leah-rae
American
Fan Of Big Words & Loud Music. / Iowa Native. / Theater Junkie, Creative Arts Editor, & Spoken Word Poet. / Social Activist In Training. Into Pottery And Tattoos. Scholar, Devouring Books And Probably Talking Too Loudly. / I'm Always Up To Trouble. And My Résumé Will Read "Feminist Dragon". / @luminaryleah
This morning there was blood on the pavement.
There are men with teeth where hand should be.
With gapping wound and rot, as humiliation.
Ones who will turn pelvic bones into a shrine,
a good enough trophy. They will collect fingernails
like seashells from place called body. They will pry
open. They will bite and **** A bruise for a mouth.
They will turn place called home into place called body.
This morning there were birds in the front yard pulling tiny rubber bands from the Earth.
They will turn knees into figures meant for bending.
Do not bend. With bravery a wronged honor. A
never deserved. An always hurt. Crawl backwards,
make birth a survival tactic. A promise. You will
shed skin off this skeleton. You will be a tremulous
placed called body.
You will not bend.
Sep 16, 2016
Sep 16, 2016 at 1:24 AM UTC
This terrible beating, a soundless roar that I
wear like worry. Caught in lace and sequin,
you stupid pretty thing.
Heart, you are so
devilishly ugly.
You make me awful and needful.
A trouble, an aching break that
never healed right.
Pitchfork and shrapnel jacket, a barbed wire
beauty.
I am disastrous and made of weeds. A hungry throat that
only knows
swallow.
Go on sky,
pour. The art of breath and walk,
of continue,
of live.
Of lust for better.
Awake a sugar glass
soul made tender.
I am great care, building scaffoldings between fistfight and belonging.
Jun 12, 2016
Jun 12, 2016 at 11:43 PM UTC
Permanency can go **** itself.
Remember when you were fifteen
When you were all yellow teeth and bad poetry.
You were in love with death back then.
Thought she was some beauty -
Some backless dress
Some lipstick stain
Now she's stretched in front of you like a black, endless void.
All broken fingers.
All self blame.
All midnight drives to ditches only deep enough to call shallow graves.
She's like walking across a dried up lake bed.
Moments before the water returns.
Drown.
He's never going to see me get married
Sometimes I think about suffocating myself.
Thumb to index finger
Crushing larynx
Straddling my own chest.
Break it open.
Imagine me carcass roadside
Ribs crushed, pulled apart, what kind of cage doesn't know how to hold things together.
There will be blood on the sidewalk.
He's never going to meet my children.
Now you're nineteen
And you are all bad spelling and coffee stains
When the body experiences trauma sometimes all it needs to process is to shake hard enough -
enough though.
What is. Enough.
Just endless vibrating.
Breath in throat.
I can't.
I can't.
Breathe.
Tomorrow they are pulling his plug at 1 o clock.
Like plans for brunch.
Expect to not be able to keep this meal down.
You will return to it.
Over and over.
Like a dog to its own *****
Sep 19, 2015
Sep 19, 2015 at 11:33 PM UTC
**This poem is for the *******
The ice princesses.
Solid and frozen.
Hearts carved from arctic stone.
Jaw lines so sharp they could cut you.
Girls so bitter, they bite.
Leave your mouth aching.
This is for the evil stepsisters,
The Ursulas,
The Queens of Broken Hearts -
I’ll tell you.
They are deadly beautiful.
They are the bossy, and the terribly too honest.
Mouths on fire,
jaws snapping,
man eaters,
sirens of the sea,
they will swallow you whole.
When the boys ask -
Tell them, no, I don’t need saving.
**** being a princess.
Be the dragon.
Be fire breathing, and pmsing.
Be angry, girl.
Cause you got **** to be angry about.
Every cat call –
Every glass ceiling you will shatter with your bare hands –
Every time you say the word no and mean it –
Every time they make you feel like you anything less than powerful.
You tell them –
You are eternal.
