Julia R. R.

“But the ultimate irony of being insecure is that you're consumed with your least favorite subject, yourself.”
― Ryan O'Connell, Just by Looking at Him

“Judas: I’ll tell you what I know: I watched you trip over your own dusty feet to heal the sick, the blind, the lame, the unclean, any two-bit stranger stubbed their fuckin’ toe! When some lowly distant relative - too cheap to buy enough wine for his own fuckin’ wedding - suddenly runs out of booze - no problem, you just presto change-o and it was fuckin’ Miller time in ol’ Canaan again, wasn’t it, bro? But when I fuckin’ needed you - where the fuck were you, huh?!
Jesus: Judas-
Judas: You forgave Peter and bullshit Thomas - you knocked Paul of Tarsus off a horse - you raised Lazarus from the fuckin’ dead- but me? Me? Your ‘heart’? What about me? What about me, Jesus? Huh? You just, you just - I made a mistake! And if that was wrong, then you should have told me! And if a broken heart wasn’t sufficient reason to hang, THEN YOU SHOULD HAVE TOLD ME THAT, TOO!
Jesus: Don’t you think that if I knew that it would have changed your mind… That I would have?
Judas: All I know is that you broke me unfixable […]”
― Stephen Adly Guirgis, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot

“UNDERBELLY


Wouldbelove, do not think of me as a whetstone
until you hear the whole story:

In it, I’m not the hero, but I’m not the villain either
so let’s say, in the story, I was human

and made of human-things: fear
and hands, underbelly and blade. Let me

say it plain: I loved someone

and I failed at it. Let me say it
another way: I like to call myself wound

but I will answer to knife. Sometimes
I think we have the same name, Notquitelove. I want

to be soft, to say here is my underbelly and I want you
to hold the knife, but I don’t know what I want you to do:

plunge or mercy. I deserve both. I want to hold and be held.

Let me say it again, Possiblelove: I’m not sure
you should. The truth is: If you don’t, I won’t

die of want or lonely, just time. And not now, not even
soon. But that’s how every story ends eventually.

Here is how one might start: Before. The truth?
I’m not a liar but I close my eyes a lot, Couldbelove.

Before, I let a blade slide itself sharp against me. Look
at where I once bloomed red and pulsing. A keloid

history. I have not forgotten the knife or that I loved
it or what it was like before: my unscarred body

visits me in dreams and photographs. Maybelove,
I barely recognize it without the armor of its scars.

I am trying to tell the truth: the dreams are how
I haunt myself. Maybe I’m not telling the whole story:

I loved someone and now I don’t. I can’t promise
to leave you unscarred. The truth: I am a map

of every blade I ever held. This is not a dream.
Look at us now: all grit and density. What, Wouldbelove

do you know of knives? Do you think you are a soft thing?
I don’t. Maybe the truth is: Both. Blade and guard.

My truth is: blade. My hands

on the blade; my hands, the blade; my hands
carving and re-carving every overzealous fibrous

memory. The truth is: I want to hold your hands
because they are like mine. Holding a knife

by the blade and sharpening it. In your dreams, how much invitation
to pierce are you? Perhapslove, the truth is: I am afraid

we are both knives, both stones, both scarred. Or we will be.

The truth is: I have made fire
before: stone against stone. Mightbelove, I have sharpened

this knife before: blade against blade. I have hurt and hungered
before: flesh

against flesh. I won’t make a dull promise.”
― Nicole Homer

“I wanted to be physically erased and start over again. I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want to be there. I guess I wanted to be nowhere, I wanted to listen to my brain talk inside of nothingness. I wanted to be untouchable and have no need.”
― David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration