Sitting in a bathtub full of red,
I knew I had been disowned
by the waters of my youth.
No more would I wade into
the shallow green waters of the Blue,
tiny rocks and the shells of long-dead
mollusks digging into the soles of my feet.
I drained myself into the water,
imagined my blood swimming in the Brandywine,
swirling in the dark near the bottom of the Delaware,
letting go of itself, finally, as it flowed into
the arms of the end of the world,
as it broke upon the waves of the grey Atlantic.

Once, I caught a fish in the Cumberland,
I regarded its red-eyed terror with some of my own,
and when we threw it back, I wondered if it would live,
enduring in the water, a new scar in the soft flesh of its mouth,
an amulet against future harm, a fear of hooks dangling within reach,
and black shapes silhouetted against the bright noon sun
as it skimmed across the surface of the stream.
I never threw a hook in the water again,
but I found myself, time after time, drowning
in the palm of someone else's hand,
all for want of a river that would keep me
safely ensconced in its dark secret places.
Like the fish, I dreamed of hooks.

Imagine the end of the world.
Downtown in the dark,
the filthy Ohio snaking its way through the shadows
that fall upon the river valley.
The girl stops to smell the scent on the air,
but she doesn't quite understand what it means.
She has smelled it all her life, putrid water,
but she has never stopped to contemplate the source of it.
She never thinks she will have time to get to know the river intimately,
the way it will caress her slackening skin,
all of the days they will spend together,
on her journey to join the great brown Mississippi,
the river taking as much of her as it can get,
keepsakes to remember her by. It loves, as much as it can.
It loves the fields, the fishermen, the boats.
But most of all, it loves the girls no one wanted,
the girls no one could find. It holds them in its waters,
and when the time comes, it gently lets them go.

The city of my childhood glows white in the Midwestern sun.
The river running beside it is ugly, but not,
shimmering with diamonds of light that float upon its brown surface.
This is the river that breaks a continent in half.
It could take your home if it wanted to, your town,
everything you ever loved and anything that ever meant something to you.
It could break you, like the continent, only it would be easier.
You can cross the bridge, but you can't look down.
You know the river is waiting below you, implacable and constant.
For thousands of years, it has eaten the dead,
and killed some of those it wanted before we had decided to let them go.
Its bottom is haunted by boats, its ghostwaters are dammed with the corpses of soldiers
from wars as important to the river as the dragonfly hovering above the surface.
I look upon this river in my dreams, and it knows me.
The reflection it shows me is dark but true.
All of the rivers have known me.
I whisper their names as my skin becomes saturated.
I pray to the rivers of my youth,
but, like god, they never answer.

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.

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.

Your heart makes a dull thump in your chest,
as red as a brick, and you lie
about everything, but only because you can.
I have never lied about anything,
but only because I couldn't.
We fit together, lock and key.
I am miserable with concavities.
I seem convenient enough.
The words burn when I swallow them.
They poison me, and there is no sugar
to make it better, no respite for my tongue.
As red as a brick, it's pressed to my teeth,
and the silence surrounds me like armor,
a defense against all the careless words
I never should have whispered in your ear.

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.

The body casts a shadow
on the back of my mind,
girl-shaped, rotting in a forest,
where no one knows its name.
It was a person once, and loved,
before it wandered too far afield,
into a darkness filled with envy
for anything that has a light inside.
It didn't know its life could be taken
at any time at all, gone in an instant,
flesh stripped from bone,
sightless eyes pecked out
from a withering skull.
Maybe it would have chosen differently,
if it could have chosen anything at all.
We are all destined to become bodies,
mere shadows of the human beings
we always took for granted that we were.

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.

I crawled naked
through the fires of redemption
and I felt nothing.
I felt nothing,
with blood running down my arms,
and tears carving canyons
through what was left of my baby face.
The river ran through me
the same way the blade ran me through.
We wrapped our hands around
each others’ throats,
and together, we felt nothing,
but, for a moment, nothing we had ever felt,
had ever made us so alive.

The river’s still up in the park,
and brown, drowning the swingset,
eddying around the bottom of the slide,
like a trapdoor out of childhood.
I never needed one. I used to dream
of the waters sweeping over my head
and now I remember the way blood looked
circling the drain, fainter and fainter
pink and then gone, lost forever.
I wonder how it would have felt,
to never know the deeper pools,
to never be dragged down into the darkness
that lies beneath the surface,
the unending roiling of the sea inside.
I bite my tongue, turn the saliva red,
so that even my mouth is full of dark water,
and I keep the words to myself,
trapped behind the blades of my teeth,
locked in the viscous fluid behind my eyes.

