A week after Jack’s decapitation, Peter drove Jack’s old truck through the San Fernando Valley and straight into the Los Angeles River. Jack’s truck was the color of Paul Masson.

Black Ribbons, Black Water, Black Sky

A Lesson in Treatment (singular noun)
Your personality is a bag of symptomology. Your heart is a wet feather, your mind, a weighted ball. Everything in you is made to sink.

Treatment as a Noun

The ward has got this music. This culture. Feel it on the first morning, this atmosphere that will grow into me, turn into a branch of my body.

Sink

I do not remember that I have stolen the pearl earrings until day three. I wake up from hibernation and go to throw my work clothes in the washer, and I hear a plink-plink, and there they are, at the bottom of my machine.

When The Plane Falls From The Sky—

I’m in California now, where bees die in the light. Where everybody dies first, then lives forever. The bees are alive. Their flattened bodies tattoo the pavement, stain the places pressed flat with a concrete leveler.

All The Bees in California are Dead

I have lived as a patient,
impatient,
            full of pills,
a capsule in a bottle in a mind
gliding through currents
of chemicals
as thin as gold

Somewhere, Somewhere Underwater

(TW: troubled-teen industry & conversion therapy). Ethan and I made our escape the day that the butterflies fell. Two weeks after my concussion. Maybe because watching thousands of orange corpses plummet from the sky made anything feel possible.

And All The Children

(TW: psychiatric hospitalization) Love is the biggest lie. It is the biggest exhaustion. I once learned about love as starving. I once learned love as denial, as rejecting nourishment, letting my body drip back to the earth in hot pools of grief.

Why I Can't Love You Right

(TW: Eating Disorder.) She stopped in front of the yogurt. She stared at the tiny bins, at their shimmering red tops, their dome-like bodies, parables of edible architecture. They whistled, 
catcalled her starved mind: That! Includes! You!


Nothing, Egg Whites, Nothing

(TW: psychiatric hospitalization) I will have to escape on empty, full of pronounceable pills, the numbers rattling through my mind like bingo balls.

Petra

(TW: psychiatric hospitalization & meds). This is remission. Doubting my words. Kissing the sun. Touching the spring green, owning my body, my voice. This emptiness. These new thoughts, thoughts of trauma and want, emerging like breaching whales.

Pills

(TW: ED & hospitalization). We say mantras before meals. They feel too much like prayers, but there is a holiness in the air. The oxygen is cultured with grief and becoming, neither of which can exist without the other.

Piper Gourley

Selected work