close your eyes
lay your body down in the green of mine
soft and rooted in earth
veins of life reaching into soil
rest
place your hand in the center of my chest
where wildflowers gather
in full bloom
and you among them
my love is not a serenade
my love is an aubade
not an evening, but a morning song
warm and full of new sight;
let me be your eyes
you are not what you see
you are not what you have seen every day that you can remember
let me be your eyes
I see a blue dark sky
oil slick rich with violet, gold, and white
wild and endless,
I feel so small in comparison
my love is not a serenade
my love is not the weight of expectation
or an entitlement to experience
it is clean and unrequiring
you are not what you see;
close your eyes
Apr 28, 2019
Apr 28, 2019 at 11:34 AM UTC
I am sixteen,
walking down winnie in the middle of summer
heat waving thick fingers in the air, taunting
I am wearing sweatpants and a hoodie
all my layers of self and self defeating comfort eating are not enough to cover me
I have the hood pulled over my hair
***** too short, uncared for
I am carrying a novel, something cheap and badly written
a friend from school passes by me, waves, I turn away
pretend I don't see them
I stuff my hands in the soft pockets, grab a handful of hip meat, it feels like that scene in Lord of the Rings where juice runs down the chin of a false king
I wear anxiety heavy around my face, I don't recognize myself without it
but depression is not a word I can touch
it doesn't fit me
it doesn't belong in my charismatic vocabulary
I don't know that I am drowning
wet mouth smacking and finger tapping make me feel like my mind is an experimental horror film
how are small sounds so loud?
how do they crawl into my ear canal like an animorph alien?
I was always so afraid of those books
and the sounds outside of our tent when my brother read them to me
I am so afraid of everything
I am sixteen
It's 98 degrees outside
and I am walking down the street in three layers of winter gear
and fear
and self hatred
and I cannot identify it
I don't know that I will be beautiful
I don't know that I already am
I don't know that my hands will pick wildflowers out of words
and that my life will be a practice of arranging bouquets for kitchen tables
I don't know that my hair will be long and easy to twirl around one finger, without thinking about the action
actions won't always feel like eyes watching me in and of themselves
I don't know that I will pull on jeans without thinking about the way they don't lay flat against me
I don't know that curves can be custard on the tip of a finger, sweet and nostalgic tapioca,
gritty and dimpled and perfect for sundays
and mine and plenty
and pretty
I don't know that I will be beautiful
I don't know that I already am
Oct 4, 2018
Oct 4, 2018 at 11:07 PM UTC
it's the first fifteen seconds of messes of men
and the newly wed couple coming out of that church in Ireland
bathed in light and new union
her red lips are so clean in my memory
kissing the hand of her husband
a safe place
surrounded by green and the anticipation of the unknown future
it's my father's square hand, pressed to my forehead, praying
it’s the way his face looks when he speaks in another language, meant only for God
and the sound of his voice when he read to us as children
it's the way a river moves me
with its inherent music,
and I close my eyes
it's the sunlight turning everything into honey
and the taste of the morning
and the sound foliage makes under wandering feet
it's watching the pine trees move by in slow, flickering movements,
like the pictures on a roll of film,
set to the sound of hymns
rising and falling with the passing mountains,
like we’re breathing together
in sync
it's a senseless homesickness
and a piercing, unutterable ache
It's the frustration of never being able to say what I mean
it's the relief of not needing to
it's the first fifteen seconds of messes of men
and the comfortable silence between friends
it’s the distance between us
it's the way I don't
it's the way you
it's
Jul 6, 2018
Jul 6, 2018 at 3:32 PM UTC
My mind is an open palm, raised to the trees
avowing and disavowing the love of sunlight,
and translating fractured thoughts caught on the breeze like cottonwood seeds,
snatched by a hand in the air;
like the way we used to catch mosquitoes, and ended up with one one another's mingled blood crushed into the lines on our palms
and to be honest,
I didn't mind it so much.
I guess I wanted to reclaim something
I guess I wanted to take back a little of the life that was siphoned from us
I am sick of lifeblood being stolen and replaced with poison, and the anticoagulant that keeps it flowing long enough that we never know we've been bitten until it's gone, and carried away in someone's belly, where it melts into so many others inside their stomachs
It's so easy to let your heart get to racing, long enough that you don't know what's being taken from you. Like the first time I let a man take off my shirt in the back of his car; he used his hands to show me where I could stand to be improved; carving another woman into the air,
and she would live there like a ghost for so many years.