That you carry a generation in your belly -
That it all begins and ends here, inside you.
That you can bleed for seven days straight and come back with teeth sharpened for war.
Remind them that that when something is taken from you, you will do everything you can to get it back.
You will destroy what destroys you.
Eating fire and spitting brimstone.
And never, ever saying sorry.
They will call you crazy.
They will call you over emotional.
They will call you loud mouth.
They will ask for your smile, pretty girl.
Give it to them with poison ivy lips and a razor blade between your teeth.
What no body knew was that Ursula was King Triton’s sister.
A perfect storm.
Banished from the palace -
When a loud, powerful woman gets out of hand, we don’t call it leadership.
We call her dog.
*****
Bossy.
Fangs out and snarling, we don’t battle, we cat fight.
**** kitten gone wrong, when she learns to leave scars.
A dog, no not a dog, a wolf in heat.
Domestication is a ***** word.
***** is to know your worth, and take it.**
To carry it in your esophagus.
A war cry.
Feeding your enemies to your children, and coming back starving for seconds.
Doing anything to stay alive.
Because you were raised by a mother who fed you fear for supper.
Packed your backpack with mace, and brass knuckles.
She told you to turn your body into a weapon.
She knew there would be men who would try to cover your mouth.
So she taught you to bite.
This is how you protect yourself.
A mouth full of ***** and a bark to match.
“Beware of dog” sign around your throat.
This is how you keep them away.
This is how you warn them.
Because the villain was not always the villain.
She was made that way.
You were made this way.
You’ve got brands still healing, still smoking, skin still searing.
You’ve got a trauma written in your blood.
You’ve got a ribcage holding onto your heart too tightly.
You are chasing down a revenge so sweet it could rot your teeth.
A heart attack romance asleep in your chest.
You will come back home limping after this war.
And you will tell all the other girls -
It ain’t all about the love story.
It’s about the “being in love with yourself” story.
Apr 10, 2015
Apr 10, 2015 at 12:55 AM UTC
Give me..
**Give me that good ****
You know, *that good ****
We're handed pipes instead of pills.
Told to smoke pain away something that's been breed 4 generations deep.
A poverty in the sheets.
An allergic reaction,
nuclear,
biochemical -
skin abrasions, lacerations -
3rd degree burns on our hearts.
Drink away the pain to sooth the burn.
To silence the scald.
No one even teaches you to hold yourself.
Instead they tell you to find someone else to do it for you.
Make you unable to be whole.
To be three fourths **** up.
Bandaging your own self inflicted scars in the bathroom sink.
To be metal jackets made of sorrow.
To be blacked out Saturday nights, too hung over to go to church with your family in the morning.
To be so high, you never even get low.
To be light bulbs busted, stayed bright too long.
That good **** ain't good **** when it turns you into the kind of slack jawed, numb monster your mother is ashamed of.
We are a generation self mutilated - no, no - self medicated.
Raised by television sets, they made cigarettes look ***
They made suicide look pretty,
And binge drinking look cool.
They made it normal for kids to pass around bottles of liquor at 14.
You're too young and too fast, and **you're trying to not ******* feel ****
I've been you.
I am you.
So no, it ain't no good ****
*I don't have any good ****
Cause nothing is good, if it's never been bad first.
If it's never been broke, and broken, and sick.
If it's never cried itself to sleep.
If it's never seen its own reflection in broken pieces of glass and felt akin to the shatter.
You have to feel every inch of the low to make any high worth it.
And let it be a homemade one.
Let it be love.
And lust.
And the sun, and good art, and loud music, and jukebox laughter, and your family telling you, you matter.
Don't let it be synthetic and manufactured. Don't let it be bought on street corners, let it be home grown, and natural.
Raised in the corners of your mother's smile.
Let those good moments be you.
Let those moments be life.
Let them be the warmth before the scald, let those be the moments before you fall.
And I know it hurts.
It hurts to be a volcano victim.
