Compulsive’s Confessional in January

by Chel Campbell

Yang Shuo

Sometimes I unfix my gaze in the bathroom mirror to see double, push grinning lightbulbs beyond their fragile containers. I want to perform the same magic with my tongue, crack myself open like a pistachio, tell a stranger everything just to have someone really know me no matter the cost. A few weeks ago, I stole a tube of chapstick, considered selling feet pics, got a tattoo of a gravestone that reads meh

above my ankle. Yesterday was the greyest Sunday, and I was halfway through sketching a nude self-portrait when I was struck with the need to give myself a haircut —  with bangs. My sister talked me out of it. Today I’m completely unproductive, and I think I’ve done well for someone who grew up lonely and so, so afraid. I no longer hear demons lurking around my bed or sink my bare fist into snow to see how long I can stand the burn, and I now believe most people don’t secretly want to hurt me, and I think I’m definitely real, as real as my skin between my teeth as I pink my cuticles into a prairie twilight. I’m nowhere close to perfect, not like the fresh snow pinkening under the sunset that bounces off my neighbor’s tallest windows, and what is snow if not water suspended above earth, waiting for time’s permission to quench and pink us into spring. Father, I’m afraid I’m not sorry for any of this want. I no longer believe in sin.

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Chel Campbell (she/they) is a poet from Sioux Falls, South Dakota whose work appears or is forthcoming in HORNS, NonBinary Review, Pidgeonholes, Kitchen Table Quarterly, The MacGuffin, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. They recently won an honorable mention in Midway Journal’s -1000 Below: Flash Poetry and Prose Contest. In 2021, she completed her master’s degree in English at the University of South Dakota where she taught literature and composition and read poetry for the South Dakota Review. They have been a stay-at-home parent since the pandemic began.