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anusha Feb 2018
Blond umber smears
Tree trunks all around,
Swaddled in damp
Verdant, soaked
With tears
of clouds

The
Path,
Though longer
than a spool
all unstrung
Fungal bouquets adorn
every fall totem
Illicit lifeblood, an inclement heaven
G
anusha Sep 2018
today my sadness took me driving
past empty fields, beneath a pinkish sky
pondering an emptiness that can't be filled
despite how hard I'll try

it leaves me asking why

weeping over the beauty,
(a bed of gold beneath cotton candy)
so sweet it makes me sick, saccharine
leave me nauseous, fill my heart
with spit.
anusha May 2018
a mottled stone of
ruddy brown, spotted:
the freckles on my mother's breast
of feeling whole; of love

the way I look at her
the infinitesimal touch,
my love, the impossibility
of desire

This; feeling my love
for you pulse in my
bone marrow,approaching
oblivion asymptotically
anusha Jun 2018
You are:

a pile of spent lighters
sunrays through smoke
a searing bath, which feels
like an embrace

we will meet at the threshold
of water and oil.
we will meet at the brink
of night and day.
for Isa
anusha Feb 2018
a sordid smattering
of damp drift, draft
notices littered
among handwritten receipts

what do you know,
of vomiting in an ex’s
bedroom, rivers
staining the topography
of your skin
anusha Apr 2018
I’ve

seen love

In movies, viewed parting

lips, glances

through a glass—

To know:

I’ve never felt

the heartbeat of another

sync alongside

mine

But my

mind, it holds

Skin, salt, of sea

waves who may feel the scratch

ofthe sand for-half

A second, to then

be dragged

away,

how many,

I ponder, are alike? It must

be an ocean wide,

those

For whom this

ache is commodified. I fear—I am

A blossom, bearing

fruit, which knows

it will fall

soon;

It is but a

matter of time before

I am crushed

underfoot... .
anusha Feb 2018
Richard Siken


A man with a bandage is in the middle of something.
Everyone understands this. Everyone wants a battlefield.

Red. And a little more red.

Accidents never happen when the room is empty.
Everyone understands this. Everyone needs a place.

People like to think war means something.

What can you learn from your opponent? More than you think.
Who will master this love? Love might be the wrong word.

Let’s admit, without apology, what we do to each other.
We know who our enemies are. We know.
anusha Apr 2018
How does one overcome/
That sense/ ./of loneliness:
every second           /I tread
the grave of a past/self...
/have you a             piece/
of your heart,   empty/.
being /chewed up and
spat out/ by carrion birds
anusha Feb 2018
of the scarlet sledgehammer
in my chest,
When I lay my head
at the juncture of your
crossed legs

We spin, a thousand
Voices in a choir
Echo between my cochleae

My heart, once jagged scrap
metal trash pick-up,
Wrought iron from the
ember of your
fever
anusha Oct 2018
light scatters—my rain-spattered
windshield, dark roads below darker skies

praying our problems might align
that we may patch the cracks in our lives

I saw you in the moonlight, caustic
smile caught by 2am drives

I knew you would be the telephone pole
with which my car collides
anusha Apr 2018
/your                  love is a
flimsy wick/
I,—         a /ready gust....
anusha Feb 2018
if i could kiss
The broad strokes of light
which dance across
Crescent moons;
cresting
waves,

I pray
Thy pale light
might aflame  
my sorrow’s sight
anusha Apr 2018
Some find it harrowing, their life/
is (a mere footnote in others’ histories)
but I open a thrift-book, thumb the blueink
musings, in awe of this realization:/
an act of compassion is a blooming feeling, one that imbues (you and another) with the surest sense of existential peace—for these moments I live.
anusha Sep 2018
tasting god from my fingertips//
to this matchstick (every time a part of me breaks,
my flesh bursting forth clear and pure and seraphic,
i kneel between the pews) /you lead me drunk//
off the rooftop, the night we first kissed.

