when i was a little girl,
during that span of time
when years weren't the yardstick
but rather the speed with which
my popsicle would melt
or the days awaited
when wands of pine
would cover me from
sun-burned scalp to scraped-up toe
with sweet sap,
i would run about the tall grasses
and name every wildflower
that brushed my ankles
oh-so-tenderly.
i would keep a journal,
all in cornflower blue crayola,
about my findings,
my voyages through seas of green
and the whispers heard
in rustlings through the waves,
all turning to fae fairytales between my ears.
everything was named beautiful,
and everything was soft as a cloud
as i laid with my shoulderblades in the earth,
sticky fingers outstretched towards
projected memories far above me.
and now
i often find myself in a similar position,
ribs heaving heavily
as the floral essence
fills my lungs so amazingly--
the leaden comfort in my limbs
making it almost as if i had never left.
it's as if those fae fairytales have finally come true,
the ponderings finally rippling anew,
and the poppies lulling me to sleep
for hundred of years,
millenia stained with
the purity of august's finest daisies.
their perfume roused me one morning,
the sky still bruised and fluttering,
head sticky with a misplaced exhaustion and the woes of age;
the circumstance to which i awoke was this:
the buds,
the lilacs and hyacinths,
the baby's breath and dandelion
fluff
i had made delicate wishes upon since my earliest days
had found themselves a home wrapped around my spine,
fragrant petals gracing my stomach with their presence.
as if influenced by draught,
the ache did not place itself
but rather my fascination
with each tickling floral
forming fissures in my abdomen--
i took mental note
of their names
and characteristics,
as many as i could fit in that sap-lined cavity of my mind,
just as lovely as ever.
the soil was as soft as a cloud,
childish glee filling my heart to overflowing.
some things never change.
sometimes, the beauty of flowers
remains
the beauty of flowers,
whether it is plush under foot
or pushing through
bone and sinew.
Jun 27, 2018
Jun 27, 2018 at 5:47 PM UTC
I have a bit of a blunt proposition for you:
let us move to Wisconsin or somewhere just as hidden
among soy fields and monotony;
let us leave our names behind,
the concrete slabs too heavy for our broken frames and silk rucksacks;
I am tired of fulfilling a Sisyphus contract, to be entirely honest.
I think that we could hitchhike from I-95
and drum our anthems on fleshy kneecaps,
our sights pulled away from the windows of some random Honda Accord
as scenes of purple mountains majesty paint themselves
on the insides of our singed eyelids.
Wouldn’t you love to skip along dirt roads
and forget the concrete jungles
that left painful calluses on your palms
and broke my left arm in a juvenile monkey bars contest,
complete with purple cast and a tablespoon of kids’ ibuprofen.
Pleistocene mulch would no longer plant itself
in our pink feet,
and the scars from past romps would heal.
We could lay in the high grasses until high noon,
until the moon rises high in the sky,
until it sinks behind our worn heels
and lights them with its cool flame.
Our minds could wander in Wisconsin,
wily teenage worries abandoned in favor
of punk-rock philosophies.
Maybe we could even make up that alt band
you dreamed of at sixteen,
as blandess is the birthplace of creativity;
you could pick up a flea market guitar,
and I could sing with a newfound, folksy humor.
We could do anything, and we could do nothing.
That’s the glory of something over the turnpike.
Just shake my hand,
those callouses scraping my crepey skin
and forming a blood bond like no other.
No signature required.
Leave your post stamps on your pock-marked kitchen counter.
Jan 8, 2018
Jan 8, 2018 at 9:44 AM UTC
There are butterflies in your stomach?
They flutter when you see him;
a furious blush paints your face,
raw brush strokes and
unadulterated emotion
leaving behind a rich pigment
known as cluelessness.
Mix in a bit of pallor,
and it's embarrassment.
They beat their mosaic-printed wings
with a stumble of your feet
or a failed exam,
a 68 in Applied Physics
when you should have pulled a crisp 69.
They find Eden-tier gardens with excitement
on par with that of a pajama-clad kid on Christmas morning,
and I bet you relish in the feeling.
But little did you know,
Miss Little Innocent sitting there
with her head weighed down
with her heavy thoughts and knock-off Docs
pigeon-toed in a less than symbol
(don't you know that, sixty-eight?),
had elephants,
prides of lions,
*********
the whole savanna
housed inside her ribcage,
bones rattling from deafening roars;
a cognizant mind stumbling from the seismic waves
of leviathan footsteps,
shaking the ground she walks on.
The pain in her chest,
the god awful attempts to provide
for her own microcosmic ecosystem
wracked her frail frame without mercy.
She continued to bounce her knees
and answer your questions
with breathy, exhausting syllables,
but you put yourself out of commission.
You write and write about your butterflies,
but think about how
it must feel to have to accept
lionesses gnawing on your shoulderblades.
Would you ask for your beautiful ******** back?
Dec 27, 2017
Dec 27, 2017 at 6:31 PM UTC
Ill rumors slid down my throat, gelatinous and coated in bitter mucus - reminiscent of when I was five years old, just dared to kiss a slug found in the school's daffodils. They burned my esophagus, leaving me without taste for days. They left me stumbling over too big, too-there feet to the nurse's office in search of Dramamine.
Nov 8, 2017
Nov 8, 2017 at 9:41 AM UTC
Miss, Atomic Bomb,
how are you today?
Do you feel a jittering in your veins,
hear a chattering of ivory teeth
in your sugar skull
candied by your wish to always be oh-so-sweeter?
When you fell to the ground under his hands,
rough with militant knuckles
tattooed in unlined blues and purples
transforming into nausea-inducing camouflage hues,
and your new, Target brand, $2.99 black tights
ripped viciously at the knees,
did you feel an explosion in your chest?
