benji 3 fin

fox Graphics 1,363 POSTS Pronouns: she/her last seen Apr 25, 2024 12:23:42 GMT -5 but a butt ?	benji 3 fin Oct 16, 2022 21:48:13 GMT -5 Quote Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Member Give Gift Back to Top Post by fox on Oct 16, 2022 21:48:13 GMT -5 benjamin kloet, 17
	Last Edit: Nov 4, 2022 20:30:18 GMT -5 by fox

fox
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1,363 POSTS

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last seen Apr 25, 2024 12:23:42 GMT -5

but a butt ?

benji 3 fin Oct 25, 2022 20:37:29 GMT -5

Quote

Post by fox on Oct 25, 2022 20:37:29 GMT -5

there's another body in the garden, bones, bark, lichen when we find it. the weeds get stuck in the wheels of my skateboard. the streets are empty. the apartment complexes are empty. there's a single grocery store in town, a poster dated from the 60s peeled on the window that says welcome home Klaus Goravich!

there's another councilor on television. the t.v. plays the greatest hits, another disc of politicians crooning, the crowd's roaring. the universe spits out planets like a gumball machine. i haven't seen a clear sky in the downtown in forty-eight days. it feels like we're melting, blue in a palm. it tastes like raspberry.

i've got a neighbour three floors up. we scream at each other into the silence from our balconies, from our stasis, meeting on the roof to smoke.

Love Canal, district Three.

we were an industrial wasteland. we were the dumping ground for electronics, for metals and plastics, for dreams and prophets. the river flooded, year after year, with foam and chemical onto the banks. three grew bigger. we were generations living in a one-bed, we were families packed into matchboxes, people stacked upon people, and the cost of housing kept rising, trembling, scared for its own spill.

someone at the Capitol was looking at a map of Three, throwing darts into the city and missed one to the outskirts, lost into the sprawling apocalyptic nothing.

shit, they thought, it's free real estate.

my gran remembers all the fanfare and ribbon cutting, how the construction machines came and paved over the landfill, how they built a paradise, still green and beautiful, unlike anything in Three. start your family here! they said. and we did. they all clapped themselves on the back and dreamed of the money.

there's another sillborn baby. there's another radiograph. there's another neighbour dying in the garden, blood in his lungs, spit into the grass. they took their money. they didn't come back.

the families moved away, the buildings rotted, the trees took over.

Love Canal, honey. it's supposed to be irony.

sometimes we'll hang out in the abandoned semiconductor factory, ferns in the rubble, huge beams knocked out from rot and rain. someone will eat shit trying to shred on a rail, and they'll say fuck, this place is the dumps man, this place is literally killing me. and it's funny, and it's a joke, and it's true. and we look at each other five seconds after the laughter, in the depths of a metal cadaver, thinking about how we might die here one day.

it's not all so bad.

we could be dying out there. mom was gone before i turned ten, said she had a sickness in her blood and we all watched it bruise her from the inside. i was fourteen when i stopped going to school, gran shattered her hip and i started welding.

rent gets a little higher and food gets a little scarcer and life gets smaller. someone on t.v. laughs with a fork and you're the cattle. and year after year, we get sent on a plate to the Capitol. it feels like being eaten alive. i used to dream about being swallowed.

and one night, i just fucking packed us up into a duffle bag and wheeled us to the green wastelands. swapped a disaster zone for a disaster zone, but at least i could afford this one.

there are the people who never left, the people who moved here, living in the cracks of Love Canal, the buildings half-crumbled and the electricity's never on. they live and drink from the wells and eat the food grown from dirt and die from it all slowly. we unearth skeletons in the backyard. the factories fight over who gets to kill us next. the councilor eyes this sore spot in his efficient district and thinks about wiping it clean.

but i remember being young and looking up at the sky, wondering if stars were a thing of myth. i remember growing up and being glued to the camera whenever they panned to Seven, emerald and divine.

i could see the stars for the first time out here.

and listen to the birds in the trees. look how the sky clears. look at the gardens and the flowers and the way they grow, relentlessly, gently.

and as they say, shit, it's free real estate.

Last Edit: Nov 4, 2022 20:27:29 GMT -5 by fox

fox Graphics 1,363 POSTS Pronouns: she/her last seen Apr 25, 2024 12:23:42 GMT -5 but a butt ?	benji 3 fin Nov 4, 2022 20:30:58 GMT -5 Quote Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Member Give Gift Back to Top Post by fox on Nov 4, 2022 20:30:58 GMT -5 ripred_bot

dars Administrator 7,702 POSTS last seen Apr 28, 2024 0:39:51 GMT -5 — 🥀 —	benji 3 fin Nov 5, 2022 13:23:46 GMT -5 Quote Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Member Give Gift Back to Top Post by dars on Nov 5, 2022 13:23:46 GMT -5 the imagery you conjured had me hooked from the first paragraph! <3 stunnin!
	^{I AM A GARDEN OF BLACK AND RED AGONIES}