it fell underneath me
it is falling over my wept breaths
my chest falls in breaths outside short breaths outside
all the lungs are falling outside collapsing snot
i don’t want to remember another time they pushed me
yesterday or know the feeling of how they pushed me yesterday
or how i threw myself away or how they forced it
i don’t want to study my breath from inside
my room or watch my chest fall & harden
fixed with breath caught & you
who watched me fall into memories
of trying & failing to recover how i once hoped
& looked away from myself my body a distant force
how my thighs around you from my choking around you
might have looked like a branch lost in a thicket was i here
were you here were they still here & now you
are watching me but i’m afraid to look
see myself soft in my own breath & cry
with promises of never & how to so you don’t
see how small i’ve been but see how big
i want to become, rebuild the pieces, operate on my own
chest & lungs & back & shoulders, weights
pulled off slowly, miss the heaviness, miss
the reminders that I am not
the lone brick left of a spent summer smelling of sunshine lilacs & pillow slobber
how stories told a thousand times turn into my own sorrow
because no one remembers months later how i still need to be held
because everyone forgets it happened and how to
remember the pain in stiff shoulders and gut rot anxiety
a tender new & blurry but still better than a choke hold
parts of my lungs managing to remember how to open & close
open & close,
open & close, breath into a poem
that is looking for forgiveness but doesn’t know
how to find it, breathing is counterintuitive,
when you breathe
in, your belly actually
pushes out.
Eli Tareq Lynch is a poet working in Montreal. They have been published in THEM, the Puritan, the Shade Journal, in Frog Hollow Press' City Series Chapbook (MTL edition), and elsewhere. They were one of the organizers of the Off the Page 2016 literary festival and are currently working on a book of poetry. You can find them on twitter @theonlyelilynch