clean

Xhyla Abazi

I lay tangled
in the sheets of my disheveled bed.
I don’t remember
the last time I washed them.
My room smells of stale air
and listlessness.

I keep the blinds open, hoping
that the halo of sunlight
will sanctify the space.
I keep the blinds open
so my room doesn’t feel
so suffocating.

My closet stays closed
so I don’t have to witness the calamity.
I pretend not to notice
my desk or shelves
or the dust settling on them.

I need to clean,
but even the thought
of getting out of bed is exhausting.
I need to clean,
but right now
I’d rather be crucified
than stand on my own two feet.

Yesterday,
I managed to drag myself into the shower.
I wanted the scalding water to baptize me
as I scrubbed my skin raw.
Afterwards, I detangled my hair
and prayed
that it would stop falling out.

Stress is a funny thing.

I need to clean
but I can’t get myself to
do anything but stare at my ceiling.
If I focus hard enough,
the rest fades away.

If I don’t see the mess,
it isn’t there.
If I don’t see the demons,
they can’t hurt me.

My mother once told me
a clean house equals a clear mind but
my mother doesn’t know
how heavy my bones have become.

I pray that I can get up
and shake it off—
build myself back up again—but
prayers go unanswered
when I don’t know which god
to offer them to.

I once heard that
suffering feels religious
if you do it right.
But there is nothing holy
about the way my skin pulls taught
over my body,
the way my eyelids feel like anvils,
my limbs feel like lead.
Am I so defective
that I can’t even rot right?

I turn over,
pull the blankets tighter,
creating a cocoon of cotton
as I watch the dust motes float like angels
in the sunlight streaming through the window.

Mother,
I’ll try to clean tomorrow.

Xhyla Abazi, known by her friends and colleagues as Julia, is a graduate student at Eastern Illinois University majoring in English with a concentration in Creative Writing. She graduated from EIU in 2021 with a BA in English with a double concentration in Creative Writing and Professional Writing. She mainly writes poetry and fiction and completed an undergraduate honors thesis that focused on visual poetry as a dialogue, which included a chapbook-length collection of multimodal poems titled Ad Infinitum. She is currently continuing that project and is hoping to publish it as a full-length book of poetry by the end of this year.