When someone hurts you,
Don’t hold it in your body
Or let it leak like acid
Through your veins.
Take something tender


Go to a high place,
The suicide bridge with
The fence that prevents people
Making permanent decisions.
Look down 


When you push the sun over the edge
And hear the great silence as it falls
Though it’s milliseconds, a rotation 
As long as a life, and the burst
Concrete, flesh splitting 


The seed that wriggled in you 
Released, a splatter. After all
Your enemy is dying too,
With any luck—faster than you.
Claire Rudy Foster is a queer, nonbinary trans writer who lives in Portland, Oregon. Foster is the author of short story collection Shine of the Ever (Interlude Press, 2019), which O: The Oprah Magazine named as one of the best LGBTQ books of the year. Their writing has gone viral and appears on NPR, in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Rumpus, McSweeney’s, and many other journals.

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