Did you feel angry,
willing to lash out with toxic words
that your floodgates had always tried to hold back,
the dams now creaking and groaning in beautiful sighs?
Did you,
when it hurt,
fight against that war hero who had held you close
during a time you could barely remember,
blurred crimsons shading the edges of every smiling photograph?
Or did you fold him into your campfire-scented embrace
and apologize profusely
for being so naturally destructive?
I bet you open your lips-
swollen and bleeding through cracks
that could define
‘damaged’
in the dictionary you flip through
when everything is numb,
and only battle wounds of paper cuts will suffice-
just to speak those awful words.
I bet
you allowed him to tell you
that you were a weapon-
self-triggering,
horrific,
prepared to injure
those
innocent,
pink-lipped,
blue-eyed girls he stared at on the street
just to keep what you had.
But,
Miss Atomic Bomb,
someone had to have dropped you.
someone had to have thrown you
from your security,
and I bet against life itself
that the guilt lies in those calloused palms.
I bet you never noticed
the rope tied around your ankle,
expertly knotted so that he could just keep
reeling you back up into his arms.
He liked you on that verge of manic destruction,
eyes wide,
holding onto oceans threatening to flood that little studio apartment of yours
in New York City.
He wasn’t ready to let you truly fall.
He still isn’t.
So,
Dear Atomic Bomb,
know that that
run in your tights is only the beginning of the end.
The scraped flesh on your knees
is only the beginning of
the carnage that could be wrought.
And none of it will be your fault,
your ******* crumbling-at-the-seams fault.
You won’t cause the war,
and you can still crawl out on
shrapnel-coated limbs.
Take my heed,
little girl –
desert.
Nov 2, 2017
Nov 2, 2017 at 8:51 AM UTC
'One day, she will be nothing but litter on the side of the highway', they had murmured in hidden tongues. So she balled herself up and crumpled anything that she could have been – at least she could be satisfactorily streamlined when she was thrown from tobacco-stained fingertips, if nothing else.
Sep 20, 2017
Sep 20, 2017 at 5:52 PM UTC
Do me a favor
and color in my lines –
between my ribs,
my heaving chest,
my flushed cheeks.
Keep my mouth sharp,
my words precise and meaningful.
Add a bit of character to my
picked over hands.
Tickle my sides with
Prismacolor
or Crayola
and pinch my body pink with joy.
Color in my lines
and make me everything I want to be.
Add definition with thick black lines,
to give me structure
when I am falling apart.
Make something of this empty outline.
Bring out the beauty that I want it to hold.
Sep 14, 2017
Sep 14, 2017 at 9:41 PM UTC
It’s ironic, huh? How when the small of your back is pressing into beige carpeting with those nail polish stains from that one experiment in the eighth grade, your rib cage suffocating you as your lungs expand like a party balloon animal, that that’s when you are your strongest? Your fingertips are cold and blue, your cheeks flaming as if you had tried to stick the sun under your tongue, but all the while you only feel a slight warmth coursing through your veins and a pleasant breeze on your thighs. Shrapnel and pieces of broken stucco plant themselves in your forehead, tilted up towards the crumbling cerulean ceiling, but it only feels like the light sprinkling of rain you used to try to gulp down for refreshment. It is ironic that when you falter, you lift your shoulders a bit taller. You feel like you are falling apart, limbs numb yet pricked and prodded as the whole world’s pincushion, but you are being rebuilt out of marble. When your mind’s scaffolding is collapsing, your face still keeps that slight smile in the corner of your mouth stained with berry lip shade. Everyone admires your genuine smile while you know that it was carved by Donatello himself, your torment hidden behind layers of compacted stone.
Sep 13, 2017
Sep 13, 2017 at 5:35 PM UTC
Drink your lemonade strong,
but don’t let the sugar choke you
with its sweet appeal on your tongue.
Aug 22, 2017
Aug 22, 2017 at 7:20 PM UTC
I think that today,
we should all scream
until our lungs ache
from the distance we’ve tread
and the things that we’ve said –
anecdotes that fill our hearts with joy,
tearful stories of all of that wrongness which we’ve faced,
the lyrics caught between our ears
and have been for days and months and years,
all of those words that we’ve written
in bright fuchsia gel pen in the margins of diaries
from our awkward third grade years
that we hoped no one would ever lay eyes upon.
Scream until the last syllables
crawl up your throat in an effort to be heard.
Scream until your tongue ties itself into knots
from the exhaustion of spilling all of your secrets.
Scream until you grow weary,
but that kind of weary where
you fall asleep with a smile on your face
and a soreness in your every muscle
that means you have accomplished something.
Act like a little kid again
and chase after ice cream trucks,
shouting along to
the sticky-sweet cadence
that drips into your ears.
Or crumple into a heap,
***** laundry piled as high as
Mount Everest
on your puke-colored carpet
and
scream.
Just scream
and scream
and scream.
And when you lose your voice,
come to me
and I will make sign language jokes
into your sweaty palms,
fingers curling expressively
as your shoulders lay just a bit higher,
the scaffolding that had been holding you up
torn down joint by joint,
rod by rod;
but it didn’t hurt did it?
It felt exquisite,
like waking up on Christmas morning
to the smell of just-burnt Pillsbury cinnamon rolls
and dented, wrapping-papered packages.
Let these memories whisper through you,
not scream,
and let them carry you to sleep.
You screamed today.
Now,
you can whisper
or send back witty one-liners into my palm
without the fear of explosion.
Now you can chase ice cream trucks with jingling pockets
faster than ever
because you are so
*******
light.
Aug 18, 2017
Aug 18, 2017 at 9:23 PM UTC