Sometimes I still see her.
Sometimes I am afraid that I'll never know what it's like to feel safe in the eyes of a man.
But I always feel like that now; peeled clean, exposed, disrobed to the heels in front of everyone. And there are so many hands, creating ghosts for me to fear. I am afraid of being afraid to let anyone near me, especially since I welcome it so easily.
God help me.
God help us.
There is comfort in being crushed to one another;
our essences coalescing in our minds and open hands crashing together to catch the cottonwood memories, stinging before we know what’s hit us.
There is comfort in being bled together, our grief being wed together, and being folded into one another in the bellies of sleepless nights.
God help us
There is nothing I can do except feel numb next to you.
God help us,
There is nothing I can do except feel alive in pain next to you.
My mind is an open palm, raised in a question,
Translating fractured thoughts,
Caught between us.
Jun 29, 2018
Jun 29, 2018 at 6:58 PM UTC
Did you know that if you leave your car in your driveway,
With the keys in the ignition,
And someone sits down in the front seat like they own it, and drives away,
You are the one who is liable for theft?
They can drive that sucker to the coast.
They can burn the upholstery with their cigarettes. They can bring their friends into the back seat, and fill the compartments with their refuse, and **** and they can leave it ruined in front of your house, or crushed into the median on the highway, or left in disconnected pieces under an overpass.
It will be called, “unauthorized use of a vehicle.”
It will be called a “misdemeanor.”
But you left the car running.
Weren't you kind of asking for it to happen?
They said,
This,
(Gesturing to the skirt which fell to two inches
above my kneecap),
Is like that.
If I walk outside of my house in jeans and a t-shirt, or a long dress with thin straps,
Or with my chin tilted out,
Or with long eyelashes,
Or with full lips,
Or with my hips swaying when I walk,
It's like I left the car running.
It's like I invited them to force their bodies into the front seat.
In their minds, or with their hands, or with their lips to anyone who would listen to them.
Little girls in leotards become like unlocked car doors;
Where men can burn their cigarettes into their skin,
Or stick their fingers in
In plain view of their parents,
And told to let it happen,
Quietly.
It isn't theft,
It's “a medical examination.”
What did they expect?
It isn't a theft.
She was just as guilty of negligence.
It isn't really a felony.
It's not THAT BAD. (Stop being so dramatic.)
It's the unauthorized use of your body, for a time, or one night,
or every time you close your eyes for the rest of your life,
Sure-
But you left the car running.
May 22, 2018
May 22, 2018 at 1:25 PM UTC
Turn. Tug. Pull at my dress where the buttons came undone in the scuffle. Point to the clavacle, a little blue. Trace it with your cruel fingers. Talk like it was your right to take my body into your mind and do what all red blooded men want to do. What they're made to do. I wanted it. Draw the strands of my hair into your nostrils, and close your eyes in what will look like a prayer for chastity, to the very blind. You enjoyed the way it felt to undress me with your words in front of everyone, and nobody stopped you.
I bet it felt powerful.
I bet it felt like freedom, to flick your tongue to taste the air right out there in the open.
You are not free.
And, forgive me,
But I do not believe that men were made to pull off the buttons. I do not believe they were born to take our bodies into their minds, or into the back seat of their cars, or behind dumpsters, or into empty laundry rooms where no one can hear the screaming.
Forgive me,
but it's ********
Men do not have to be cowards, or dogs, or drunkards, or the way it feels to have the pillows ripped out from under your head for saying "please, not tonight."
You are not free.
(But you could be.)
My sisters and I were placed on the front step in front of the house, where red blooded bodies were begging for red blood, and *** and somebody's virtue to ravage.
They said, "take our daughters."
It was our innocence which made us the perfect consolation prize. A tidy meal to tide them over.
The truth is coming like a sword.
The truth is coming like water.
The truth is coming like a sword.
The truth is coming like fire.
May 12, 2018
May 12, 2018 at 9:41 AM UTC
it's the way her hand moves back and forth in the air
as she's thinking
Like a maestro, conducting
an orchestra;
but it's her mind,
unfolding.
cue the crash of cymbals,
jarring
-- and silence.
//
Cue the image of her ex husband,
and the flat landscape which was their marriage
and the heat which hovered on the horizon,
like unreachable dreams,
taking on the form of
water.
but she cracked with dry reality.
cue the salt on her lips
-- crash.
