_this must be love_, you think,
as she presses your shoulder into the tile wall.
space is not a concept here
as she seeps into your skin
and you gasp
when she looks into your eyes
because she can feel you alive,
awake and writhing beneath her hands.
the tile is a dull ache.
later, much later, you will remember
that you locked the door, and that
the warmth spreading over your thighs
is dark and slow and blooming into
the blank sheets.
the drain is filling up but the
water is only another weight.
you welcome it.
your mouth is open.
it is all you know.
she digs into your jaw
_the flesh is all heart, but bones
do not lie_, she reminds you.
but you sigh anyways because the story
always ends the same way: you,
the girl, and two severed wrists.
your spine curves against
a rock and a smooth place
while the sharp tang of sweat
hangs heavy in the air.
_this must be love._
you will relish this.
there is something forgotten,
restless, shifting under a dreamless night.
you want to open the window.
your hands do not obey. you didn’t really
want to open the window, then.
she whispers into your teeth that you are mine and
for a moment, everything is blindness, everything is
expanding as the heat races down your skin and
over your flesh and _you are hers_ because you will always be hers and
you know this in the last chamber of your bleeding heart,
you have heard its chaos echoing, infinite, searing
beyond, beyond where there is no separation
of you and her and you, where
light begins and terminates because
you are the circle.
later, there are lines of red,
three parallel, to match
on your back like scars of victory. you smile at this.
rivulets tracing down your neck it
is delicious,
this sacrament you have been gifted.
the body is not a place to hide.
you mistake the fog in your eyes for
the steam on the glass, but no one
is there to correct you. then again,
it is only water, the same at your feet,
the same on your hands. you laugh.
water and fog and glass.
you lean over the toilet bowl while the blood drips out,
your ribs cracking open like soft eggshells,
but it’s okay because the cold linoleum will
cradle your head when it’s done. faithful lover. holy night.
your head slips into the bathroom sink.
this ravaging soul of yours shreds.
_this must be love_, and this last time
the air sings it for you, the
candle snuffing out.
_consummatum est._
Feb 27, 2020
Feb 27, 2020 at 11:18 PM UTC
si la dia pudiera dormir mientras
el cielo la cantaba su historia,
o si la noche quisiera despertar
con el oro reluciente en sus ojos―
el mundo se marchitaría por sus pecados.
si tuvieran un amor brillante que
no era cubierto por los rituales,
ni la luna viuda que ya espera―
todo se hubiera como infinito.
pero inseparable el uno del otro
en formas que podían destruir la causa
que sostena su belleza inmortal―
que no solo morirían en el mundo,
pero en tiempo, en espacio, y en la memoria.
Oct 23, 2019
Oct 23, 2019 at 5:51 PM UTC
strange how we can recognize someone
by the shape of their shadows how
the places the light cannot reach tells more than
the places it strikes, that the span of darkness across their throat tells more
about the way they move and the way they feel than the
tear in the eye, suspended, caught on an eyelash, unfalling with the light;
that the empty spaces of white that the shadow doesn't reach
tells me they are a reality and that the curve of their body is not impermanent, or that the shadow is not permanent, or that the light is fluctual, lining the liminal space between the two,
that the design of human nature is wrought not in one space but two,
folding over and in, not in two colors,
but one: one within and one without.
Sep 8, 2019
Sep 8, 2019 at 7:32 PM UTC
silent girl in the red dress, what else do you hide behind that smile? _"The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold.
The curves of your lips rewrite history."_ the hollows of your cheeks casting diffuse rose shadows, the soft glare— lips that make the smile but don't quite touch the eyes, eyes that see to you but you don't see them back, —peering out of the frame, half turned to go
but just there enough to see (your eyes are so wide with joy); be this happy forever, it suits you. your knowing winter face is shy and alive, and you never say anymore but you are glowing— in this, ironically, you are exceptionally dissonant; the permanence is
astounding— startling, halogenic— you, the girl in the quiet red dress, captivate. and no one will see you.
