i am focused on the immediate future
the week is golden & sticky
in my palm;
i tremble in the midst
of cold,
nearly icy hours
the embrace of a weed-dwelling sweater
seems so close to the surface,
as if the small
ocean of my
reality contains nothing but a high, beautiful child
swimming with the fish.
i rain on green
fields beside massachusetts highways
& cows sleep in the brush
spiked with my
dew. it is
the only
safe place left
Jan 12, 2019
Jan 12, 2019 at 10:44 PM UTC
so things get worse before they get better; i guess that means it’s october again, i’m hungry all the time, greasy hair, the whole thing. whatever.
in the fall months, during the cold mornings, my body floats in limbo
while the old feelings soak back into sleepy flesh. my dreams become heavy,
hairy with the symbolism i can’t seem to understand in english class; i’ll let myself eat graphite in small microscopic doses
nothing more, nothing less.
& my life is soft rain, una y otra vez, a thousand little resurrections
along the length of cells in my small intestine. sadness has no place here anymore; i thought i let that out with the long hair & the
crying episodes & the horrible empty after his death in the bitter green month of may.
so maybe transformations are all in the small things. the sun rising chillier each week, the elapse of a long season for the third time running. no era has ever been so lucid, no era has ever been
so fuzzy. it is almost as if i had climbed into the skin of a tired sheep, displacing its thick, warm blood
with my own soupy lymph.
& everything else has been that, a gentle pulse of tv static, from womb to seventeenth october
& all those lonely imaginary things in between
Oct 29, 2018
Oct 29, 2018 at 1:34 AM UTC
my baby is sick. so sick that she rocks with the stench of it
it is always another kind of pain
fingers bent backwards, or
he is no longer on this earth in the dimension of this moment.
it is early morning. walking down campus, eating the remains of the breakfast rotting in my bag
we laugh. i mind the accent marks
Oct 2, 2018
Oct 2, 2018 at 12:19 AM UTC
planets will melt
because of you
because of chalkboards filled
with triangles, closed windows,
fairy-lit stars
saccharine winters of slush
and bitter pink summers will wrap you in fur
plastic-like,
library-like
enough tired inertia to slow sleepy heartstrings
Jun 21, 2018
Jun 21, 2018 at 1:15 AM UTC
the rat is belly-up in my hands. breathing is hard due to the plastic vat of formaldehyde-drenched vermin on the desk next to me.
seeing guts open on the table is reminiscent of lying skinless on my heavy bed, organs wet and bloodless inside my body cavity.
combing through the rat, i find i'm peeling back my own painless ribcage, tasting defeat in my own clawed fingers.
it's like selling the fur off my body for the sake of extra credit points, tossing my own torn-up skeleton
into landfill, flopped belly-up below blue plastic gloves and bits of my own drained flesh.
seeing the divide between gory body and vague fishbowl conscience is so much
stickier than i ever would have imagined;
my arms are covered in it,
the ends of my hair drip
with stomach acid. the bisection
of my own blue heart exists tangible in my live shaky hands,
the coil of my intestines curled helpless
in my poxy palms.
how ugly, to dissect for commodity! how ugly, to dissect for the sake of distance, the sake of false superiority over animals that twitch!
how strange to rip my own body open, how repulsive to lie suffering under the cast of my own disease-ridden hands!
Jun 13, 2018
Jun 13, 2018 at 1:51 AM UTC
i don't know how long it's been since i was thirteen years old- feels like a lifetime
maybe i am cicada child,
living 3 lives, dying too young too eggy
leaving my ridgey shell behind, hanging from a tree.
tan jacket, goes past my thighs
but i leave it wrinkled in the closet. maybe when it's summer, when bart trains switch with buses in the back of my head
and my phone is a soft playlist of names i don't recognize.
it is late but i am not sad anymore.
sometime this year the salt dissolved from my arms and the bitter coating fell away from my lungs.
i am in my second life, eating other bugs
waiting for summer
Apr 18, 2018
Apr 18, 2018 at 11:51 PM UTC
the pasta is too gummy
marsh swamp buckets
sheep on the hill overcast rainy a little the grass is green
im having withdrawal
from her face, you know.
throwing out my report card with my lunch
wanna have a skinny stomach
there's milk on my jacket sleeve, i remember it warm on my wrist.
everything on my hand has faded
it's just little poky hairs now, no more hearts.
