i.
this a song hell bent on ruining your life. i sing these notes in place of screams. you hear this symphony and assume its for someone else. someone with a backbone of razorblades and scorpion venom hands. but its for you. the boy splitting his nicotine lips into a leer. the boy with a tongue in the shape of a noose. the boy who scorched me to the bone.
ii.
two years older with a body the size of jupiter. i was venus. the stars burst inside of me when you shoved your hand into my orbit. this bedroom floor is a solar system galaxies away from the one you and i run in circles in. in all this confusion i wonder who is the sun.
iii.
everything was cold. december painted us white, left us with cinder block hearts. you drank coffee in the morning. your warmth circled me and I desperately wanted to turn the AC up. but it was winter. a time for decay. isnt this fitting.
iv.
you laughed. forced me to fit into a joke that carved me into an ugly thing. your hands were not meant for art. when you touched me sirens exploded.
v.
fingernails in flesh. four letters being torn from my throat and shoved into a poem. ive written about you before. you are the big bad wolf circling me, snarling at me. i am the prey, gutted like game. you ate me for dinner and threw out the leftovers.
May 22, 2015
May 22, 2015 at 5:21 PM UTC
i.
how old were you when you first discovered your heartbeat? when you opened your rib cage to reveal the carnage? how old were you when the vultures circled the roadkill of your wrists? when the sun kissed fire into your eyes? when you shriveled up and died?
ii.
the epidemic got to me before you did. i peeled every layer of skin back for the mirror. there are rubies under my skin. sealed into the flesh of who i am. did you notice this when you took the meat cleaver to my skull?
iii.
when you said ‘never’ i assumed you meant in a week. instead it happened in a day. a flash of lightning. a carton of blueberries. eating dark chocolate on your back porch. you never told me you liked them bitter. you spat out the sweetness of my skin and your saliva burned a whole in the pavement. summer was always my least favorite time of year. now i can’t even stomach winter.
iv.
i forgot how to weave metaphors into tapestries to hang in museums. you have that power over me. the only beautiful thing about you is your frame. i carved it into the statue of David before you could say no. you hate the vain. thats why you hate me. i never tire of looking at what you made of me. i never tire of painting myself into depictions of the Birth of Venus. you only ever called me Venus between the sheets.
v.
if you saw me on the street, would you remember me? would you remember the fly trap curls luring you in? a weak man and a pink skinned temptress playing doctor on the bedroom floor. would you remember the gray cotton ******* you ignored? the blue bra you threw out the window? would you remember the thicket of hair? the violins singing harmonies in the background? would you? would you? would you?
May 7, 2015
May 7, 2015 at 7:14 PM UTC
And the cracks in my armor
Bloom like sunflowers.
They’re letting spring in and I think
I’ll be able to breathe again soon.
I don’t know how long winter really was
And at this point
I’m not concerned
Because the air is sweet.
Everything tastes like honey and milk
And I swear
My veins are petals of
Forget-Me-Nots picked in a game of
He loves me not.
Persephone walks with me.
The grays are blues again.
The skeleton trees scratching the sky
Bare fruit once more.
Heavy pomegranates and raspberry melodies
Swirl a vibrant red
Behind my eyes.
April kissed cherry blossoms
Into my bloodstream.
My belly is full of watermelon seeds.
For once
I am welcoming spring
With open wishbone arms,
I don’t even mind the bees.
May 7, 2015
May 7, 2015 at 5:46 PM UTC
This guy on Tinder calls me ****
My skin rolls with repulsion.
You see,
I hate the word ****
It sounds like a sixth grader
Hopped up on hormones
Made it up to be funny
And I deleted all of middle school
Out of my memory.
I say
**** isn’t a word I’d use to define me’.
He asks what word I would use.
I say
‘Weird Hot’.
The fine line between
Tastefully quirky wrapped in cute
And downright strange.
The type of strange
That leaves you with only two friends,
An X-files Poster,
And a cardboard cutout of Harry Styles
That is riddled with
Purple kiss marks.
He says
‘You are weird.
And hot.’
My skin rolls with repulsion once more.
I don’t want him to think I’m hot.
I want him to think me weird.
I want him to tell his friends
“Yo look at this weird girl on tinder.
Her bio is
‘HELP IM STUCK IN A FORTUNE COOKIE FACTORY’”
But no,
To him I am hot.
To him
The quality doesn’t matter
As long as the packaging is pretty.
Apr 27, 2015
Apr 27, 2015 at 8:37 PM UTC
This pregnant moment,
This long stretch of heavy silence
You and I created
With sweat soaked skin and
Serrated smiles
Is the only thing i have left.
This bundle of forget-me-not,
Lavender sunrise,
Wake me up when the storm hits
Ballroom dance of a relationship
Is what keeps the
Monsters under my bed at bay.
You kissed violets into my hips
And lifted all the
Ugly out of my heart.
You wrote prophecies with your tongue
And let them soak
Into my bones.
Because of you
I am holy.
Because of you
I don’t remember December.
Because of you
Memories of April and May
Play behind my eyes
Like a never ending showreel
And you’re the star.
