i've swallowed six pills.
my mother has had eight
cut.
we both cry and pull
at our skin, sit and sink
in the cold of this rusting metal city,
this wired tangle of world.
down our cheeks drips the black tar:
guilt.

but there's no need to turn to salt
for tiny writhing strangers,
she said. i was twelve thinking of
shinier cities, taller buildings.

she looked me straight in the eye

*******
unfinished

i'm unraveling myself too perfectly these days
i pick away the shattered shimmer on my skin,
lay my battered angel wings down to sleep, i
wipe the black magic away with soiled cloth,
rip off dresses i don't deserve,
pinch every wrong answer on all miles of this skin

tummy plastered with cut up magazine dreams
legs so languidly hung, drenched in heavy wishes
hands eternally full of more to roll in, more to soak up

i beg the outside one to peel her face off of mine,
twist the hair on this head till the scalp bleeds,
let out the bitter girl
made so haphazardly of littered leftovers

as if i can't read through the cellophane-covered love letters
from the boy who fingered my throat and saw stars therein
the one who can peel back white paint and whisper into the eaves
and leave in shambles a once fiercely built sanctuary

i prayed to the ceiling in the dimmest of the nights
to uncurse me, to sew me back like sally, sewn like you couldn't be
evidence from your hapless choice to take me in
your chest exposed itself: stringless, veinless, merely a wire-board

fourteen does not forget
don't say i miss you, baby
when you only miss my simultaneously
shut and open jaw

each cigarette now
is you and i then
entwined in a back car seat
me face up
counting the leaves not yet fallen
as i burn down to my filter
as you seep slowly like sap down my spine

i can still feel how sharp your teeth were
can see your wrinkled foundation
thin slices and bright orbs of her in your irises like
a string of lanterns in the night

and for many moons i
walked in your field
sent murmurs up to your window
kicked rocks to drown your doubts
oiled the rusted binds of my predecessor

you were so swift and careful
felt the pulse in my fingertips
cut loose the fishing line
snuffed out a menthol in my wrist

but even now
the tempered taste of marlboro glory
is not my own
it’s a folded map
i skip over city lines and highways
though when my back hits dead grass
the smoke rises while i
look upward expecting the same view

the stars are strung, an insect anthem decrescendos
you are far from this field, far from that car
and far from the ashes collecting below
my last smoke