Ottavia Paluch
Noah built an ark, but we still sank
People made people made people
and yet I couldn’t believe that I was a person;
sometimes I’d pinch myself, think, did that just happen?
Cypress pressed against my hands like a That
-Was-Easy button, even though nothing’s easy anymore.
Case study: Imagine I kept all my old souls in an ark, two
of every kind. Everyone would argue over why
one of us was more mature than whoever came before.
There’s no linear path to the death of my souls
—sure, they sin. But then they do it again.
It takes 40 days for me to know why it was so bad,
40 nights to know why I was the way I was. Or maybe
it’s more than that. These are all just estimates, and I’m
just hidden inside of an ark I built when I was pride,
greed, lust, not perfect, envy, gluttony, wrath, sloth,
myself. A long, long time ago, God said he wanted
to destroy us. And splinters started raining down
onto forgotten covenants, drowning people.
and yet I couldn’t believe that I was a person;
sometimes I’d pinch myself, think, did that just happen?
Cypress pressed against my hands like a That
-Was-Easy button, even though nothing’s easy anymore.
Case study: Imagine I kept all my old souls in an ark, two
of every kind. Everyone would argue over why
one of us was more mature than whoever came before.
There’s no linear path to the death of my souls
—sure, they sin. But then they do it again.
It takes 40 days for me to know why it was so bad,
40 nights to know why I was the way I was. Or maybe
it’s more than that. These are all just estimates, and I’m
just hidden inside of an ark I built when I was pride,
greed, lust, not perfect, envy, gluttony, wrath, sloth,
myself. A long, long time ago, God said he wanted
to destroy us. And splinters started raining down
onto forgotten covenants, drowning people.
Biography
Ottavia Paluch (she/her) is sixteen, disabled, and from Ontario, Canada. A featured Gigantic Sequins Teen Sequin in 2018, her work is published or forthcoming in Ghost City Review, The Cerurove, Alexandria Quarterly, The Rising Phoenix Review, and Really System, among other places. She reads for Pidgeonholes.