it is easier at night
slip in spill words

in your car on a Thursday under orange streetlights and I am stripping.
you said you didn’t know what sickness was so I am subordinating
to my oppositional content because it is easier to present it
as a commodity
than to exist in it organically.

We’re just having a conversation.

in these jutting senses
one must be self-limiting and tight-lipped.
to be ugly and dissonant to the public
but intimately tied and inconceivable without
it.

your car is without memorable smells
so I remove my coat, skin, and automatic responses.
I can only look at the dashboard,
stable horizon.
sickness is implicit inks
impossible to staunch the speech
of taboos

I am just having a conversation at you
about sickness.

we can measure the joy in moral society with formal features.
to be provocative in polite reality is only acceptable
in silence. some people can manage the possibility
of violence in stride, but this marks a definitive
break.

There is a conversation going on
and I am split in two parts.

it is winter and the cold does not know
the boundaries of glass.
I wish I could be as still as snow,
but I can’t stop breathing.

Athena G. Csuti is a student, writer, and raging feminist from Edmonton. She’s a post-secondary slave at the University of Calgary studying English Honours with Creative Writing & History. Her poetry, prose, and articles have been featured in ditch,, carte blanche, and Fem2pt0. Athena’s goal is to one day become a cat.

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