I will buy a wedding dress,
and I will send a letter to all the people I ever loved
and ever loved me
and it will say "I will be at the courthouse
in my dress
and I will marry the first one to show."
If no one shows,
I will drink a bottle of wine to myself
and dance in the dress until I'm covered
in nothing but cumulonimbus.

he said,
"you laid the groundwork for my psyche.
some of the dirt on this ground is yours.
you tended the plants with me."
he took my silence for acquiescence, but it was shock.
he did not affect the pathways of my mind.
after all of it,
I just stretched a twelve month stretch
and wanted to be a doctor.

You forget to notice
as your memories become museums.
Encased in dust,
your settling or someone else's,
it covers all the photographs you say you need
and all the papers you won't part with.
It only takes so much before
the fond caress of a frozen, flat, familiar face
becomes the hundredfold tracing of a ropelike scar.

I had been making pearls of my wonderment
And hiding them in boxes, but the concave heart shaped in concrete
Under the wishing silver sun just didn't seem to fit; all seemed tailor-made to remind
That I own only the poor copies of my perception
And should joyfully roll in the deep scent of the present
Like all sudden, stinky dog-love.

The little injustices serve to remind me
That you were not, never were
The plan. No,
Not even when things were light and my heart sang
And I could ignore, gloss over that one tuneless note in the refrain
Could I believe we were fate. I had to follow that lie to survive
The cold, thick swamp his rejection left me in the will.
Then I believed it like it was where I wanted to be.

You are selfish, but never cold. You make a mockery of me
With no thought, knowing I am Artemis
And telling your cookie cutter lover to tie your memory to the moon.
You weep when you hurt me, and your tears slide down
Almost as easily as your zipper will for the next flatterer exhibiting lordosis.
You can't help yourself, maybe, and so I wanted to sink under your failures
Instead of taking responsibility for my own success.

I will always love you but I have never needed you.

Eyes dumb and wet like mudwater,
Eyebrows twitching like
dog legs in the road
and I want to hurt you beyond comprehension.
Boil away the pity
and the tar is hate.

The room is blue-bright
Like a lie or the cheap plastic of a child's cup.
The moon moves so slowly that you are confused.
The ring that you bought to replace his somehow
Shines more strongly in the sodium light.
It excites you, and that makes you ill.
You want nothing more
Than to want to waste away at his absence,
To feel betrayed that you are never enough
And so after years of bludgeoning him,
Passionlessly tracing those grooves of betrayal with memories of indignance
You decide to kick the habit.
The mind wants to reject change
But you have begun carrying exact amounts.
He won't understand, but you don't either.
All you know is that his absence is rightness.
You close the blinds and smile, alone.

My heart still races with the pain of the moment
He told me he loved you, and I wanted you dead.
The hate blossomed like a shot taken straight through the sternum
And like my eyes, easier to focus the greater the distance.
I walked with great purpose, to keep moving forward.
I forced him to litanize your positive traits
One by one, I pulled them apart,
Twisted them under infected light
And devoured it all.

It took long months, but the poison of truth won out.
I sweat blood for this victory.
The pain has driven you mad,
Wild eyed and long faced like a sick horse
In the California hills you rampage.
I lament your destruction.
You are a beautiful animal.

He and I are a force, and anything in between is collateral.
Your life has been lived to be collateral.
Would that you could break my nose,
I've broken everything you are as I breathe.
Everything in me and on me has been mercilessly railed upon.
Any open shot is a cheap one, and any shot landed will be on scars.
Come.
It is time for the other women to stand their ground
And to see whose falls away.

Staring down the street
framed in high-contrast light like a faded sign,
a blur to my eye
that makes me wonder if it's shared,
I watch a man advance towards me from the bus stop.
He wears an old fishing hat, pale as paper,
whether I mean him or that hat, I don't really know.
As he gets closer, I realize that with every step
he is slowly crumbling.
He gives me a look
that lives somewhere between desparation and apology
as first his leather shoes
and then his ankles
fall to sand.
He speaks, a thread so fine
it barely winks in the sepia glare,
"All you have to do is hold me,"
and his lip trembles with tearless fear.
His eyes grow impossibly blue when I grab his arm like a greeting
and he slides on me like an oil tattoo,
then into me without struggle -
visible just barely under my skin.
I carry him with me to my car
mumbling, mumbling,
"If only you'd stopped walking.
Nobody had a gun to your head."
From inside myself, I hear,
I am the gun.

Careening, cavorting through the expansive terrain,
The prey that you seek darts far faster than flame.
You were not raised with a hunter's eyes,
And lo, a failure will fail the harder it tries.
I have trained hard and long how to trap alive
This creature you seek, with no will to survive.
The secret you lack is to let him roam free,
And wherever he'll roam, he'll return to me.
You can scream, you can rail, whinge, moan, blister, and punch
But it's under acceptance his resolve will bunch.
You'll find your own, I'm loathe your bubble to burst,
For each, only one hunter, and I got here first.

I have been awake for hours
Giving voice to spite and bleeding it dry
Leeching infection,
Let me tell you I love you
I do
I love you for your failures

We are none of us more than a frequency,
desperately seeking a place
where the light in us can bear to be.

I am forgiving you like dawn.
A gray, dark and terrible like death
And grass wet and cold
Give way in a pink burst I feel low in myself.

You are still out there somewhere,
and someday you might grab another girl's hand
and drag her, giggling, to the roof of an old theater.
She may gasp for love of you,
breathing hot stars that forget to burn.
I hope you have learned not to break her
And that you now cradle trust, fragile and beautiful.

There was once a fairy who moved
In a blue-black vacuum blur, as though she owned
The absence of things and the line separating it all.
She walked thumpingly, never believing her feet
Would hit the ground, forever forgetting
The prison of her human body.

She grew, once; a fairy who moved
On a true tack towards the world below.
The absence of magic startled her so that she rejected
The line separating it all. She gave selflessly, emptying
Her magic to the earth, through
The prism of her human body.