May 22, 2019
May 22, 2019 at 6:47 PM UTC
someday i hope i can find a blank concrete wall on the side of an abandoned strip
of road like yellow hyphenated tape
perforated straight down the middle: you, me, a picnic basket in our cherry red convertible with
a can of graffiti staining the tips of my fingers black,
brazen instrument of destruction spraying across the
obscenely grandiose texts that paint the insides of our minds, excerpts from howl, anything from tartt, lyrical, aesthetic, so above our heads like the smoke on your lips oh
the road trip is the one line track to solve all our miseries;
somewhere we can just stretch our arms out to touch the wind, in and over and all the way through, somewhere we can stretch our heads back to feel the sun drip down, basking, soaking, heating and enveloping glorious warmth,
linearity mocking abstraction, with all the semicolons misplaced, all the words inverted, all the secrets unkept and blurted beneath the rustle of tall southern grasses and the smell of burning wood and light sage and the dark loveless sky, cold and everywhere
but we will save up swaths of the unloving night, tuck them in the folds of your flannel and the creases of your skin
all the while listening to something sad like matt healy on the turntable
tinny and distorted running out of our car speakers, scrambling for purchase on the cheap leather seats up and over and through
someday i want to keep a bag full of midnight dances and music
softly escaping on the sorrows in our hearts and the little whims we pray so much on
with a toothbrush and a change of clothes, watching as the glassy light falls, a flag on the ground, a foot pressed into it, digging past our lives, digging into the new america, paradise for pageant runners and paisley princes
_in the garden, and i have not found so_
in paradise we are found, and here we stand, two broken things next to each other. horror story twins, you the white, i the dark, running the whole house down. we leave with abandon. we live with abandon. whole, and then suddenly, inextricably, returned.
Apr 23, 2019
Apr 23, 2019 at 11:46 PM UTC
she was obsessed with this idea of rebirth because she messed up too many times; she believed everyone deserved a Rennaisance, and it was her vision of the circle yeats drew,
and it was for dreamers who squatted in gutters along alleyways hoping to find a muse fallen and buried in the filth;
and it was for realists who really had fallen and buried themselves in filth because their homes were lower than that;
and it was for addicts, who believed they had really been to the moon and conspired against naysayers;
and it was for conspiracists who knew all along the moon simply didn't exist because they had it manufactured in their kitchen;
and it was for sleeping girls with trembling hands who sought out this kitchen in the night whilst everyone merrily slept;
and it was for the sleeping boy who really wasn't asleep but lying naked under sheets and limbs;
and it was for the tangled limbs that still quivered next to him from a dissolved ecstasy, boyish and sad and hungry;
and it was for that hidden starving hunger that still plagued the neighborhood's homes and lingered on doorsteps, begging;
and it was for begging peals of laughter that his mother sent up from the rooftop when the sky went dark and only her kin across town, reeling, beastly, gorgeous, could ever reply;
and it was for unsent replies, for conscripted soldiers, for wars fought by better men and surveyed by lesser;
and it was for less-than-scrupulous masters who hid under their solemn cathedral art that spoke higher than god himself;
and it was for god who left the world to fend under his illusory cloak of stars, so dim it only mocked his fiery wrath beneath;
and it was for that fiery wrath, the kind that incited and ravaged and devastated, merciless with abandon for all of mankind's own misgivings;
and it was those misgivings that had started her renaissance, her quest for glory cores and sovereign minds, for signs and streets and women and colors and light and the end of all suffering;
it was for restart (like a death, but shorter), somewhere between termination and a genesis in vitro (the liminal space found within and without); for her alone, solitary line cleaving the shadowy folds of time, defiant, windswept, miraculous, insignificant glitch through the eternal night; for her, until she commanded time to stop; for her, hungry; for her, powerful; for her, terrified; for her for her and only ever her: the regifted universe.
Apr 20, 2019
Apr 20, 2019 at 10:11 PM UTC
shifty birds, why do you sway so?
on the wind, in the surface of the lake,
_you are a disordered heart_
and yet, you hold?
flightless vessels, what bore you here, so many lives away from home?
if only it were so easy.
you say you will leave like that, leave by the sound of the water.
to the other side of lakes mirrored and glassy eyes showing even less.
leave by the sound of the water.
a charmed life, indeed.
Apr 11, 2019
Apr 11, 2019 at 12:09 AM UTC
_/There is no fellow in the firmament._
but only fire can cast down raging blood,
running through the city, flagrant
smoke on a collonade of scepters, raised
— line by line: note the conspirator in the masses
_Doth not Brutus brotherless kneel?/_
traitorous hands, leaking red
_/Speak hands, for me!_
— from a dagger plunged deep through the heart of eruption it
spills chaotical, arterial, sinful
down and down ribbons of life
crown in rotation: halted
on tumbling tyrrant, passes guiltless largesse from hand sought to
hands yet seeking, searching
[whisperings]
"but on what grounds is usurpation justified?"/
"what cavity yet persists in the dawn of these reds rising?"
kneeling king, sodden with loss
bend for me —
_Et tu, Bruté?/_
screamitbloodymurdersingitholydivination
_Then fall, Caesar._
Mar 9, 2019
Mar 9, 2019 at 10:34 PM UTC