Restlessness as Trauma or Coping Mechanism By Chestina Craig

Caspar Diederik Flickr CC


​
Restlessness as Trauma or Coping Mechanism

get up, get up they can’t ignore you
if you are moving, swallowed gold like seafish,
I am every darting scale my body loses to the light
get up, get up you look best blurry
best with half body on the next frame
get up, get up they might just love you
if you learn how to dance, quarter slip
grace out your ear.
you can get what you need if you just melt
& mold, like candle wax child,
every good daughter burns.

get up get up he cannot find you if you slip
into the school like lost letter,
paper in the wind, if you
silver sliver sardine run like the rest,
hide in your wide hands like the visible sky.
get up, get up the beasts and their noses are coming,
& your feet are calloused & bare,
your legs know invisibility like tripwire,
like look for the camouflage in girl,
get up get up, he can’t gaslight
if you are already smoke
constantly vibrating like sound wave,
get up, get up I am pulsing
in no defined location.

I’ll drive my car
as far south as I can afford
let the road to make me
sun off the tide: lost light,
search for me,
but do not find a thing.
this is what everyone wanted,

I know it.

​

Chestina Craig (she/her) lives on the California coast with her cat. Her work has been published by The Rising Phoenix Review, Sea Foam Mag, Button Poetry and others. She has presented her work at The Presidents Commission on The Status of Women, The Young Women’s Empowerment Conference, & more. She has a degree in Marine Biology, loves to meld science and art, and sometimes pets sharks or hangs out with octopi. She hopes that one day she will only be required to wear gauzy clothing, study the ocean, and get paid to have too many feelings. Her chapbook “body of water” came out October 2017 with Sadie Girl Press.