To be so irrevocably in love with life when it can burn you so badly.
Believe me, being numb means nothing.
And yes, I know it's hard.
Hard to be 14,
And 17.
And 21,
And 45.
I know it's hard, so ******* hard to exist every single day.
I know the bouquets of heart break, feel like chainsaws and forest fires.
I know the boys hurt your feelings.
I know your parents don't understand you.
I know your teachers don't listen to you,
I know you hate yourself
And I know you shouldn't.
Because baby,
A pipe,
Or a pill
Or a bottle
Won't ever do any good **** for you.
Mar 2, 2015
Mar 2, 2015 at 11:30 AM UTC
All I can think about is the passenger seat of your car.
Torn up apolostry and 150,000 miles of nothingness, the only kind of somethingness I ever grew up with.
You used to wake me.
A few hours before the sun would rise when only God was still awake, when darkness was the only thing we could taste.
I was 5.
A pair of scissors in my hands and a 20 minute drive into the nice neighborhoods.
Ones with spare bedrooms when we never had any bedrooms to spare.
It would be spring time.
Like April kissed May
& the Earth came back home to tell us she loves us after being away.
We would steal flowers.
Fists full of roses, hands carved by thorns. Daises.
Sun flowers.
Tulips.
Daffodils.
We would fill the back seat.
I think - people forgot that the flowers don't sleep at night.
They are still there, waiting for the silence of a sunrise to wake us all up.
Every night I thought they were waiting for us.
For me.
For my hands, still so small, to cradle their broken necks.
My mother was always good at holding beautiful things just a little too tightly.
Now mom - I wake up alone in my bedroom at 3am and I can still smell wet earth and the fear of being caught.
I rise looking for dirt on my shoes, or petals to tell me..
But now I don't find anything.
Just hands still stained with rose thorn kisses.
You used to always say I was a good seed in your garden, and momma I think I've finally bloomed.
A wild flower.
Tired of thunder storms.
A few weeks ago I handed you 1,500 dollars. Poverty is a ***** word we share sheets with.
I know you needed it.
I know I won't ask for it back.
I know some part of you could barely bare to ask, a tongue turned violet, bit backward and ashamed.
I know it's hard to make rent momma
I know it's hard to put food on the table momma
I know,
I know Momma.
But I am 19 years old, and you have taught me to pull the things I love up by the roots and **** them.
To hold them captive.
Like you used to with pills and pipes.
I never knew how to love any other way.
But I thank God,
The stars and the sun,
For these bouquets of heart break.
For this love.
For this insanity.
For this insomnia.
For a garden full of broken steams.
Of broken necks.
Of a home built on top of soft petal carcasses.
You taught me to hurt the things I love.
But I'm just now learning to love from an arms length away.
I know I am fire.
Smoke in these wild fire lungs.
I have to learn to not burn myself.
To not burn down forests I call home.
Momma you've taught me to stop picking flowers in the middle of the night.
And to instead tell them how much they mean to me in the morning.
That love under a cover of darkness, might not be love after all.
Just starving.
A hunger to hold something that I love so much it hurts.
Jan 11, 2015
Jan 11, 2015 at 3:06 PM UTC
The following is a quotation.
"In the emergency room, they have what's called **** kits where a woman can get cleaned out."
-Texas State Representative Jodie Laubenberg
Dear Mrs. Laubenberg,
I have never felt so betrayed by another woman before.
And I know this was your attempt at a prolife argument.
But you don’t understand anything about your own anatomy.
Unlike you, I know my own body.
The home I've created here,
inside myself,
these shoulders,
hips,
scars,
and stretch marks.
Believe me when I say - I am my own war memorial.
So let this body be ready to be broken.
I will give birth to umbilical cord nooses.
Hang myself with my own womanhood.
Blood soaked ******* and blue and black bite marks.
I will never be anyone’s victim.
I was built - hand crafted by some creator - who knew he was breeding me for war.
