bored
chewing gum
college life
you challenge thoughts
wrapped in a blanket
meaning = form = structure
i disagree

maybe?

I hope where I begin won't make much sense,
but my body is up above my head
and for once I feel peaceful.

Your are a mist
making me wish my hands were a mason jar
to cup you and keep you
from slipping away.

The first time I wrote this I missed the potential for pain, here.

But everything slips, sometimes.
That's just reality.
Or what I believe anyway; right is only right until it is horribly wrong.

It's different for you.
That is how you choose
between pumpkin pie and banana bread
between taking what is yours and sleeping on the floor
between what you want and what others want for you.

That is the difference between us, you know:
That I live for me. Simple.
I know you don't like it, and neither do I,
but I am rightly emotional, so forgive me,
if you can.

Turns out the icy burns against our knees were in your head, too.
We should have felt guilt
but the truth is I can fake it pretty well.
Lying is easy, when I do it for the wrong reasons.

I felt on top of a mountain,
bowing with the breeze,
thinking that no matter the direction I fell
I would be unable to get back up.

So maybe I should just stay right here--
live in this in between forever.
I'm good at getting what I want
but very bad at holding on once I have it.

So, this is what peaceful feels like.
If it were my decision to make, I'd stay,
but as you always say, my dear,
take care, see you later,
or maybe tomorrow.

I hit the ground many years before I ever felt the impact.
And once that came, my eyes stayed closed, refusing to react.

I scanned crowds for pierced earlobes, wondering, sometimes, why?
But then, the fear simply set in, its tendrils 'round my spine.

I sat and fought it for a while, to cloak myself, more than anything.
It's funny how my big secret worsened with the protecting.

Then it got bored, and left me, somehow hollow but just whole,
And I naively stretched right out, and frolicked in it all.

But then back home the pain seared out, much harder than before,
So once again, I dunked my head, but this time split the door.

This fishing line feels rather thin, but to it I still grip;
I will be simultaneous, and glide just as I trip.

I used to joke about how
I was the only member of my family
(including my dog)
not on medication.

Now, I keep a plastic baggie in the front pocket of my purse.

My dog is dead and his basket
of pills has been replaced with:
blue tablet, round, and
white capsule, oval.

The capsules are filled with powder, not liquid.
The kind pharmacist assures me of this.
I think she is not usually this kind.

I think pharmacists get a kick out of studying our faces at the drive-thru window.
They sneak back into their rows of candy colored pills
and play memory with our prescription slips
matching faces to OCD, schizo, and insomnia.

This is why it takes hours to put 30 pills into an orange bottle, probably.

So thank you,
nice pharmacist lady,
for smiling at me so wide,
because you think I'm depressed.

But I am not of that kind, you see.
I have gremlins in my brain that you can't glean
from a doctor's messy handwriting.

That plastic baggie in my purse?
Don't you worry.
I only take it out at mealtimes.

I looked in the mirror this morning
to see that my skin had bloomed purple roses
from a night I do not regret
and will easily forget.

Do you remember when we did that once?
On your bed, in the winter.
You impressed upon me a tight-lipped bruise of love.
Or so I hoped at the time.

But as I clench fists around snowflakes
I begin to realize that this ice is like love-
the smaller it gets
the more quickly it disappears.

It's easy to pretend
when I peer into my hands to find them slick and empty
that when something isn't there
it means I don't need it.

So I order "lite ice" at my local Dunkin' Donuts
before a Statistics class
and I sip from my nearly full cup
that I imagine to be delicious.

I whisper
in my head
that as a lover, you were really never much better
than this lukewarm cup of iced coffee.

It's all saliva and lips when I think of you
and footsie under the desk
on the silent floor in the library.

Can you focus on Jane Austen
while making my heart get hard
and my pencil lead splinter from pressure on the page?

You walk in in your peacoat
and hot pink knee-high socks
and I think
I will never find another quite like you.

Nicotene wafts from your breath as you ruffle my hair
and it's all I can do to hold myself back from leaning forward
and making your exhale
my inhale.

* * *

It's all lips and tongue tricks when I think of you now
and the lies that tongue twisted into my
willing ear.

I hope you fuck your heart hard
against the desk in your bedroom.
Jane Austen would be ashamed of you

with your broken soul courtship bullshit
and 4 am rendez-vous with red wine bottles.
I hope I never have to
encounter another anything like you.

A hand-rolled cigarette dangles from your lips
whenever I see you in passing
forcing me to remember that I am still
weaning myself off of an addiction to exhales.

someday soon
i will lie in bed at night
and think of you.

tucked
like a swaddled infant
beneath my sheets

i will picture the caverns of your face
paint the rise and fall of your cheekbones
into my mind's wavering canvas
with gentle brushstrokes
as i have done so often before

i will wonder
did our auras skirt like shadows
around each other?
did i have to turn my head
in order to shelter my heart?

and i will realize
that i don't remember

and i will suck on this indifference
as if its sweetness will never fade
i will play with it in my mouth
running my tongue over my teeth
sticking the lozenge of the moment into the corners
of my cheeks
because there is such beauty
in paying someone so little notice
that you forget
that they exist.

