our ankles knock
at stranger’s doors
under once familiar sheets
Jul 19, 2017
Jul 19, 2017 at 12:17 PM UTC
Read more.
Words are the map fragments of wisdom you need to navigate your way in a world constantly sending you searching for that which you don’t yet have a name.
Write more.
And don’t keep it to yourself. Your voice deserves to be heard too so scream in cursive and whisper in all CAPS, bleed through paper and heal through the spines of notebooks
you’re spiraling onto something, breathe in commas and step over periods because you’re not over
you’re the most beautiful run-on sentence
paint more.
You’re an artist whose perspective warrants an audience,
so leave cerulean fingerprint traces in your titanium touches,
mix gesso with mars and be alizarin against charcoal
stand out. And stand up.
Find adventure in the every day. Skydive through small talk, zip line through steps up stairs without an end,
life is the ellipses in silences your eyes seek to make stories,
explore.
This world. People. This city you’ve landed yourself and take calculated risks.
Tiptoe through moshpits and stomp through meadows.
Cartwheel into concrete conversations headfirst eyes wide open,
be vulnerable, to those who deserve to see the rawest parts of you.
And leave the ones who’d rather exploit them behind
leave others’ opinions behind. Let them be the ones collecting dust.
You are stronger than you’ll ever know and ten-fold what they’d ever expect.
So let them guess.
Be the question mark in the corner they can’t place.
Your story is complicated. But that makes you interesting.
What doesn’t challenge you doesn’t change you and you’ve been challenged each and every day
you get out of bed and speak when so easily you could’ve lost your voice the night you lost your body.
It took you some time and a few nameless faces to claim it again and you’re still working out what that means,
you’ve always had your own way
but all the ****** assault pamphlets name this normal.
[For once it’s a label you don’t detest.]
So this year be normal if you so choose, but also be weird.
Be loud, not small, be confident, and not sorry.
Take up space.
You deserve to.
You are Woman and you are Strong.
Push, but don’t ever shove.
Love unapologetically and fiercely.
But don’t force what a boy is not willing to give.
Find someone who will pay your heart the same attention he does your body.
Scratch that,
find yourself.
Read your body’s brail, your chapters of goosebumps, and play chess with checkers across your skin.
Unlearn and relearn and unlearn and learn to remember you are enough and it is your turn.
Look in the mirror and accept the pieces looking back are in progress.
Keep writing.
Watch the moon make way for the sun. Be brighter than both.
Let your irises draw constellations across galaxies unwritten.
Move so far forward, you stop having a reason to look back.
Forgive that which you cannot change.
You’ll make more mistakes, scrape more knees and trip on chainlink chokers, your jewelry limbs you haven’t yet untangled.
But forgive yourself.
Kiss the boy. Kiss the girl. Kiss no one.
Live in the present tense and with future declaratives.
Appreciate the thousands of little moments still looking to be made yours. Make them yours.
You are worth all the struggle. Don’t forget.
Be kind but don’t rewind.
Stay authentic even when you don’t make sense and your words aren’t oil enough to separate
paddle through the waves eyes closed if you have to,
the salt may burn your scars and you may lose your bearings, but keep going.
Maybe this is the year you’re going to learn to swim.
Jan 2, 2017
Jan 2, 2017 at 2:11 PM UTC
Palm to ribs he writes what’s not there.
His lips spill the cheap words, “it only beats to keep me alive.”
But the cavity in which it should exist echoes the emptiness of her last goodbye
and it’s not ready for anything more than short hellos and drunk quickies.
I ****** him for the first time at 5 am on New Year’s.
He’s the definition of a void, but we brought in 2016 with a bang.
It’s still unclear which it ******* more –
his body
or the hollow mirror image of my chest.
May 15, 2016
May 15, 2016 at 10:14 AM UTC
i water the flowers in my chest with whiskey,
dying to drown you out of my system, but i just get drunk
your face reflects at the bottom of each shot glass i fill up just to find you again,
it’s raining on my face again
and i’m coughing up petals that scream he likes me not
just to force feed them back down my throat so maybe some will seed
maybe i’ll learn to stomach i meant nothing
or maybe i’ll drown waiting for you to
Dec 6, 2015
Dec 6, 2015 at 7:02 PM UTC
When I needed a google search to tell me if I was still a ******
It took a game of dare or double dare to teach me I don’t know repeated sounds an awful lot like yes
and two fingers can drop mountains on boundaries not yet built –
serrated edges on once innocent skin
I let you carve me.
Nine years later and I’m still trying to find air in the ocean where it all happened.
I took lessons, but I never learned how to swim.
I remember thinking you must’ve liked me, that was the reason
and returning the favor would’ve made it okay. I found you in my freshmen year yearbook.
But I was wearing a bikini shaped like ignorance and a smile lined with naïve
you weren’t reaching for my heart when you went to hold my hand,
forcibly lacing my fingers like ribs around your ****
I still wonder if dropping the I don’t before the know would’ve made any difference.
Dec 5, 2015
Dec 5, 2015 at 2:19 PM UTC
“I miss you” lit my
phone, as your tongue left its place
to touch her tonsils.
Dec 5, 2015
Dec 5, 2015 at 2:17 PM UTC
You taste like Sunday morning on Friday night –
something about your body speaks to me in ways only God would understand
and I hope He does.
I wish you’d bite my lip until my mouth gave in and I no longer had words
to describe how you’re different.
Be different.
**** lingering ghosts of lovers past from existence so you’re the only name
my tongue remembers
and utters.
I want you to scratch your future down my spine so I can be –
everything you breathe for beyond these sheets.
Mark me.
I swear to die for you daily and resurrect in our screams,
just fall on your knees.
Be willing to bleed –
love –
my body
breaking for you
my blood
shed.
Dec 5, 2015
Dec 5, 2015 at 2:15 PM UTC
Your hands are fire,
sunstars singeing my skin with their touch,
you ignite me.
And sparks fly from our crossed screams.
Our *** is electric –
and I’m just praying the power doesn’t go out.
Dec 5, 2015
Dec 5, 2015 at 2:10 PM UTC
Each breath was a fugitive from her lips,
a scar for which his skin screamed in agony,
tortured by another moment she didn’t know his name.
Dec 5, 2015
Dec 5, 2015 at 2:08 PM UTC
The alcohol in my system makes me its mission.
Tells me, darling, it’s okay to admit you too are tainted,
something in the silence of the moment says safety, but fear spills from my mouth as
words stain the air with glass bottle shards of no going back.
His whiskey lips bleed, “I don’t know what to say...”
I don’t know which words to have him kiss feed back to me,
so we swim in rose-petaled silence
and say nothing.
Dec 5, 2015
Dec 5, 2015 at 2:07 PM UTC