Doris - Emily Campbell
(if you’re reading this i hope i’m fucking dead)
in my mother’s nightmares i am the skin-walker
spider-eyed in the summer
fertilizing girls in the
mosquito heat
ovaries split into pomegranate seeds spilling free &
bug-eaten through his slit fists
a woman’s quiet terror in three hundred sixty degrees
burrowed deep into the bloodline
a childhood kingdom submerges
mermaids drowning in the afterbirth
formaldehyde skies hemorrhage wet memory meat
i am afraid of something we cannot accuse
if the mother is survivor’s guilt formed flesh
then what is the child
horror
a child is horror
Holzer Diagnostic - Emily Campbell
Circle your answer from one to five: one being completely false, five being completely true.
[1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5] Better to die young than live-forever.
[1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5] This hole has existed long before you; you were born oozing around the sides of it.
[1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5] It’s not easy being a woman in outer space.
[1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5] Teachers warned you not to smile with too many teeth.
[1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5] Sometimes, you find yourself leaking from surprising places.
[1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5] You’ve been unnecessarily preoccupied with kidnappings.
[1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5] Near the point of climax, it’s fun to image Venus bursting through the ceiling to stain the mattress with you.
[1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5] You can see your face in other people’s knees.
[1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5] A better man would know what to do with his hands at all times.
[1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5] You believe it’d be quite pleasurable to have your skull rearranged.
[1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5] It is important to learn other languages so you can explain your traumas to strangers in foreign lands.
[1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5] You’d have made a much prettier boy.
[1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5] In a perfect world, all genitalia would be as hairless and smoothed shut as a Barbie Doll’s.
[1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5] You’d look good with surgery scars.
[1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5] You identify with photographs of insects with holes on both ends.
[1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5] God is the ultimate absent Mother.
[1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5] You’re afraid of horses. Their eyes are so heavy, and you don’t know that they like what they see.
[1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5] Late at night, you turn your tongue sideways to simulate feelings of intrusion.
[1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5] If something dies quiet, it never should have been alive in the first place.
Calculate your Score: __
Contributor's Note
Emily grew up all over the Pacific, and can't quite remember how she got here.