I had managed to repress my sea monsters down to the drains, but they still dominated my fibula: once my sea monsters released their gurgling screams, I was trapped in their foaming fangs and words wouldn’t leave till I let them speak. 

Once I did, I was overwhelmed by both – their tendency to contaminate my ink and my tendency to deny their existence. If I wasn’t sick, my truth was a fictionalized exaggeration in an attempt to disguise the reality of who I was.

Whenever they foamed, I wanted to crawl through Pasquino’s armpit, afraid of the materialization of my own thoughts.

I was frustrated by my inability to incorporate the outside world into what I’d write. My fibula was repetitively shooting out the same overused themes that should have been consumed by the sarcophagus I thought I had locked my seamonsters in.

Working my way through my poems was like working my way through the steps of the cupola at St. Peter’s Basilica. I reached a point where in theory, I thought I was headed upwards, but the walls that bent me into a tilt along made me believe I was just circling and climbing down backwards.

Instead of appreciating the city that had become my home for a month, when I peered through the bars on reaching the top of the Basilica’s dome, I was again made hyper-aware of my foam; I couldn’t escape the bubbles swimming in my chest, reminding me how far away I felt from my surroundings.

I was disappointed in myself for not knowing how to control being disconnected with the present; for not knowing how to absorb the present any differently than I would a redundant postcard of St. Peter’s Square that could easily be found at every souvenir store in the city.

But a day after I allowed myself to wallow down my tightly wound spiral staircase of self-loathing at the cupola, we received a new writing prompt that became the stepping stone for helping me get over myself.