She has a wide mouth
He wears a leather jacket
surrounded by red lipstick
that smells of mothballs and cigars
and she sings to me
and when we walk down the street
with breathy staccato laughs
he dances with me
and she takes me away.*
and he takes me away.

They sing show tunes
and waltz down sidewalks
and they take me away.
They take my breath away.

Do not so readily forget
what you said to me
because I
clung to each syllable
as I would to the edge of a cliff.
Desperately.
By the tips of my fingers.
Breathless.
Hard.
Absolutely petrified.
And like the dirt perpetually stuck
under my nails you cannot
expect me to ignore
that you still said it.
The energy of
your vocal chords was
released into the atmosphere
and there
it lingers.
You can try to bury
the three am
conversations
under the entrails
of your regret
but the words
"I love you more than her"
cannot so easily be masked.
I suggest you put away
the absinthe
and shame
for neither carries a satisfying
burn.

When I look at you,
I can feel the Nile river gushing from
my arteries and separating into
the most delicate of tributaries.

When I look at you,
my bone marrow jolts my body forward
because you’re east and i’m west but
if we followed the lines of longitude
it’s impossible for us not to meet again.

When I look at you,
I smell bleach and roses
both burning the back of my throat,
one covering and the other cleaning.

When I look at you,
I feel warmth
but the real kind
not the the heat from a couple shots of absinthe.

When I look at you
my heart flys up and squeezes into
the delicate space between the two hemispheres of my brain
and suddenly you consume
me.

So when you left

I stopped looking at you,
looking for you,
looking for your hands on my ribs
or the hair of your leg brushing the back of my calf.

I tried to stop longing for the proclamations of love that you
whispered directly into my ear so
the wind couldn't ****** the seven letters before I got to hold them.

When I had looked at you
I did not want to admit that the red strings
that tied our calloused fingertips together
had begun to fray and snap.

When your presence became to fragile for my fingers to touch
and the ashes of burned rose petals
would fall into my palms.

I would swallow them
and try to remind myself of their-your
your once velvet beauty.

But charcoal is only used to extract poison from a bloodstream.

I refused to believe that you were the poison and I would open bottle
after bottle after bottle of red wine because
it was my-our-your favorite type of drink.
My red stained lips would get trapped on the neck of the bottle
until neither alcohol nor oxygen remained inside
and only shattered glass and ****** knuckles.

I tried to leave hickeys on the walls and pretend
it was your neck but my lungs were too empty from my screaming.

When they burned from your absence
I ate the charred alveoli
and hoped it would absorb a little bit of the pain.

i.
i found a little
pull in the threads of
my favorite sweater
the day my father told me
my mother was
(is) clinically
depressed.

ii.
the first time i saw
a tear in
my favorite sweater
was in fifth grade
and i learned
that the price to be
perfect was cheating
on a spelling test
and a finger
down the throat

iii.
i started realizing that
other people’s sweaters
had tears and pulls when i
was walking
to the park
and saw the teenage girl
who had carved ribbons
and ladders
up her forearms.

iv.
my sweater didn’t show it’s
wear
until
i provoked my father and his
response was
mirrored to that of his
alcoholic, abusive father.
(in turn i smashed every cup
in the cupboard).

v.
my shoulders began to curl
inward
due to the weight
of that sweater.
and i explained to my therapist
that the meds weren’t working
and that i was tired but
i could only sleep after
drawing
an equal amount of lines
on each hip.

vi.
the scraps of ***** yarn,
hardly keeps me warm
anymore.

vii.
for the longest time
i worried i was the only one
who wore a filthy sweater
until i had a best friend
who lifted up her sleeve to show me her
identical  
wrist

viii.
i don’t like to wear my sweater
anymore
but like most old belongings
i don’t have the
heart to throw
it away.

I remember when I told you I was fat and

you told me to shut up- that I was beautiful.

I got so so angry and even though you thought it was because I hated the compliments,

I was actually confused why I couldn’t be both.

Because the most beautiful girl I have ever seen

Didn’t weigh a pound under two hundred. But her eyes

told stories richer than Belgium chocolate and

her deepest dimples, may have been those at the bottom of her spine

but her veins contained more love than all the water in the Mariana Trench.

So I’m pretty ******* angry at all the tabloids

that proclaim how to loose the extra fat, or the latest celebrity diet.

And I’m sick of “less is more”

because even though my thighs grow thick and embody the roundness of a peach

I hold more truth than the salt count of the Dead Sea

and my words weave stories that put Persian carpets to shame.

so the next time you want to make love to me

with the lights off

I’ll tell you to just **** me with the lights on. Loose the ignorance

because I will not be bullied into loosing the weight.

Have the courage to find the beauty in my stretch marks

and revel in the softness of my stomach

and I won’t be shamed into saying a smaller pant size

because I sure as hell know

that that **** piece of cake will taste better than skinny feels.

i don’t know if you were in second
or third grade. or what your favorite color was.
i’m not sure if you liked playing dress up or soccer
or if you were an only child or the baby of six.
i don’t who you had a crush on and i’m not even sure of your gender
but what i do know, is that today you were scared because you saw white
and then heard the noise of the explosion, and the screams of the injured
but i’m not sure if had learned yet in school that light travels faster than sound.
i don’t know why you were watching the marathon, but i know that you were excited
and impressed
that all these people were running for twenty-six miles, which happens
to be the distance from your house to your
grandma’s.
i don’t know if you died squeezing tightly to your mother’s hand or
if your last breath was taken alone, while hundreds ran in a flurry around you.
i do know that when you fell to the ground, no longer breathing,
you tripped a wire that pulled out
your father’s heart and sanity.
i know that you hadn’t yet felt someone
trace their lips up the divot of your spine
and i know that you will never get to sneak out of the house at
three am to get drunk in a park.
you will never see the next president or even what your best friend will wear
on his wedding day.
and i am sorry.
i am sorry that someone was sick enough to put
an explosive in the trashcan and let it detonate
i’m sorry that your death was the product of human selfishness and greed.
i am sorry that today you had to feel a warm liquid leak from your body
and that you lost so much of it you
couldn’t bear to keep your eyes open.
i’m sorry that you were eight years old when you died,
and that you barely got a taste of the world before it was snatched out from under you.