I want to get home so that I can sleep for 17 hours with my mouth hung open so wide you’d mistake it for a black vortex where planes and people and boats and Ameillia Earharts go mysteriously missing and it petrifies the **** out of you that these things exist on this planet if you think about it for too long your eyes beady and blending into the dark of your bedroom or I want to jump out of my window and die or run up and down the four flights of stairs in my ****** apartment complex until I feel the muscles and tendons and ****** pink strings in the meat of my thick thighs burn and come to life and the fat rupture and break apart beneath my skin, or maybe I can just run a regular marathon but that’s so ******* boring that I would rather gouge out hollows between my ribs with a spoon because why the **** would I want to run in a straight line, I want to run up and down and zig and zag and left and right and upside-down and on my head and with my legs ******* behind my back and at the speed of light like the energy-never-dies organism that I am, all that I am really comprised of, the bare bones of what this body is broken down into in actuality, except I swear to ******* God I better die one day

A thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail
takes at least five months.
In five months:
a fetus is the size of a papaya,
a small home has been fully renovated,
2,450 dollars in rent is paid if you live with three people,
Swahili has been learned incompletely,
the grief of a dead high school teacher is finished,
a person sinks in, gets comfortable,
the planet has turned its back,
Loestrin has travelled out of the system—
who’s to say it’s not just like the Appalachian.

I’d like to make a rope out of my hair
tie it from Georgia to Maine
sail a two-pound apology all the way down
to make up for the places my body will never make it
because five months of footwork
is too long to stop nurturing a life
that is not worth living anyway
but this way
I don’t have to lose.

Alarm clock kicks exhaustion into gut immediately as it sounds
University student jolts into day still dark
20 years later body still too daft to recognize shrill wake-up call as prey rather than predator
US kills Russians in Syria strikes
How to get ready in under ten minutes—life hacks you won’t believe: leave without locking the door, forget to brush your hair, and more
Five reasons breakfast is the most important meal of the day
Trump wants to replace food stamps for impoverished Americans

Snow in the forecast for the next three days
Why is vitamin D important for our bodies?
Sleep deprivation: a student epidemic
I’ve had panic attacks every day for the past three years—here’s how I’ve coped
Accused killer says victim hired him to do it on Craigslist

Want to know how to budget as a college student? Stop buying Starbucks
All she has to do to claim 560-million-dollar lotto is make her name public—she refuses
Signs that your friendship is coming to an end
Lions eat and **** suspected poacher
Tips on how to be successful after college
These are the victims of the Florida school shooting
Binge-drinking on college campuses and escapism: the dangers of drinking to forget

Declinism: is the world actually getting worse?

Please wait
Help is on the way
cereal box bursting plastic seams
full to the brim
Help is on the way
too many high-sodium high-carbs      
everything that goes up must come down
everything gripped white-palmed hits this polished rock bottom
Help is on the way
is the backpack-bearing bearded man with dirt slathered across flip-flop bare feet not accepted in addition to cash?
See store for details.
I am afraid he will ask me
if I can spare some change but
I have to keep quarters for laundry
pods 25% off
wish I could give him deliverance, tell him
Help is on the way
Please wait
wish I could be a Pharmacists Who Care(s)
I just Pick Up, Go.
Did he fail to follow the instructions
on life
on pin-pad reverberates high-pitched privilege
I am one of the guilty ones
I look at him as if he were already expired
stuff my guilt in the bagging area
please keep all items in the bagging area
I want to leave this one out.
Where is my expiration date
am I only Good Thru a Beauty Guarantee am I only Good Thru 40% percent of my body am I only Good Thru what is seen on tv?
System processing
Please wait
Thank you for shopping

Daybreak dawned seconds before the bus gave way to my body
a mercurial collapsing of wheels eating gravel
I now know what is godsent:
to have eyelids like a light switch where nightmares ebb darkness.
Did you hear the dogs barking straight towards the dim?
Cyclical guttural growls
like rewinding a cassette and playing it all over
while mourning the stretch between three and five in the morning.
Between each stone-cold silence
stood the whirring frequencies of a circuitous scratching on the walls
all white noise and stark black pen.

