Dither Me This is a publication that presents current, old, spontaneous, or nonsensical musings for the reader to use as a writing prompt, discuss with a friend, lover, or to read and move on. Authors may present questions, creative processes, or thoughtful means to end the week; and while you may still be left staring at the walls, it is not without a new thought mulling the paint into iterative transformation. Thus we send waves into the electronic ether and see what is returned – extending a baton to the world, only a little afraid to let go. 

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11 – Midnight Must-Halves

a poem

by Hatie Parmeter

Midnight Must-Halves

In the middle of the night
I wish to split my pelvis open wide
place the middles on the cool side

with a lemon wedge, halved.
I cannot get my pubic bone close enough
to the floor. With every movement
I am weighted, not relieved –
I imagine my insides full of forks, knives
blades, tines
only getting sharper, more jagged,

I am full

of womanly anxiety
heavy with the burden of knowledge
understanding pain can come at any moment
with the shedding of the insides of my organs.
I always carry the extra essentials as backup:
underwear, liners, painkillers, birth control, stomach pills –
I am exhausted.
From the potential.

I wish to pierce icicles
through my back dimples,
leave black and red Rorschach blots
on the wood floor in the bedroom
under the frame.
I have to give in sometimes

to the sense-heightening waves,
the wish that I was not of my body
of this earth, of skin,
those dark hours of the night

awoken by my ocean of muscles
throbbing for no reason but self-awareness

a phantom baby that was never mine
and may never be
and eventually it’s over.

The whitecaps turn to slow rollers
daggers, dull, turn to dust
exhausted, I fall asleep.

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Writing prompt: When you anticipate pain how do you cope? Is it different than when you are in the throes of it? How can you prepare for the inevitable? What is the nature of your pain?

Yours,

Hatie

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Hatie Parmeter hails from Minnesota where she learned to appreciate the wild. Today she feeds her urge to get out through adventure and running Whoa Mag, a women’s magazine about the outdoors.

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dither me this is a collaborative effort between Sara Aranda, Birch Malotky, and Emma Murray