veiny skin. I will always hear the voices of prepubescent boys tearing my insides. This color, into me. My head on the rock. Your hand on my forehead, gnashing me against the slate. Ripping me open, my legs tearing higher, higher, the drugs in my system and the hollowed-out voices, the snickers of them, watching my violation. Your stink permeates the whole woods, and the yellowy maples fall like filtered light onto our bodies. And if this wasn’t so painful, it would be beautiful. The yellowy woods, September in all its austerity. The veins in each leaf is like the veins of my skin. The yellowy maples feel my pain, I know it. I know it. That’s why they’re falling. They know it’s a death sentence. My mouth emits a sound, a disagreement, a decision, a scream, and all it does is disentangle the leaves as they fall, like my echo. I am bare and naked and bleeding on the forest floor, moldy leaves and cold worms wriggling beneath my ripped hymen and scratched legs. You bang my head against the rock— I’m a good drum, I am? You like the noise when I scream, don’t you? You like to see me suffer and the trees weep and the roots pull back and the branches sway above, whispering in confusion in my confusion as the blood enters the distance and my eyes roll out of my head and my skin sinks through the dirt, and all I am left is bones and sweat and pain.
Julia Laxer writes in the afternoons in a rose-lit room in Portland, Oregon. She uses performance art and spiritual practice to explore archetype and ritual and writes poems, essays, erotica, fiction, and memoir. Julia won the Orlando Prize in Nonfiction from A Room of Her Own (AROHO) in 2014, and her work is featured in magazines, journals, and anthologies including Luna Luna Magazine, The Los Angeles Review, So-to-Speak, and Zócalo Public Square. She is finishing a full-length book of poetry.
