"(I Wanted To Die) I Wanted To Stay Alive" by Rose Zinnia

(I Wanted To Die) I Wanted To Stay Alive

At the same. Time: I wanted to deadhead. & deathbed. 
Flashlight in the ever-after. Dreamt of me guffawing on an ordinary
 
Tuesday. Remembered the light on my face was a whale 
song. Wanted to listen for the haptics of our beholding. 

Forever. Wanted you to tattoo my name on your jugular. Memorialize 
me in vinyl on your rear windshield. Bask in loss like summer. Heat 

dissipating. Rewind my momwound. O moonsound: I wanted, I wanted. 
To die. No, for real. I wanted to end my crimson rivering. 

I wanted to de-part. To hear what my name sounded like when I was no longer. 
To croon at my funeral. In the most lugubrious key. Eulogize my own vanishing.
 
I wanted to be future, past, & present. Perfect tenses. I wanted to fall 
into the field of spring phemmes. Be topped by a coalition of rootlets. 

Summon the cripistemologies of the (un)dead: rot, invisibility, storage units, 
copper statues greening. I wanted to inanimalize. To vampire a leaky foxheart. 

To grok the holy architecture of beehives. Casually slip into the centralized heterochromia of a wolf’s eye. At the same time. I craved my body on a spit. 

My makeup done. Forever. I sought the knot-body hyphally thrumming. 
I wanted to be thrust out of the self like a vapor. Locate a moss-fungi
 
alliance to sublet. To be dispossession. Chimeralish. For just a moment. 
The feeling of night silvering into day. I wanted to. Refuse living.
 
(Regretful.) Hone a pewter seraph to stir me into flame. I wanted to stay 
in the womb another ever. To wake into a fuller emptiness. I hungered

to be absence & presence. Technosignature of a prayer. I wanted to be 
lain, to be a body laying. To be pellets in fertile loam. The iridescence
 
on a swallowtail’s wing, under a new moon’s sclera. To glimmer. 
& surrender. To be thirst & the river. & the syllables to sing it. 




Previously published in the chapbook Togethering (Ledge Mule Press, 2024)

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Audio: Rose Zinnia reads “(I Wanted To Die) I Wanted To Stay Alive”

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Rose Zinnia is the author of Togethering (2024), a hybrid chapbook of poetry & lyric essay. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Hedgebrook, Vermont Studio Center, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and the Kinsey Institute. Zinnia's writing appears or is forthcoming in BRINK, POETRY, Michigan Quarterly Review: Mixtape, The Offing, Black Warrior Review, and Poem-a-Day, among others. Her debut book of poetry, Anarchic Womb, is forthcoming from Haymarket Books in Fall 2027. She lives in Cincinnati, Ohio where she is a doctoral student at the University of Cincinnati.

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