There are two moons,
the one I used to cut my wrist
and the one that followed me home,
bathing my blood in silver light,
its round-eyed innocence gone.
My skin glowed white, hemoglobin
starved, celestial, cementing
my place in the firmament,
so that the universe cried with me,
cratering all the worlds with its tears.

The blood falls like confetti
like glitter from veins,
a celebration of the possible,
of the bargain we make with faith.
We can release ourselves from
the prisons of our bodies,
pry ourselves open knowing
that it has to be better, somewhere.
There must be something that is not this.
Every world I've carried inside of me
will be born, explode into superior existence.
This shell cannot contain the real me.
It never knew how.

My stiffening fingers found the flowers
hiding beneath the snow,
the edges of their petals sharp with ice.
My broken fingertips turned the delicate flower flesh
every imaginable variation on pink,
and I held a bouquet against my greying skin,
lost in dreams of the spring,
wandering in and out of time and space,
to walk the streets of the city
I had never learned to call home.
I recalled all the terrible dark seasons of youth,
the great evils of the world,
and when I arrived again, at the walls of the city,
I saw it with new eyes, a great harbor
afloat on the sundering sea.
It was in this city that hope had come to live.
Forcing myself from my reverie,
I steeled myself for the trek back to the new world,
a holdfast standing strong against the old.
I left the flowers behind, thinking that when spring came,
my blood would melt from the petals
and return to the welcoming earth.

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.

When you crawled up out of the mine,
there was a hole where your brain had been,
and you tried to fill it up with moonshine,
but your son still went to war to get away from you.
You both knew that the smell of burning flesh
was part of a suit that would be ill-fitting,
but he had no future under the mountain,
or in the liquid pouring out of the still.
Under the stars at night, you studied him,
this creature you had made, and found him lacking.
You punished him for being solid,
with no formula that you could adjust.
You never loved him.
He smelled too much of fear.

A plane flies next to the moon,
trailing condensation that bisects the sky,
the sun pushing away inferior stars
as it idly caresses the glowing pink horizon.
An unseen hand lifts the veil between night and day,
where heaven and earth melt into each other,
and in that place we dwell, our feet finding
a pathway through the spiraling galaxy.
Where the dark meets the light we exist.
A whole universe churns inside of us.
We are. We are enough.

You never loved me, but you needed me,
graceless form, but solid function,
a stiffened spine to wrap your life around,
the unbent shoulders holding up your silly world.
Now I revel in all the ways you are unable to break me,
the hollow thud your skull makes ramming into
the brick wall of my unshakeable resolve.
I loved you, but I never needed you.
I’m not fool enough to build an anchor with feathers,
to pluck the brightest bird down from the sky
and set him upon the sea of tears I’ve already cried
in anticipation of the way he will drown.
Now you revel in your freedom, the wind that carries you,
while I stand still on the ground below,
watching you grow smaller until you disappear.

We carry it inside,
the sea and the sky,
the stardust that made us.
I was once a blazing green aurora,
a defiant glow at the top of the world,
but I knew, even then, what I would be,
and I had no power to stop it.
Human will is useless against the engines of creation.
The star that birthed the essence of me burned away
all knowledge of my existence the second after I began.
There is a long night at the edge of what we know,
dark and beautiful and terrible to behold,
and that void does not remember us.
No matter what greatness we aspire to,
we will toil in obscurity and then fade.
We will live and die for nothing and we will not be missed.

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.

There is nothing as familiar to me
as the space between the waist of your jeans
and the skin stretched taught across the muscles
below your stomach, the way your flesh calls to my hands.
My palms are rougher now than when I first touched you.
I'm more scarred, but less scared.
A thousand tiny almost deaths have made me braver,
but more than that, I know that you
would **** and die for me, no hesitation,
and that's the blood that binds us,
sticky on your fingers and salty in my mouth.

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.

Yes, I know that words are wind,
but you need to remember where I'm from.
I've got tornadoes in my blood,
and the walls that surround you are thin.
Even the cellar won't save you.
There's no logic in burying yourself
in the ground to keep the sky out.
The taste in your mouth is the dirt
from your grave and the ashes of your faith.
Have you ever stood against the gale,
let it take your skin but leave you standing?
You don't understand the nature of weakness.
You have no idea what it takes to make a person hard.