i’m in a dull, grey cube, wincing at fluorescent terrors
look down and i’m naked, veins peeling open/
/Will you come back, if i show you
how much i feel it? it couldn't hurt—
i couldn't hurt any more than this/

my friends haven't known spirituality
past a bag/ pushed through through your truck’s open window/
passed a bar passing hands like a love note
limp joints burning our fingertips//
your hands, my throat

open your nose, open your eyes to the world
watch the clouds racing through the sky
and in this moment// everything is perfect
heaven's light falling upon our faces
anusha Apr 2019
my starving heart
another turn of the stars
never further from your arms
after Sappho
anusha Oct 2018
And nothing will compare to that first love
unrequited, the way your heart aches
To reach out and touch her hair.
It falls like molten gold in the light
of a summer’s day in the Shakespeare
garden, you’re shaking with anticipation.
Laying in the grass, she leans over and
applies your lipstick with her finger.
Teenage adoration hangs in that lazy
afternoon, the cusp of fall, the first of
a thousand deaths.
anusha Mar 2018
The vibrant greens
of that first bloom.
frost wears, shedding
solitary tears,
warmth erodes—even
the strongest facade.
anusha Apr 2018
Tiny silver fish writhe,
pavement, iridescent brushstrokes
sun's left, this dreary city
proving visions, mere mirages
metallic bursts of light
on a rain-soaked Ave,
They're not the
only culprits, forging upstream
against nature, against reason
not knowing how or why, or
what lie can I make this time?
what can strip me
of the binds of subsistence? To
whom is this even addressed?
What fame? Glory? could be achieved
as the mire consumes me. ha. I've
been ****** into a puddle
of outbursts, deception
mere mirages,
vision swimming vision swimming vision
swimming vision swimming vision swimming vision swimming vision swimming vision swimming vision swimming vision swimming vision swimming vision swimming vision swimming vision swimming vision swimming
You sink into dust. I follow.
anusha May 2018
It's late.                    /awake
             unbroken Moebius, (of
"look what you did)      "look what you said")   hated)hated)hated)
      
            i remember carrying on like nothing was   wrong   with me.
                                                                ­    they wouldn't meet
                   my eyes./
                                         I am
                                                            be­ing
                                                             ­                 carried
                                                         ­                                              away—
                                                              to­ that terrible world of my thoughts
, alone;
                                                          ­                                if i can survive this
circumspection,/evade reaching tendrils
                                                        ­                I may fade
                                                            ­                                            into black—
anusha May 2018
On a hot summer day,
Your eyelashes suffuse sunlight,
Golden waves undulate as you
walk in front of me

I’ve pressed flowers between the covers
of the book I’ve given you.
(I’ve underlined the most romantic
lines of his sonnets.)
about one summer day in particular. Hope this person isn’t on hp ****!!
anusha Feb 2018
and awaken,
the ill-lit underpinnings of a
world drained of all;
you've shown me
a dim haze
of life, a marching pall-bearer,
the passed: my soul.
anusha May 2018
You will drink the kool-aid, looking
for some answer as to why your veneer,
desecrated, requires an eternity to heal.
and an olive branch is only that,
(a frail twig which will soon snap)
No escape because I refuse it.
Is this what it means to be human? An
epiphany for every night, gasping, gulping
breath, sweat clinging to your edifice
blossoming fractures within your chest?
anusha Mar 2018
Over there!
Floating drop of honeyed sap
suspended in a web
of blacks, cloaked in
sallow darkness,loathe
to all mortal entrapments
poised in death’s clutches.
But the skull, weathered,
safely wise, resting
on a veil of lace
Will watch the
sins of our sons,
Our lives slip
into dusk
anusha Apr 2018
Some days you can only paint in blacks,
midnight, sage, mulberry sometimes—
the shades of rotten meat. An artist
can only make of what is given.

Some days smearing violent
Crimson, scarlet, florid visions
is not enough. A painting is a mind
captured by a moment. But moments pass.

