where is your anxiety?

where is your anxiety?

she once asked me that, my best friend,
and i was caught off-guard, my

castle guards were taking a nice smoke break
when she asked and weren’t even
manning their positions, so i
shrugged and said i didn’t know

let me answer now:

the waves come washing into my
gut, sour and salty, sloshing along the
walls of my stomach, making me never
want to see the ocean ever again

the spiders skitter over my ribs,
behind my chest, poking spindly legs
at my heart, making me want to claw
it out myself to keep it safe

it glows sickly and black in my forehead,
pulsing and throbbing like a migraine,
telling me to check my alarm clock over and over and over and over,
telling me i need to tap the wall again and again and again and again

it resides in the creakiness of my joints
it lives in my scars
it is tangled in the blood in my veins
it is burrowed inside my bones

By Odelia Fried

Biography:

Odelia Fried is a student, poet, and actor based in NYC. Her work can be found in The Fem, Cleaver Magazine, Melancholy Hyperbole as well as other literary magazines. Her passions include gender identity, Judaism, adolescence, and the intersections of the three.