I stick my fingers in my throat
and throw up a basket of swallowed suns;
under it, my tongue is parched and pinned in place
like a dried house moth on an entomologist’s hand
that nurses it back to life

and demands devotion in return,
a poem in return.

But I have purged the feeling being out of me
like a cold, cold man now averse to the ways of his younger lover
who is alive for all of it — the lust and the starving kisses
and the quiet deaths in the morning only to haunt at night.

I leave letters for my bitten nails without meaning a single word,
and go to lie with the superficiality, the hypocrisy nesting under my tongue.

I have started writing poems again — see where they take me this time
and find myself here, once more
where a fool unpacks her baggage and out I come rolling
like a dead body with a foaming mouth, a brown moth burning under the sun,
a leech that scurries under salt and needles,
slowly eroding like sanity.

She thinks, therefore, she is, they say,
but at what cost? She looks on and pens this poem
with a tiny smile on her lips.

my father pours his beer on my mother’s wounds.

i bet she rues the moment
god fashioned her out of his hollow ribs
and him, out of the twigs breaking
under her careless, tiny feet when she was fourteen.

hollow and broken, the walls fall
all over me like ancient, perishing twin cities
and lot’s wife never looks back; the angels never look back —
i crack like a lightless dawn that wants to disappear
but my brother has started to look like me —
wearing an all too familiar silence, an all too familiar sadness
wrapped around his neck like a cursed talisman.
my sister’s wrists are exposed; i check
for bitterness, and cigarettes, and boys —
maybe i hid them better and held them tighter away
until i was pale and white as a ghost i longed to be,

hollow and broken, the walls fall; the door flings open.

i no longer have to hide my wrists,
but i crouch to a cluttered corner of my room.
every sudden movement, every unchanging voice,
and i bow my head low for my father to pour his beer,
like a baptism of the heathen who accepts the words of god.

my mother’s wounds shine like biblical relics
kept in my body — too fragile and small
but i was not made for the word of god
who calls himself by my father’s name.

dearest stranger,

i am too abstract now for my own good. i feel and hold myself, in place, in my hands and i slip right through like sunlight, like tiny moth scales, like the delusions of a sauntering ghost, like all things unreal and untouchable, like a madwoman, laughing away in her free fall to an unsteady ground.

and all the flowers are cheering in their surreal, psychedelic scarlets, and all the rocks are breaking, and all the words are failing to capture what i truly feel.

am i still despairingly corporeal, like paper napkins and panes of glass? am i still in actual flesh, now that god doesn't exist? am i still as tangible as this last, frantic breath of a letter?

am i still actually here?

bidding my farewell now,
ginia

when will the world quiet down into a throbbing, feeble ***** that i can so easily crush?