Halfway through dusk  
we settle that it must have been the sounds of Cerberus
begging each voice that drags me by hair through hell to stay
as each night I scrawl an escape route to stability.
I hoped that it was those hounds of Hades
who were operating the vehicle
that skimmed just over the brim of the outer-layer of my skin
but denial takes a weak form in the passenger seat.
I claim ownership of the wheel
death-gripped two-handed
falling short of hitting the target
a day-in and day-out ritual
where I remember
that repetition
can ruin

I try to tell my boyfriend that I am depressed
less than three times a day
after that
it gets a little depressing
like maybe it’s a ghost that if I don’t acknowledge
it will glide back into the thin layer between the underworld and mine.
I don’t know how to talk about wanting to die
without personifying it
addressing it as a pronoun
saying its name and capitalizing the first letter
tightening the slick leather collar around its neck that reads: “If lost please call…”
sticking its freshly birthed hand on certificate
but all I can say
is when I'm sitting in an all-white walled in 9 by 5 room
and the ceiling becomes latex,
seals itself a vacuum over my face,
all I can think about
is what a touch of cardinal could do for this room
but the thought of my brains turning brown and ugly,
after a few hours of the three people I cared about forgetting about me,
is enough to do nothing
until my sweat becomes comfortable with mattress
and out of necessity
I move.

A boy with bruises for under eyes in two o’clock poetry
stayed ten minutes after just to tell our professor
that he felt like a dead body
and when I went home that day
I laid in bed long enough to watch my plant
follow the grace of the sun
eight limbs strung wide open
a gradient of striped canary strewn across my bedroom floor
as it left me.
I thought
maybe the dead body boy
will schedule to be known as existing only to his bed
the same days as me
so that our agendas and the ******* Gods and the other planets
that are of no use to me
can align
and when I don't show up in the world for a week and neither does he
everyone will think there must just be something contagious going around
maybe there is—
Do you think that throwing your dinner away and smashing the plate,
allowing shower water to run cold over hot flesh,
and treating sleeping as an affair that I can only participate with eyes cemented open
is a new symptom of the next bat-**** virus everyone will lose their minds over?
Asking nurses if there's any way to make permanent
the needle still pierced through soft pit of inside elbow skin and spewing
the hauling behind you of a sweet 20 pound IV like a
dead
body?

When I wake up in the morning,

I don't

know the difference between dreaming in increments—
and being alive.

How much time passes
between inviting the sun to hunch in the corner of my room
canary and screaming for the world to stop orbiting
and suddenly it’s night
and you realize it’s been seventeen hours since your body has made a request to move
knees pulled up to chest empty and heaving white
every bone in your body an orchestra of creaking
soundly against the crickets leaping off the fourth floor of your balcony dingy
the background noise of your dreams
blood the scent of pennies ripe in the air
smeared here and there
across all things unwanted
where apologies thrive on eleven cold dollars an hour—
you never asked for this.

I am better
at tallying each shade my room turns
because it has nothing to do
with the cerulean in my face
and this is the only place
that I allow warmth to be subjective,
when it’s breaking through windows with hatchets
instead of being waited on
watching the mouth of my wall clock nailed shut
frozen in a minute and speechless,
I have no desire to dial an ambulance
bear witness to the whirring American frequencies
of heads turned 180 even during the scuffling feet rustling rush of rush hour,
I’d rather hear the ringing in my ears
of each ghost that has ever followed me back home
quaking in translucent skin.

I heard that three a.m. belongs to the devil
I haven’t tested that theory since I was seventeen sacrificing and surrendering
but I do know what happens between the hours of thinking without doing
wanting without acting
the bed a fort you are asked to hold down by that hefty feeling
in your feet that reside two blocks from where your legs used to be,
and there is no path filthy with orchids,
when dark is just on the brink of waking,
but you can’t tell the difference anymore.