Let this body be a graveyard to all my past lovers.
Let it be known that I was built for destroying things just as often as I create them.
The lipstick I wear is the same color as blood.
I was made to devour.
A caged animal in my throat.
A growl asleep in my chest.
A ribcage built for holding me captive because I'm a savage animal.
Do not call me weak.
A ***** bites.
A ***** swallows her prey alive.
So don’t you dare push my knees apart into metal stirrups, and
“clean me out”.
Do not bandage my wounds.
Do not wipe me clean of this recklessness.
Do not cover these bruises.
Let me stand, a testimony to what they have done to me.
To us.
My wounds will not be silent.
I want you to look at me.
At us.
We need to carry these battle wounds with us.
On my college campus, we have been broken in like cattle.
We know the scent of fear.
We’ve been branded black and gold.
We were told to carry mace like an accessory to this sin.
To never walk alone at night.
To travel in packs.
To carry weapons.
To carry guns.
To carry our femininity concealed because bare thighs are dangerous here.
Each week is only finished when a ****** assault paints my campus crimson.
**** is a hate crime against weakness.
So I’m taking back femininity and I’m deciding what it’s synonymous with.
And never again will submission mean woman.
Never again will girl mean powerless.
Never again will tenderness be considered vulnerable.
I am a flower on ******* fire.
I am Mother Nature,
Thousand watt lightning storms and forest fires that could turn you into dust.
You cannot break me.
Every 90 seconds a woman dies during pregnancy or childbirth.
So yes, we are used to giving this thing called life, our absolute everything.
There are 400,000 untested **** kits in America alone.
So yes, I know, Mrs. Laubenberg.
I know you picture women’s bodies like machines,
cold,
hard,
metal.
Something than can be deconstructed, cleaned, and put back together.
But I am a human being, and I don’t assemble easily.
****** assault belongs to the survivor.**
How dare you try to white wash your own guilt and try and file our stolen femininity under blood slides and nail scrapings.
You are a woman too, Mrs. Laubenberg.
And I know, these hate crimes look like girls in short skirts to you.
They look drunk.
They look *****
They look like *** workers caught in fishnets.
They look deserving.
But Mrs. Laubenberg,
They also look like your sisters.
And your mother.
And your daughters.
And if something isn’t done to change this,
Maybe
They might end up looking like you.
Oct 28, 2014
Oct 28, 2014 at 4:28 PM UTC
Six girls.
Four bunk beds.
Freshman year.
College.
We are all nervous.
Elbows and knees. Awkward.
Like being packed into a cattle car.
Rewind 6 years.
Homeless, living in the back of a minivan.
Three children, and our mother.
Sleeping together in a single motel bed
Nervous for morning.
Elbows and knees.
I am built for building.
Made to create.
Hands like carpenters, I make a home out of anywhere I go.
Learned to carry it on my back.
To take things with me.
And now, I am almost nineteen year old and I have been living out of boxes for the past two months.
Out of containers filled with my own clothing.
I feel like I can’t find stillness.
Or have silence.
I haven’t been alone in two months.
I am sleeping with the lights on.
They call this temporary housing,
For all the students who applied late.
Like me.
But I didn't think I would be here.
But I was raised poor,
remember the minivan,
so a free college education tasted like..
Like you’re starving, and your mom’s food stamps haven’t came in yet, and you’re at the grocery store,
and its Saturday,
and they’re handing out free samples.
And I feel lucky.
And I feel blessed.
And I feel grateful.
And I feel slighted.
And I feel frustrated.
And I feel tired.
And I feel angry.
Angry that I am this easy to tear down.
That I am ticker tape,
salvage yard,
construction zone.
That the four walls of the home I've tried to build inside of myself can be so easily burned down.
Can be destroyed.
A fire alarm in my chest, and a flooded basement.
That I can’t find peace in the only home I've ever had.
There are motel signs.
Blinking,
three am,
and my mother’s credit card is being declined.