Let this be the sign that I am ready to move on.
That I am done with your games,
will no longer struggle to be your queen,
have been tossed from the board,
checkmate,
you win.

Let this be the sign that I will never again
try to be worth something to you.
Never try to fill up the bruised cavity of your heart,
or siphon out the black ink from your veins to leave them gleaming.
Because still, in your eyes
I am worth nothing.

Let this be the sign that I will find someone else
to fill me bubbly, spritely, sparkling and red.
That he will press petal-soft lips to my forehead
like you did, but he will mean it
like you never could.

Let this be the sign that being alone
does not always mean being lonely.
That my throat will someday open again
to speak the words
I know to be true:
I will be so much better off without you.

Little girl,
put down your bright red bricks.

Oh yes, I can see you
with your frizzy hair and bleeding fingers—

no, you can’t ever
hide from me.

You’ve been slaving away
for a few years, now,

building up
your castle of bricks.

It’s a beautiful cave
with a stained-glass window

to let in some light,
but you’ve filled

all the cracks
with a smattering of spackle,

sealed every stone together
with a minty rope of mortar.

Sometimes visitors pass by outside
and stop, heads cocked to the side

to listen to the music
that seeps from within—

a consistent lullaby,
tangy stardust,

even you can’t
prevent from escaping.

Little girl,
open your eyes!

Forget about letting the right one in,
let everyone in,

and believe that the right one will find his own way,
and until then

when you get hurt,
hug the pain,

wind it around your fingertips
and through your toes

because pain only comes
when you’ve lost something worthwhile

and loss only hurts
when you’re in love,

but love is loss,
just like love is hate,

and life without love
isn’t really life at all.

So take in a deep breath of air
through your wide open window

because life will only open up
once you do.

dear god, make me a bird
so i might flap into your feathers
and burrow there
while you sing me to sleep.

sing me mozart
as i sleep:
annunciate the instruments
the way i want to

annunciate your name
or voice
from the page, i pray
you share with only me.

you've got me praying (just imagine!)
in that way i do
when i try lying to myself
but it doesn't work.

am i suggesting?
yes. possibly?
night
night,

love! l-o-S-T.
i lost it (myself?) this
something (noun) i never had.
well, maybe had halfway-

once.
i am still whole.
still a whole step below her
THAT is why we glitter. no,

above!
always above!
say it
and you will believe it.

now: i touch your pen to my lips.
wish you had taken it back,
boo. can't help but try to break me
with this piece of you.

I couldn’t cry at my grandfather’s funeral.
My grandmother’s frail body, directly in front of me, meager skin and bones,
wracked with convulsive sobs. Salty rivulets streamed from my stoic male cousin’s tear ducts
and steam coated my mother’s glasses, condensed heat
from tears shed for a lost father. I, stone cold, couldn’t break through the barrier in my throat.
Too preoccupied with bloody stained-glass windows, aching cuts from ballet flats, ignoring the
   consoling words of a god to whom I don’t belong.

Perhaps I should stop pretending I belong
to a family who thanks God at a funeral
and eagerly stuffs belief down my throat.
“Thank you, Lord, for crushing the bones
of my grandfather to ashy powder, and for the heat
of the fire that snuffed out my neighbor, and for stuffing molested little girls into air ducts.”

Here are things that can make me cry: the sight of duct
tape fraying on my water bottle, losing my belongings,
a ten dollar watch from a children’s store, the scalding heat
of my dog’s body curled against my stomach at night, watching a girl I love at her mother’s funeral,
studying another’s hips, and the way the bones
pull at her papery skin. My sobs are throaty

when I cry in earnest. They begin somewhere in the stomach, stinging my throat
as I fight to swallow them away. But it’s not easy to duck
out of sight when stress pops in the cracking of finger and neck bones
and the only place you want to be is the place you don’t belong
and every day feels like a funeral.
When you long to exchange ice for penetrating heat

but when you get it the heat
is unbearable because you didn’t consider the way his throat
used to ripple with laughter and remembering this at his open-casket funeral
might just be too much to handle. When the cramped duct
of the dark closet in your bedroom presents itself as a safe hiding place because belonging
is unthinkable when you fear your world might collapse into a city of bones.

Bones
should be filled with heat;
they belong
in our throats
not within ducts
carved in the earth or in polished caskets at funerals.

You will scream this heat from your throat
until the words belong to the stubborn saline that refuses to pour from your tear ducts
and you hope that one day, your bones will speak for themselves at your funeral.