playlist to sing by yourself of hallucinated vocalists, probably, possibly, dead
by Liam Strong
trans-
versal.¹ pickled blueberries left in the card
-board.² on a dimensional level, maybe
you don’t die in this one.³
a political narrative or
few normalize suicide as part of the queer
experience.⁴
you’re *so* dead this time, dude.
the bully in me is me. their name is a primordial
gender & sounds like a torn
tendon.⁵ i surgically remove stones from
the blood. the EMT recommends i use
more tylenol next time. yeah. it’s
fucked.⁶ because ibuprofen is cheaper, & no one
wants to sing sad songs,
you know this,
you do, i tell myself, yourself, which
-ever self feels best in the moment, which is so very
few.⁷ because most songs are
about nothing, i tell
me, in a distant mania. no one composes
songs with the blood drawn from them, or songs
about being afraid
of opening brand-new jars of pesto
because of the
shattering, the blood again, redux, & re
-mixed, because no one else can
do it. i don’t know
what else to say. my social
workers put washcloths to my hand like
an axe, wounded dabbed with another
wound.⁸ i let the migraines stay
because excedrin can’t,⁹ patchwork soffit
& a chorus that repeats the whole song, just
is the whole song, from
your other life where you lived,¹⁰
you, me, unopened jars of un
-named sauce lining the cupboard, who won’t
last forever, because everything’s
got to go bad at some point,¹¹
the song ends, you make a playlist with
the same names as
yours & glass so
they can keep on breaking
until they disappear. i haven’t written
a fucking song in a decade.¹² you weren’t a
-live then & neither were
you.¹³ i don’t have to write it
to get it out of my blood
-stream.¹⁴ i think you’re surviving, you’re
surviving,¹⁵ i feel the plums
getting soft again, blue as
the inner parts of flesh from the
outside. i’ve got them, a whole basket,¹⁶
& you can’t tell me that i’ll
let them grow mouldy again.
¹ “Disorder” - Joy Division
² “Kettering” - The Antlers
³ “The Hero Dies in This One” - The Ataris
⁴ “Real Death” - Mount Eerie
⁵ “Transparent” - Milk Teeth
⁶ “(Hospital Vespers)” - The Weakerthans
⁷ “Hair of the Dog” - Senses Fail
⁸ “like blood from a stone” - Old Gray
⁹ “Using” - Sorority Noise
¹⁰ “If I Don’t Make It” - Ghost Key
¹¹ “To Our Dead Friends” - Respire
¹² “Healing” - A.L.I.S.O.N.
¹³ “St. Ides Heaven” - Elliot Smith
¹⁴ “The Devil in My Bloodstream” - The Wonder Years
¹⁵ “I Exist I Exist I Exist” - Flatsound
¹⁶ “Dog Days Are Over” - Florence + the Machine
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Liam Strong (they/them) is a queer neurodivergent straight edge punk writer who has earned their BA in writing from University of Wisconsin-Superior. They are the author of the chapbook Everyone’s Left the Hometown Show (Bottlecap Press, 2023). You can find their poetry and essays in Impossible Archetype and Emerald City, among several others. They are most likely gardening and listening to Bitter Truth somewhere in Northern Michigan. @beanbie666 on Twitter and Instagram.