And my little sister won’t stop crying.
And we are in a homeless shelter when I’m 6.
And we’re in another when I’m 8.
And another when I’m 13.
I’m 19 in a few months,
And this dorm feels like another one.
And I’m convinced they build these places, on purpose.
Temporarily temporary.
To show us how temporary we all are.
That we can’t take anything with us.
That I can't take anything with me.
Where ever it is that I am going.
Where ever it is that I might end up.
I’m just praying..
Praying there is a warm bed to sleep in when I get there.
Sep 21, 2014
Sep 21, 2014 at 1:07 AM UTC
Don’t grow up.
Grow down,
deep into this earth.
So deep you forget what part of your body your heart belongs in.
Be nothing except wet earth.
Be an open mouth. Be a seed.
Be every language our ancestors ever spoke.
Be a dialect ten thousand years old, and still breathing.
You woke up one morning and asked me,
“Am I pretty?”
Please be spring.
Be new blossoms and the way the ground smells after rain.
My mother came to me and told me we were giving you away.
Before you had even taken your first breath,
she said we couldn't do this.
Take care of another baby, when our backs were already broken. Poverty was a ***** word we shared sheets with.
I told our mother, that you were already ours.
That you could never really belong to anyone else.
And we kept you.
And when you were born, you had these eyes.
These, ocean kissed sky, and slept all night, kind of eyes.
These eyes that told me that we all come from the same place.
These eyes that said
“Ive been here before.
Ive done this already.
Get ready for this.
Watch me.”
And you’re eight years old now, with a broken leg, and you've been screaming for two months.
And I cried the day the car hit you.
And I laughed when you woke up.
And you’re eight years old, and I haven’t stopped believing you belong to me.
This cocky, loud, screaming mess.
This spaghetti stained, angry little monster.
This bully, who swallows her own meanness.
You've got a venom about you kid.
A house set on fire, inside you, kinda crazy,
sometimes I can even smell the smoke.
I haven’t stopped believing you belong to me.
And I wanna tell you,
You don’t owe anyone beauty.
You aren't in in-debt to some universal credit collector.
You don’t owe anyone make up, or 40$ worth of hair product.
You are the best kind of disaster.
You are laughing until you cry, and secrets you promise to keep but never do.
You are irrevocably yourself, and no one else,
and
God **** It Little Girl,
You are beautiful.
The best kind of beautiful.
But I am afraid.
Afraid of what 8 years looks like, when it meets ten, and four more. When you’re tall enough to see your reflection in the bathroom mirror.
What you will do to yourself.
I pray to God.
I pray you meet someone who teaches you to love yourself.
Because I know you are still angry.
Angry at this world, and your life.
Its like you walked into an overcrowded room,
and no one noticed you
and you haven’t let us forget what we owe you.
I pray to God you kiss your fingertips.
Bless them for each meal they give you.
There is nothing more intimate than feeding yourself.
Baby, counting calories is no way to live your life.
There is nothing more ancient than a sunrise.
You are a horizon, a tissue papered sky,
do not cut pieces of yourself away.
You are not ******* gift wrap.
I pray to God you listen to your own voice.
See strength in the way your body never gives up.
That you are Iowa,
illegal fire *******
set off in our backyard.
You matter to me.
That you are red and blue police sirens.
You will make people nervous.
Get used to it.
You will shake the ground with your voice.
Get used to it.
You are powerful, the way the ocean is powerful,
the way it devours cargo ships,
air craft liners,
churning up lost Atlantis’,
turning stones into sand,
and swallowing this planet slowly.
That you are meant to exist.
Remain.
Endure.
That you are beauty.
That you are billions of atoms.
My solar sister.
You belong to me.
But baby, you belong to you.
Own this.
Take it,
like a testament,
and write it.
Put it in a box and save it.
Mail it back to your own house, and read it.
Be it.
Breath it.
But please,
please,
don’t ever forget it.
