Three Poems, by Becky Curl

Funeral Body 
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I have been trying to be beautiful longer than I have been trying to be anything else. I have never loved my body. At a young age, my peers taught me that there was a wrong way to look and a right way to look; I was already living in the wrong. I was overweight. My teeth were too crooked. My hair was too wavy. My skin wasn’t smooth enough. Everything about my appearance was wrong. I was only a child, and I was already so wrong. There are days when I feel like I am outside of myself. I wake up, and I know that this body is mine. I know that this is the face I’ve been trying to grow into for the last thirty-one years. I can run my hands across the skin of my right arm or down the length of my left leg and recognize it as tangible. I am tangible. And yet, I still feel like I am a stranger here. No matter how many times I look into the mirror or comb my fingers through my hair, I cannot find myself. My body is the only thing I have always had to count on. I was born into this body. I will die in this body. I have been suffering in this body. I’ve transformed myself so many times throughout my life, and we still can’t find a form that we agree on. The moment I am finally able to look into the mirror and be happy with what I see, my body reminds me of the way the mirror lies. It makes sure that I see the way my clothing clings to the parts of myself that I like the least. It points out the fine lines slowly carving themselves a home underneath my eyes. My body reminds me that I will never be at peace here. I will never be in control. I’ve shapeshifted, and I’ve shrunk myself, but I am still too much. I worry that the older I get, the more unlovable I become. I am fading out of my era of being young and beautiful, and I still haven’t figured out how to be the latter. The internet is telling me I need to be someone else now that I am in my thirties. Twenty-one-year-olds fill my social media feeds with their poreless, perfect baby faces, and I become invisible. 
I mourn my youth before I have even left it.

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A Drink to Desolation 
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It’s almost midnight, and I’m thinking about how many of my days ended with you. I am counting how many hours I spent wishing you would just come back to me. But I am not longing for the you that came out of the bottles of homemade liquor you made in your apartment. I am dreaming of a person I now know never existed. I found the real you at the bottom of an empty wine glass and the unpaid postage on a package from St. Louis. You crawled out of the depths of our university’s disciplinary actions after you drunkenly punched your best friend, and you found me. You found someone else to drag down with you. You never laid a hand on me, so I never knew anything was wrong. I poured myself out, over and over again. I was empty and still, I found somewhere to bleed from. I remember the weekend we stayed at your parents’ mansion. I could barely eat, and you decided you couldn’t be with someone who couldn’t take care of themselves. I folded into myself, right there at your parents’ expensive kitchen table. Shame rose up through my body as I clutched the cold marble tabletop, coursing through me until it stopped in my cheeks, rising red hot to the surface. Red hot like the anger you always felt towards me at the slightest inconvenience. My cheeks burned like the alcohol you forced me to drink as it slithered down my throat. The tears fell, dropping into tiny pools I often wished I could drown myself in. You wrapped your arms loosely around my skeletal frame. I clung to you like you were my only hope for survival; some days, it felt like that was your goal. I prayed for you, the one to take me away from all of the pain I had been through. It’s funny how salvation felt like despair. Fragile doesn’t even begin to explain the state you left me in. Invisible. Hollow. Alone. 

An empty casket waiting to finally be put into the ground.

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Grieving for a Future That Could Never Exist 
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I wonder if you ever think about what we could have been. I imagine who we almost were in an alternate life where we didn’t hate each other, and I never left you. I picture the home we could have had: cozy, inviting, maybe a cottage with a front door painted bright yellow with a cobblestone path leading right up to it. Sometimes I can see us in this home, happy, smiling over big cups of coffee. The sun is pouring in through the skylight in our kitchen above us, and I watch the rays of light illuminate the golden tones in your olive-green eyes. You aren’t drinking, and I’m not starving myself. We are both who we pretended to be when we first met. But then that image fizzles out and I see us both alone in a home, alone yet we’re still together. I drink my coffee outside on our porch in the rain. And you drink yours alone in your office, your only company the homemade liquor you don’t even bother hiding from me anymore. We only speak to each other if we have to. We live like we are strangers. And I still don’t know your favorite color.

Becky Curl is a student in the MFA Creative Writing program at Roosevelt University in Chicago. Her work has been published online by To Write Love On Her Arms, Thought Catalog, Revoloon, and more.