I only ever wanted someone to draw blood
when they kissed me on the mouth,
to leave fingerprints on my skin like tattoos,
the bruises forming a map to the place
where they had pried my body open
and pulled all of its secrets out.
I let you sink your teeth into my heart,
press your tongue against it,
and when I put my lips to yours,
I could taste it, the ghost of the ocean
that hid inside my veins, and yours.
You wanted to drown yourself inside me,
so I wrapped my legs around you
and let you slip beneath the waves.

The blackbirds gather,
cutting a line across the sky,
dividing it in half, marking time.
The fields are full of yellow flowers
that the rain has helped escape the plow,
but it will come for them, still,
to press their headless bodies
into the ground beneath the wheels.
Through it all, the highway runs.
It could be a road to anywhere.
Instead, it beats the path to my mother's door,
the awful cushion of the familiar.
This is the life that we lead,
on this blue globe spinning in the black,
tied down to the earth, then severed from it.

In my dreams, I travel through time and space,
to the land where I used to dwell
in the house of my father,
trapped again in its dark and twisting halls.
There is no other place where running will take me
when he decides to set me ablaze
and form a new child from the ashes,
one who will call him sir and remember
to love him more with every bruise.
Upon waking, I check my skin
to make sure that it still exists,
but there's no way to measure
how much this dream has taken
from the places inside that I can't see.
There are wells of gasoline inside my soul
convinced that the spark is what I deserve.

We came across the waves to change the future.
We built houses with the corpses of dead forests.
We built nations with the corpses of people
whose skin didn't reflect the sun as brightly as ours.
That was a sign from god. He gave us the land
and told us to make it ours, to bring fear to the soil,
so we could offer the bounty up to the sky and call his name.
Our hands were made of metal. Our minds were full of gears.
Our steeples pierced the sky with golden crosses,
to strike at the belly of the lord and let him know
we could command his love if we needed to.
Only the weak beg for what should already be theirs.
Now our hearts are filled with the pride of being chosen,
because we decided to exalt ourselves and swear
that the voice of heaven spills from our own lips.
We put god inside of us so we could do whatever we want.

Some nights,
I dream of my father's fists,
or the blue-green color of his eyes
and how they watered,
became oceans,
when he'd had too much to drink.

There was a galaxy inside of him,
a great, gravitational mass.
He opened his mouth and swallowed worlds;
became a death-eater,
teeth biting down into a swollen black tongue.

When I was a fetus, I felt him pulling,
so I gnawed my way out of my mother's womb.
Covered in her blood, I met my adversary.
I dove into the sea to stare him down,
but could scarcely remember my amniotic swimming.

I drowned. My lungs filled
with the emptiness of space,
and for ages I floated, unmoored,
drifting by stars forever unimpressed with me.

One day, the universe will collapse,
time flying backwards toward its end.
I will see him as he was when he was new,
a stardust embryo not touched by awfulness.
I will know what it means to love.

When the pills start to work,
I dream while I’m awake.
I see the ceiling fan melt,
and turn into a monster,
with liquid gold skin and
swirling blades for teeth,
and I want to die,
to close my eyes so tight
even sobriety can’t pry them open.
I keep secrets. I cut a slit into
my sallow skin, a place to hide
all the suicide notes I’ve never written.
I don’t understand what
the thing above my bed wants from me.
I’ve never been good at this
being human, I have no knowledge to impart.
I just want the noise to stop, the growling.
I want the hairs on the back of my neck
to stop telling me something is there,
crouched in the space behind me
that I can’t see, waiting for me to fumble,
because I taste so much better
when I realize how much I have failed.

The more people you love,
the weaker you are,
every emotion a voracious leech,
drawing blood away from your heart.
When they open their mouths
to say that they love you,
their fangs will drip red,
and you’ll find, to your horror,
that you feel cold and you can’t move,
and you used to think you knew
what love meant, but now it’s just
the hollow space inside of you
that draws all your energy in.