Sep 11, 2014
Sep 11, 2014 at 12:04 AM UTC
This is for Barbra Harris, the founder of the ‘Project Prevention’ program, a foundation based around paying poor, drug addicted women to sterilize themselves.
I have lived 18 years, and I’ve never been angrier.
I was raised to believe that white is an absent of hue, a lack there of, an identity that pigment hadn’t given me.
A sense of self, who was still running from me.
But today, I think I finally found my color.
A shade, an identity the color of gritted teeth and hell fire, jaws snapping, I haven’t stopped seething.
I was brought up inside the walls of narcotics anonymous meetings, on stale oatmeal cookies and burnt coffee.
I have seen scalding cobalt, empty indigo, and every single color of self destruction the spectrum has created, wrapped in ultra-violet - nick name them disaster.
Torrential rains and hurricanes, volcano hearts with lungs made of wildfire.
No one chooses to be a drug addict.
No one decides, as a child - that their spines were meant to bend backwards into question marks, body contorted around chasing something that will destroy them.
Born to slit ivory in two, and bleed black like the stars do.
They were children once.
Daughters who were beaten by fathers, and sons who watched their mother’s commit suicide,
children who were too young,
whose skin bruised around the fingerprints of trauma.
They were shaken, born vibrating, their bones have never stopped craving silence.
So if a needle brought it to them, or a pipe, a second of stillness, it became the only thing that mattered.
Using, drinking, snorting, shooting, swallowing, smoking, inhaling an answer to the questions their spines were asking.
Maybe you’ve never heard the sound of a body betraying itself, but this is it.
There will be a skylit shades of remorse they will turn themselves waiting for the answers.
An explanation for all the
“whys”
and “yous”
and the “I would quit if I just could,
but I can’t,
and I don’t know how not to,
when the only time the world stands still is when I’m high enough to look down on myself.”
Drug addicts use because they are broken people trying to mend broken pieces, swallowing shards of broken glass that end up slitting their own throats.
If you have these shattered shrapnel pieces wedged inside yourself for long enough, its hard to remember existing without them.
I watched my mother, break in and out of sobriety like a jail cell she had swallowed the key to.
No one realizes the cage we’re all trapped inside of, is our own ribs.
She created me, took all the best piece of herself and made me. Like a patch work quilt, my edges didn't always come together easy.
But I thank God, every single day for it.
Each Christmas spent in a homeless shelter,
every hour I spent shoving notes beneath the bathroom door, begging her to come out,
every relapse, recovery, overdose, hours waiting by the phone for a hospital call, every midnight I couldn't sleep without her by my side,
Every twelve step program, a serenity prayer for seven days sober, key chain necklaces and chips she'd always kiss and say “this ones it, baby”.
Every ****** up, angry, starving, man and woman who carried a story in their lungs, and let me hear it,
Every plate full of co-dependency she fed me,
Every ounce of anger and sorrow she gave me,
Every time I asked her, why,
Every moment she disappointed me.
Every time she'd say she was sorry, and tried to mean it,
Every time I wore her mistakes like battle wounds
She destroyed me
But God **** it, I am so ******* grateful she did.
Because she broke me, into a thousand pieces.
But its true what they say, bones always heal stronger the second time around.
I’ve been given this opportunity,
this legend in my blood, this authentic, “I’ve been through hell and back” mentality,
this dedication to myself.
And I will not let you, or anyone else take that away from me.
I’ve got a born and bred monster, asleep in my esophagus, brimstone and fury, I am whole-heartedly dedicated to my own ambition.
And this climb, upward through the wreckage of my own existence, has given me more than you will ever understand.
Allowing privileged white people to discuss the nature of poverty, doesn’t find answers.
But I have mine. And I will tell you, there is value here. Inside of me.
I am that child,
I am that statistic,
Alive still born and still screaming,
You can not get rid of me.
Mar 3, 2014
Mar 3, 2014 at 11:54 PM UTC