By: Lizzie Joy (loveland) Nunemaker
We are the ones that won’t die.
We are the ones that won’t die much though the demons confer about our demise. They watch constantly, popcorn falling out of their bile mouths. Like a cave of frenzied bats they screech with glee when they can put a hook in our back, something we might believe.
But we are the ones that won’t die
Our muscles ripple and we shake the claws and hooks out of our backs- “take back your lies about us- we reject you! we reject your lies!”
We are daily plagued by our various ailments- the menthol rub for a spine like a lost locomotive that’s come off the rails and others whose knees creak like old door hinges. some of us have hearts that are broken glass, we continue to sit around the fire piecing together into a mosaic hoping it’ll be more beautiful than the time before it was first torn in two.
Some of us live by pills or prayers because if we don’t we get wild and chaotic or perhaps others stay like slag metal, wasted and melted into unnatural shapes unable to break free, unable to lift their sunken, iron, mishapen skulls on their own.
All of us want to run and dance and climb and fly but we are trapped in these heavy earthly bodies like children from the dust bowl wearing potato sacks for clothes.
We shine up ok though.
We are the ones that won’t die. Hardship and madness and real people who have stolen real things that can never be replaced – our time our love our passions our joy— or at least we thought that those things were gone for good. We are learning that even though our bodies are getting worse and worse, and more tired, that we can plant new seeds and shield them from the snow with our hands like little umbrellas and what do you know, the years pass and what once was barren has become a field of wildflowers.
We are the ones that won’t die. Life is continuing to beat us in the teeth in horrible yet creative ways- sometimes with bricks, sometimes with used car parts or maybe a broken vase, but we spit out our canines and our molars and we say, “you forgot some.”
And even when we’re all bloody and toothless and in the ragged dirt we will, on trembling biceps, push our way up. We will not stay down. We will spit and spit and spit the dust and hatred and pain and unfairness and depression and loss and regret out of our mouths and leave all that bitter earth and blood where it belongs because we will always rise above it.
We are the ones that won’t die.
We are the ones that won’t die.
We are the ones that won’t die.
"overcome evil with good" 