Machinal

Pull yourself together
You did this to yourself
You made it this way
Tell the story
The story of a helpless creature
A being who did not ask for this
Any of this
Sometimes the stories we tell
Are not just reflections of us
Sometimes we create
As a cry
For help
God help us all
Why would you do this
Why would you make something so horrible
A living thing
It lives and it lives to die
It lives to bleed
Scraping itself back together
Wasting and wasting away
It cannot help itself
You cannot help it
All you can do is stare
You stare and you watch
Sickened with horror, yet you’re entertained
It’s undeniable
Why else would you put it in a cage
A glass cage to be seen
To be alive is to perform
Constantly, consistently
Until you can’t
It cannot help itself
You cannot help it
All you can do is stare
God help us all

Seedless

Your hard casing can be broken by me
Waxy, cold, and smooth with tiny indents
There will always be bright and dark patches
And you protect with an inside layer
Your warm colors, fleshy reds, soft yellows
Sticky and sweet like a fresh honeycomb
Juicy scents must mean being so alive
You fooled me with your exterior shell
Brightness outside won’t match your somberness
Will I break you? Why do I fear such things?
“Blood orange,” a bit macabre, I think
Too much of a sweet thing makes me so sick
Am I enjoying or ruining you?
I crave more, but my stomach won’t let me

run_off

her eyes were crystal pools of ocean, shallow surface
with a void deep enough to drown
and his name tasted like a siren song
a haunting melody that drove her mad
he said he wished her everything would be him
forever, for real
she promised to rest with him by the tides until the moon drew them back
he will never understand how she feels tied to him
twin droplets who would find each other in any sea
but how can she rest with him when her soul
yearns to break free from his shackles, which she once placed upon her own heart
she knows that the parasitic leech of time ends everything, and the water will
run off
and it will all go back to the genesis of the ether
it will never be forgotten even beyond its demise
still
when the world stops moving she knows her mind will go back to him
as the earth gets warmer, and the glaciers melt
with the waves he will remain
more than anything, she wishes she knew
who she was before she saw him
and if she could go back,
she would be more gentle with herself
but while the sea breeze sings his song, she tightens her shackles
once again
and when she looks in the mirror,
her ocean eyes
have drained themselves

Kai Cruz (she/her) is a Boston-based writer who dabbles in a little bit of everything. She loves theatre as much as she loves writing, and her playwriting has won several awards and honorable mentions. Her ten-minute play Thank You, Come Again was featured in Boston University’s Young Playwrights Festival, and her co-written monologue Sucker was one of two winners of the Massachusetts Educational Theatre Guild writing contests. She writes every genre she can, including nanofiction, sci-fi, fantasy, realistic and contemporary fiction. She is currently co-writing a novel with her best friend, titled Tempest.