the girl in my head walked by me red gray blue she looked like berkeley (no, richmond i guess) like a drizzle sun today's weather she walked like the rainbow at the end of the hill
someone lit the bathroom on fire.
i know if he was still here,
the moon would be out
but without him the pasta is just too gummy my stomach too full the hills too wet
Mar 9, 2018
Mar 9, 2018 at 12:57 AM UTC
get it out of your head
she says.
everybody knows i can't follow directions. everyone knows my bruises & my freckles; in fact, they know the parts of my body better than i do.
take your own advice
she says.
the rhinestones on her eyelashes are distracting. i keep thinking
they are going to fall into her eyes
but she knows this too
she knows about my ear piercings
she knows they are closing up.
you're such a *******
she says.
you're so ugly. you're stupid
she says.
i sympathize with hairy arms. i sympathize with her jawline. it doesn't mean anything in the end
except maybe that i cared a little too much
about things like crawling bees. or liquor stores.
i found your third grade notebook. you're embarrassing
she says.
we hold hands & in the process our bodies melt into each other
my right,
her left.
i feel her veins against my own. she is not very strong. she is all ribs & fat & cartilage.
sometimes i want someone else to walk beside me. she comes out of my body when no one else is around
we take the bus downtown. nobody notices
we are conjoined.
Jan 8, 2018
Jan 8, 2018 at 1:17 AM UTC
we are your daughters too! we are your daughters, have you forgotten that part? have you been gone so long that your memories have shriveled into space gaps and brain tissue and eggnog?
young stud, blue jeans. there’s a sister in the room, you don't have to worry about being dizzy anymore. is there comfort in her hair. is there a mosquito green pond in her eyes. or is it just me?
some meadows are full of honey, like the one in san francisco above the trolley lines. maybe it was there that they walked barefoot, full of moon wedges. maybe it was there that the gravitational pull of the earth first began to melt.
we are exactly the same! closer than twins! womb-slick and half-closed, hands grasped together from the moment the first cells began to split. mitochondria. fibula. ozone.
i wanna hold your hand sometimes! i’ve been thinking of monserrat lately, her knee-high black converse shoes and her tulle skirt. i have been thinking of sitting behind the science building and tearing my history textbooks into strips and i have been thinking of the alley behind the safeway and how i pretended i was luxa for a few hours. all of that ends at graduation with elan’s red dress and her mom in pajamas.
i still wanna hold your hand, i am fifteen and dumb and you are seventeen and beautiful. the inside of her stomach was so long ago, it’s the difference between the beginning of a century and two years after it has begun.
maybe we aren’t so alike but i know that i still dream of water bugs and swamp gods. does your heart beat to pacific tides? does it float and gasp, like duck and pelican? because the ocean is still ready for us. it is gooey with patience and whirlpools and spongey with squid ink, squid eggs and krill.
the east coast is waiting for you too, ready to fold you into its hilly green arms and take you away. some places are too pretty for their own good, they are too much lighthouse red gas station not-oregon hot dizzy head sit down warm cement. i don’t want you to go. and i still don’t even know where you want to go to college, but probably not san diego because someone said she wanted to play there and you didn’t chime in.
it’s so funny about being postnatal. blue and orange hands, umbilical cords in place of functioning intestines, young toothless mouths and cottage cheese. sometimes i miss it. that’s dumb because i am still postnatal, i am still conductive to electricity my body is still blue and wrinkled. we are exactly the same, don’t ever forget that. don’t forget we shared a body.
Jan 3, 2018
Jan 3, 2018 at 4:47 AM UTC
angel is at the door. / you don’t know what it means, but /
oh m, please pray for me. please / melt the dust off the doorstep, let angel in.
bring the bread to utah and eugene and atlanta and north dakota / the places he was in / the shows you wanted to see /
dear butterfly, i want to go to rome like they did. i want to be in monterey again, it sits in my stomach. / the ocean cemetery, the seaweed, the rain / i want to reach down into my small intestine and pull out seagulls, potato chips, the mist. monterey, please come back /
i’m inferior to the little girl inside me. / she is blue and unbreathing due to the strangulation, my cramped ribcage. we were hand in hand in eighth grade, i think, when my body didn’t end / when my memory wasn’t sticky from too many rewinds.
angel, come in / i’ll pick the fleas from your wings, i’ll shave your head for you
Oct 23, 2017
Oct 23, 2017 at 11:58 PM UTC