One day riotous chartreuse,
vermillion, the full spectrum waltzing
across your iris will not fatigue you. You
will brush dawn across your skin.
anusha Feb 2018
meet her gaze and see
speckled pebbles in a cool brook, which glimmer and radiate
a thousand fleeting stars

I read manuscripts in the creased skin
Of her lips
I ache,

as the waves smooth glass
into soft, clouded,
infinite
anusha May 2018
dawn breaks, marking another
passing day. awake, you will
stay ‘till the trapping dark
another night of lonely avoidance;
you're perpetually under the influence.
you remember less and less... .
anusha Apr 2018
Indigo and midnight. /Lustrous
Violet blooms like blood trapped/
pillow beneath your skin,:
tearing away leaving you
open,/for them to crawl
inside, but you learn to live/
With the worms just below
your surface, you learn—
To love the itch, for that acute
terror brings you comfort/.
anusha Feb 2018
past few days have made
me think of the loves

I could’ve had,
which felt like sitting in the sun

and dancing to the music
you wouldn’t dance to

even around friends your age.

now my stomach churns
when I think;

Of dancing, and picnics,
and your music.
anusha Feb 2018
am i here, in these
chevron evergreen stockings
with little grips all along them?

I find a lightness
in my strides,an almost
floating feeling

I cheated death.
It seems;
my body left behind,

I possess
spirit autonomy

freed from the corporeal
I was forced to reside...
anusha Feb 2018
(Am I insane to radiate with emotional dreck so much I can hear the snap of your neck)
I could point
To the captive screams drowned in
***&cokes
Festooned with “passion”
Lived out in empty stairwells
the front seat
hours
inebriated
please
let me leave. even without my year 15.
anusha Jun 2018
TRIGGER WARNING: SUICIDE

The meds stave off the spiraling thoughts:
Void, this part of me,
(that languid fluidity) of
“I will die by my own hand”—

if not today, someday.
But also the intensity, that fetid lustre
of that which glimmers ever brighter
because it will soon be lost...

I feel its absence intuitively, like
the way I know I’ve forgotten my keys
My heart managed to grow around
That fester, but now, I’m left a cavity—

I hope life may flood this atrophy.
If not today, someday.
Part the materialization of this sinking feeling i get sometimes, part a necessary release after Kate ***** and Anthony Bourdain's deaths by suicide. This morning, one of my teachers started a discussion about what we can do so that such tragedies can be prevented(they are preventable). I'll have been on Lexapro for 19 months on the twenty-fifth. I was put on this lifesaving medication after my suicide attempt the day after Thanksgiving. I had entered a toxic relationship with a man four years my senior, and I was pressured into dating, then having *** with him. I had been binge drinking every night for weeks, and once the alcohol ran out, I decided it that was time to end my life before it had the chance to even begin. I was saved, and I was able to recover more, and I have reached the point I am now.

The point is, I'm not here to spew worthless platitudes about "how precious life is", how "selfish you'd be", how "every person is beautiful". I know firsthand how seemingly meaningless and empty that **** is.  I cannot tell you that "life is perfect", "I'm happy all the time", that I've "bought a house" or "have a job" or any of the conventional markers that have been sold to us that supposedly measure "success" and "happiness". But I can tell you that 19 months later, I have none of the garbage friends or the abuser which I had then. I haven't drank in months. I have not considered suicide in months. I find myself truly feeling joy, of laughing without abandon, of the most profound sense of love when I look into the eyes of my friends. At times, I feel unconditionally accepted.

Clinical depression has a way of deceiving you, telling you "I have only gotten worse and I will only get worse". That is the most terrible thing about the disease, that complete dearth of hope. But behavioral therapy, psychiatric medication and an ever-growing web of support have helped me in ways that I could not possibly describe, given a thousand years and an infinite number of stanzas. But, if you experience suicidal ideation, it is impossible to get better until you reach out for help. A doctor, a teacher, a trusted friend. Once you let someone know that you need outside resources, you can begin the long and arduous path to fulfillment. If anybody wants to message me with any questions or need someone to talk with, PLEASE send me a message. The social stigma around this topic needs to be obliterated, or we will lose more treasured, inimitable lives.

I'm begging you, please reach out if you are considering taking your own life. I am astonished by how far I've come, looking back. You deserve the same.

— The End —