I don’t want to write poems about other boys.
I want to be pure,
I want to be rung out of the past.
I want your lips on my stomach,
Your hands on my waist,
Feeling the dip of softness,
Feeling the jagged edges of my ribs
Beg to be touched.
I want you to swallow me whole.
Let me be your Jonah,
You can be my whale.
I want my veins to run red
With 4 letters.
I want to wear them around my neck.
This pregnant moment,
This lilac infused euphoria
Keeping me from jumping
Is the reason
Your arms are my safe haven,
Your bed is my home.
Apr 27, 2015
Apr 27, 2015 at 8:36 PM UTC
I had a dream my teeth fell out
And I woke up talking.
My tongue was thick cotton
And my throat was clogged with ghosts.
I’m always choking on
Bad dreams and lies
Woven like forgotten scripture.
I wish I could repeat the prophecy.
Apr 20, 2015
Apr 20, 2015 at 8:10 PM UTC
My head is heavy with all the verses
I’ve made for you,
All the carefully crafted stanzas
That I want to write on your back
With my fingernails
While you whisper prayers of ‘yes’.
I want you to paint the Renaissance
With your teeth on my neck.
There is no room for impressionism here.
You turn my
Starry nights into starry days.
You keep me in a starry haze.
I never want to eat yellow paint again.
Apr 20, 2015
Apr 20, 2015 at 8:08 PM UTC
I never give him a name in my poems.
He is always “Him”,
Always a personification of a
Smothering darkness closing in.
On a bad day
I see nothing but black.
On a good day
He is a dim border
Making it only a little harder to see.
On a dim day
I can wake up and take a shower.
I can present my naked body to myself.
I am not a Renaissance painting.
I am not pink and soft,
I do not have flowing blonde hair
Tumbling down my back,
But he still picked me to play his
Mona Lisa smile.
On a dim day
I can read on the bus.
I can ignore the *** holes,
The bumps in the road that remind me of my skin.
The skin that was touched and burned,
That scraped against the ridges of his fingerprints.
On a dark day
I take more than the recommended amount of pain killers.
On a dark day
My spine curves into the golden ratio,
The perfect submissive pose.
On a dark day
His hands are my hands,
Slippery with butter and calloused from his car.
On a dark day
I am a gutted museum of trauma.
I am cigarette ashes.
I am a tongue tied convulsing mess.
On a dark day
I am fifteen again with cracked collarbones.
On a dim day
I can’t even muster up enough thanks
That he left me alive.
Apr 20, 2015
Apr 20, 2015 at 8:07 PM UTC
I imagine my death a lot.
I am 28 years old
With two poetry anthologies
And a novel out
Living in New York City with a
Husband who doubles as a musician.
No kids,
Three dogs.
I laugh so hard I combust into nothingness
And my husband writes my memory
Into a song.
I am 19 years old
And looking over the edge of a
Casino building in Atlantic City.
Just last week a man
Flung himself down onto the ghost streets
Because no one told him
There’d be no gun in his game of roulette.
He had to take matters into his own hands.
The rain washed him into the ocean.
I hope it does the same for me.
I am 60 years old
And living in the New Mexico desert
Just outside of Roswell.
I look up at the night sky and
Hunt for UFOs.
I am yelling at the clouds
‘Just take me already!
Take these withered bones,
Take this soft skin!
Find me a new home!
One where I fit in!’
I have a heart attack just as they come to collect me.
I am 18 years old,
A sad girl from New Jersey.
A sad girl who grinds her teeth into stardust,
Who plays with the frayed ends of existence,
Who smiles with fury.
I imagine my death a lot.
But you see,
I’m dying.
I’m dying dying dying dying
And you are too.
There is no need for imagining.
Apr 20, 2015
Apr 20, 2015 at 7:52 PM UTC
I walk into the thrift store yelling at my mother,
which is terrible because
1) I’m yelling at my mother in public and
2) I’ve always hated people who yell at their mothers in public.
But she just won’t stop
Dissecting every part of me that I hate,
Every part that is stripped bare for all the world to see
But is still somehow secret.
Somewhere between 12 year old me
With her short blunt black curls and bruised knees
And 15 year old me
With her blood shot eyes and broken back trauma
I’ve developed a habit of stuttering my words,
Of letting anxiety snake through me like
Early on set rigor mortis.
Somewhere things got seriously ****** up.
How do you tell your mother,
Who birthed you who raised you who loved you,
That you can’t talk to strangers
Because you once got too friendly with a boy
Holding garden sheers,
A boy who clipped your wings and left you
On a bedroom floor?
How do you tell her
Your poems aren’t just statements,
They’re stories?
How do you tell her
You’re like Sisyphus with the boulder,
Like Prometheus with the eagle?
How do you tell the truth?
I walk out of the thrift store quiet.
My mother doesn’t say a thing.
On the way home
She takes sharp turns and hits the brakes.
Hard.
My stomach churns.
This is my punishment and I deserve this
For yelling at my mother.
Apr 20, 2015
Apr 20, 2015 at 7:50 PM UTC