Guts, Mostly
Guts, Mostly
by Elizabeth Lerman
Lately, it seems that if you speak to me, I will either ignore you or eat you alive and its rarely the latter but sometimes I do swallow people up so quickly they get stuck in my throat and it’s not about eating anymore it’s about owning and bodies aren’t meant to be held there, in the space between smile and sternum so eventually all I taste is blood and sometimes I think it’d feel nice to be with someone softer than me and I don’t mean sweeter because that sounds short-term but someone with less gore growing in them because lately, if you ask me what I’m thinking about I will say guts, mostly, about entrails and all the ways we can be emptied. I am thinking about the woman I met, a friend of a friend, who told me how her intestines were removed so her baby could be born. She was awake while it happened, conscious of her own reshaping, alert to the feeling of organs being taken out then loaded back in. I am thinking about body horror and birth and how that’s just the noble beginning of it because what it’s really about is violence and the way it invades the best and worst moments of our lives and I’ll never have to make anything up because the world writes itself and I guess what I’m saying, in its simplest state, is that people, mostly, I mean, don’t want to hear about being hollowed out so, lately, I am finding them hard to talk to.
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Elizabeth Lerman is a creative writer based in Brooklyn. Through her prose and fiction, Elizabeth aims to examine the significance of small moments and the space they hold. Her work has been published by Curlew New York, Sad Girls Club Lit, Train River Poetry, Coffin Bell Journal, and Quillkeepers Press.
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The Waking is an online literary magazine and a part of the Ruminate creative community that houses high-quality literary writing about what it’s like to be human. We are interested in short-form prose and image-text hybrid work. This art can be beautiful, it can be strange, we just ask that it feels true.