//
and here we bring in the street preacher,
who can't keep his eyes on her face.
he reminds her if the desert.
he reminds her that sometimes we must cover up the curves to keep from stumbling our weak brothers who cannot resist the presence of wine,
(but she is not the wine.)
//
women are not the wine,
and men are not the drunkards.
women are not the wine,
or any other intoxicating substance.
neither are they meat sacrificed to idols,
or meat at all.
//
cue the crash of resounding cymbals
and it breaks her train of thought
but it does not break her
//
and the desert did not **** her
and the drunkard can not taste her
cue the crash
-- and silence.
May 9, 2018
May 9, 2018 at 11:10 AM UTC
There is a look that you used to get in your eyes which I cannot to this day quite accurately describe. It was the night prowler, passing by the downstairs window, peeking in. Evaluating the locks. Evaluating the distance between the front door and the valuables.
I made it so easy to get in. I kept the windows open, and my eyes shut. I kept the doors unlocked.
When you touched me, you went away. I was not a woman, I was the chemicals responding in your brain. Ironically, for a burglar, you hated any part of me which suggested that I was something of great value. You hated the individuality tattooed to my skin. What is a womans body if it does not look like the last woman's body you used to touch and go away from? You hated the reminder that we are not all the same, and we do not exist to release chemicals in your brain.
I colored my hair red. Like wine. Like the lipstick you said looked "too heavy." I inked roses into my ribcage and between my ******* and I kept you at a safe distance, that is to say, too far away to ever touch me again.
The windows are locked.
The doors are deadbolted.
I moved homes, I moved cities.
You'll never get close enough to give me that look;
You'll never taste wine, or feel the ends of my hair between your fingertips while we watch a movie.
You'll never trace the shapes of roses.
You
Will never see me
Again.
May 7, 2018
May 7, 2018 at 4:38 PM UTC
I am afraid of speaking.
I am afraid of the texture of my voice, and the effect it will have on you.
I don't want to be pressed into the caricature of an angry woman; voice raised in what they call a hysterical display of emotion.
Calm down. Be rational.
Stop being
So
Dramatic.
Well let me tell you something:
I am an angry woman.
Because all I can see is my best friend’s blonde head, coming within an inch of becoming the crushed drywall beneath his fist.
All I can see is the false piety painted on his pastor’s face, asking, “well… did he hit you?”
I see her eyes closed in the darkness, fingers gripped in the sheets he tore off of her body to wake her. She has to hold on to something.
He says, “Show me you're enjoying it.”
Calm down. Be rational.
Like he wasn't gaining access INTO her BODY by FORCE. Like, of course it's her job to lay down and take it. Like it. Lick his lips for the taste of honey, because honey, he told you to.
but it's poison. It enters her bloodstream, weakening her will to resist it.
She looks at her phone, at a text she did not compose herself, or send,
“Hey hot stuff. When you see this, let's have ***
“If I pretend I didn't write this I'm just playing hard to get.”
Do you get it?
Yeah. I am an angry woman.
Stay calm, dear sister. Be rational.
Rationalize the gaslighting, because the big picture doesn't look beautiful when you hang it above the sofa; and her home was staged to look like a family so that when you look in the window, you don't see that she was a hostage.
You don't see that her son was asleep in the bed when he grabbed her face between his hands and crushed it,
And called it “gently redirecting her gaze.”
From the window, you can't see his body blocking the exit.
You can't see her baby, with his little fingers curled around her ******* begging for comfort.
I will not calm down. And in case you are so damaged by devotion to comfort that you can't see it, it is right to be angry.
It is righteous.
I am angry, and more rational than I have ever been in my entire life- rationally, righteously begging for justice to flow down like rivers.
I am an angry woman.
May 7, 2018
May 7, 2018 at 4:07 PM UTC
Bite down hard.
There can be no question of who’s in charge here.
There can be no doubt about the alpha- sheep.
Make sure you hit an artery; we can not allow that kind of blood to flow unbroken inside their veins- and remember that we are only trying to help them remember their place. Because we love them.
Stand back, and let the smell attract the vultures.
Let the laymen see-
EXCUSE ME EVERYONE, THERE HAS BEEN A BRUTALITY
And make sure you lick your teeth clean.
Make sure your breath smells like honey.
Strip them, strap them down, parade them through the public square, declaring,
LOOK AT WHAT THEY DID TO ME.
What a spectacle.
Why can’t we all just make peace?
Mar 30, 2018
Mar 30, 2018 at 11:40 AM UTC