The color of the cream
As it is bled
from the cows in my dream
Also in red

Unfurling, curling,
bended, distended

A color so bright
It demands a white vase
So tired at night
Cannot lift its own face

LONG AGO,
            I     S P R A W L E D.
I WAS THE OCEAN FLOOR
            I WAS AN ASTRONAUT, A COSMONAUT
            Still impressive,
                               I am now
                               Harry Houdini
                               in the worlds'
                               smallest box

Less impressive,
I am covered in my own ****
which is soaking into the cracks between the linoleum tiles
in the ****** kitchen
of the ****** apartment
i live in
with my ****** ex boyfriend
(But he is not home)
  
Serenity, alone
It's rare
To feel love
From inside

Serenity, together
It's hard
To have help
from outside

An hour and a phone call later

A friend hoists you up and carries you
Mopping your floor
wiping your genitals
Tenderly, platonically
The way we hoped had already happened for the last time
A moment between you as a baby and you as a parent
Before you gained a real memory
But that moment is happening right now
But, somehow, your whole childhood is ahead of you still

I thought I’d be smited, right then and there

The red gravel spilling into the dugout

Was now plastic aquarium rocks

I was in a bowl, drowning underwater

It felt like drowning a lot of the time I was out there

Mostly because I was easily distracted and couldn’t play softball for ****

When Paige kissed me, I cried

Now, those pieces of red dirt
were a hellfire beneath me.

My religious upbringing was the kind that’s secretly stifling. The kind that permeates so deep that to act against it is to act against yourself.

This generational inherited catholic guilt.

The idea that I should be unimportant and unassuming and sinning was important in a bad way.

I knew I would only get one trip to the bathroom per service, I planned it carefully each week

So that it would take the most time

So I could stand in the great hall and twiddle my thumbs

As we were  forbidden to re-enter the chapel while the father was speaking

I am forbidden from many things as a child.

I’m forbidden from tears as if I’m not important enough to have them.

I am not stone and my tears are not blood. I am not a miracle. I am not a sight to behold. I am not a message from god.

I am not the prophetic ****** Mary in my mother’s dreams the night a relative passes.

I am not allowed to love without meaning.

When Paige kissed me I cried.

I had to tell everyone in t-ball that I was 5 when I was only 4 because my mother wanted me to start a year early.

I hid the sign up forms they gave us at school each year, but my mom would register me in person.

Every year she’d tell me, just one more year, this can be the last one.

This went on for nine years.

After I made my first communion. I asked to quit

I had to study five more years to make my confirmation sacrament, effectively promising I’d stay in the church,
before my mother would let me leave.

The irony was lost on her.

When Paige kissed me I cried.

What a cruel way to hurt someone. This was worse than the tripping, the taunting, the terrorizing.

Her tenderness.

I often wondered why she treated me as she did—I was already an ugly duckling, a left fielder, a loser.

Her mom was the coach, and she was the best on the team. They all listened to her, which meant they all hated me.

She’d call me a **** and pull my hair.

When paige kissed me, I cried

Why couldn’t it have been anyone else, why not natalie johnston

I never told anyone else, I decided it wasn’t my secret to share.

But I am tired of keeping secrets of what people who hate me did to my body.

Retrospectively, it’s easy to try to be flattered. I’m sure it was hard and weird for her to have those feelings.

I’m sure she expressed them as well as she could.

But I didn’t want Paige to kiss me.

I WANTED Paige to stop calling me a ****.

I wanted her get hit in the face with a softball

and I wanted it to shove her nose into her brain.

And I wanted her to die.

And

I prayed for her to die.

You own something electronic that glows blue in the night and you find it irritating, and I find it helpful

When I sleep over the first night
And it helps me find my way to the bathroom

What the fridge organization would look like if we lived together.

How much the landscape of my fridge would change if you stayed over for four days in a row

How when we move in together we’ll have to make a mature decision between slate gray and burnt orange for an accent wall even though we will each be firmly on different sides and neither of us like the idea of striping them nor mixing them together


How well would we compromise, how hard would you kiss me when we chose what you wanted for dinner

And in my dreams i dream of the dreams i’d dream in your bed

a dream in which I walk in a long bounding gait, like an astronaut ballerina

The restaurant
We ate at
The last time I saw you

Is now closed

I didn’t know that would be the last time I would see you

I didn’t know that would be the last time I
would eat there

You looked into my eyes for the first time since I picked you up to say “this is the best garlic bread I have had in my entire life”

It took us 47 minutes to get there

It took us 61 minutes to get home

Because we sat in the parking lot of a gas station I’d only been to once before, but liked a lot

I haven’t been there since we were
Either

We listened to that song

Not the one you quoted at “lunch”

Not the one about what you want and don’t

The one that asks why

I took you back

To his house

I parked a block away

I cried

And it waited a moment longer than a moment’s pause

It was rain resisting its temper, attempting tenderness

Each drop the poignant pain in a patient bladder when you hold to hear the end

Then, it drowned the saplings in the gutter

a violent politeness
an apology for impeding
a housewarming gift

i remember being a child
i remember the ignorance
i remember the jump rope that whispered, “how do people’s knees just /hurt/“

i remember dreaming of digging mosquito bites out of my flesh, but never daring to

i remember peering through the cream-colored tissue paper and seeing the blue and green toned ribbon rivers flowing underneath, wanting so badly, so innately, to dam them, to disrupt them, to desecrate and destroy

i remember watching television without glasses, i remember seeing the movies, seeing the bad but handsome men, i remember wanting their scars, wanting my own, wanting to save the broken glass pieces of the broken glass picture frame (more than i even wanted to save the once precious drawing inside), wanting to remember every memory, every mistake

every time i thought of pain, i thought
how, why,
when


and now, i have a warm and wretched wedding ring made of my own marred and mangled mistake

put there by a hot, hollow heat

and that hell-fire put there by either me as a careless adult


or by the wishes i had as a child

to be

mysterious
interesting
and
hurt

to have abundant axiomatic afflictions
to be scuffed-up and broken-in
to be a well-loved leather wallet
to be an other
to be seen as damaged and dangerous

to say “keep away”
to say “i have lived and you have not”

and maybe one day,
to say, “that one looks just like mine”

and eagerly pull at my clothing
and carefully cull
desperate to reveal myself
and find camaraderie in unforgettable pain