it’s a cut ties kind of night, 

citrus wound kind of night, 

ginger ale girls dance rings 

around pollen thoughts kind of night, nicked

my wrist on the open glass, bottle spins past, acid lord rain 

and a whore on the rail, i watched them kiss

and turn around to fuck me in the alley 

on the backlines

like they needed me heady 

and restless for power, like they’d never kiss me 

       except to take everything.

was i the bullet

   or the gun?

becoming the high priestess of something

they would never touch

could never reach [caught up in all their 

small vagaries].

      cloudpine on the side of a high mountain

      where i make my castle and churn poems

like butter

to spread on stale bread 

and watch the world unfold 

in alchemy and coffee dregs.

i am a blood orange 

sacrificed under     Sky High July.

    despite how i crawled across the desert

    i didn’t make it back the same

and that’s what stings the most about

citrus in the wound, the forever bellyache.

those ginger ale girls never passed the cup

no fizz to cut the blood-edge

  no kiss that was anything less

  than drunken foppishness in the half-light

it was only coattails and apron strings

grey geese at dawn, 80 proof sprawled on the lawn

         like a toadstool ring abductee.

who is to say that is not

what has happened to me.

    the old world is now beyond my reach.

i still live half-then, inside my head:

   cling to cloudpine castles on mountainside.

it’s a cut ties kind of night

that’s how the morning stings, as i fall down it

through the mist

and into the orange grove:

where my body still slithers and sleeps

beneath the trees.

it is the season of ripe suns bursting

[it is time to grow up] like citrus in the wound

blossoming bittersweet 

to climb the early sky.

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Jess Roses (she/they) is a disabled, neurodivergent, emerging writer. Her focus is the transformation of relationships and experiences with pain and the taboo. She explores how these communal experiences form and relate to societal and personal narratives within and without the psyche. She has been published in Caustic Frolic, Coffin Bell Journal, Raven Review, Grub Street Literary Magazine, and more. You can find her work on Instagram at @jessroseswriting.