My Voice is Bleeding

My voice is bleeding. It bleeds out slow and clogs
my throat like molasses. It bleeds because my fingers
don’t bend right no more, because the calluses turned to fire
and the frets laugh at me. My voice
bleeds because of the strings I used to whisper to,
and because the old Gibson stays quiet in its case
like a dog that won’t bark. My voice
bleeds because I was born a howl.

Sometimes my voice bleeds so much
it curls up inside me like a baby afraid to be born.
It bleeds at the edge of every note I used to hold,
every moan I once made dance. It bleeds
at the radio static in my chest,
at the echo of the club lights flickering on too early.
I’m bleeding a whole jukebox now,
each song a scream I can’t make right.

My hands throb like memory. My palms
tremble like sinners at the altar.
I offered them both to the demon. Said:
give me my voice, give me my fire.
And he did. Oh Lord, he did.

Now I sing again,
and every time I open my mouth
lightning carves a crack through my skull.
Every riff a riptide. Every chord a seizure.
The voice comes clean—but the price,
the price is that it ends me
bit by bit.

My body bleeds now—
on stage, in the silence between sets,
in motel rooms with the Bible drawer half open.
I bled in Tupelo. Bled in Harlem. Bled
while tuning up for a crowd that never showed.
I’ve got so much song inside me it’s killing me.

Even if the crowd don’t listen,
even if the mic cuts out,
I’ll sing myself into a stroke
because this voice is righteous, and terrible, and red.

Unnamed Need

I feel, just this very instant,
for the unwritten poem—
the one I abandon on Lenox Avenue
each time I try to name the genre
that might hold me.

A sonnet? A confession?
A braided essay with citations and ache?
I shelved it all once—after workshop,
wrist sore at the crook
from carrying a basket
of borrowed forms.

The glossy metaphors!
Pear, lychee, plum—
forbidden fruits plucked
from MFA syllabi,
sweet with approval
and rot.

Once, a draft spilled itself
in white sperm whale ellipses
across my desktop,
while I searched for the line
that could carry
what no journal would touch.

It was Brooklyn. My thirties.
Everyone I knew was negotiating
the same desolate luxury—
knowing the price of art,
and who pays it.

We were all ashamed of the same things:
authenticity. marketability.
the terrible burden
of being a “voice.”

I’d lug my manuscript home,
counting rejections like receipts,
doing grant-math
in a spreadsheet’s margins,
telling myself it’s okay—
that the lyric still counts
if it bleeds
into prose.

I’d squint into it, or close my eyes
and let it slap me in the face—
the known world ending
in a blur of genre tags:
Ethnic. Experimental. Diaspora. Grief.
Filed like flavors
in a sampler box:
marked,
but never devoured.

A need I can’t name—
not for Eden,
but for the page
before the fall:
before the first “no,”
before the hyphen,
before I learned
what not to say
to be published.

The Boy

What do we do with the boy, do we
burn him, do we nest him in dirt or
stone, do we wrap him in cedar and myrrh,
in muslin, in all our questions,
then lower him into a country of worms?

What becomes of a son’s body,
if none of us names it now, if
we leave it for time to dissolve—
will it soften like wax or
shrivel like salted meat in the sun?

We have the denim torn at the knee,
his cracked phone, the shoelace
knotted like an unfinished prayer—
are these relics or trash?
Is grief what gives them weight?

If the sheet stained with his sleep
still holds the shape of him,
would it be a kind of betrayal to
wash it clean? Or worse, to
wear it in secret, like armor?

On the floor, beneath his dresser:
a drawing he made, him as a hawk.
Was this a wish, or a warning?
Did he know how close the wind
had come to taking him?

Do we call the priest, or the flame?
My brother says bury. My mother
weeps for fire—“ashes can be held,”
she says. My father hasn’t spoken
since the accident, just holds the box

of his childhood teeth like a god
measuring what Job once lost.
And I—I look at my own hands,
half-expecting chains, Prometheus-style,
welded by silence, left to the vultures.

No one grieves the god who brought
us the spark; we only light it.
My brother says, “He was a boy,
not a myth.” But I saw it—
he tried to bring light to us.

And what now? Shall we build
a pyre in the backyard and call it
a cathedral? Shall we drag him
to earth and let it take its toll?
Shall we exile him to memory?

Was he a country we lost
without maps? Is grief its own
topography—floodplain, drought,
scorched field? Was this what
Hercules felt, if he ever lost a son?

(But did Hercules ever have a son
who died?) Does that mean
he was spared this? Does it mean
he was no man at all? And
what then am I, still living?

Where is the hole they talk about,
the one you can crawl into and
forget? Is forgetting, too, a kind
of godsend? How long does it take—
how many mornings, how many crows?

I look at my hands, again.
Once they held him. Now
they only ask questions.
What do we do with the body?
What do I do with these fists?

Rais Tuluka is a poet, essayist, and storyteller based in Sacramento, California. His work explores grief, Black identity, myth, and creative endurance, often blending lyricism with philosophical inquiry. A former public health strategist and current student of narrative power, Rais believes in the urgency of telling beautiful, difficult truths.