rip out your womb and pickle it
take two bites from an apple and throw it away
buzz your head and paint sigils on your skull
light a candle and leave it burning
set fire to your childhood home
dont eat any pomegranate seeds
so you’ll never have to come back
drill holes in your body and fill them with steel
eat an entire chocolate cake and puke
become a ****** and rob your clients
drink ***** until you can’t see
light a match
and swallow it

I should love you as an eight year old,
asking to be excused from your third grade class
to go throw up in the bathroom.
Leaning over your desk in fevered prayer,
hunched over two tender nubs of breast.
Sitting down with your counselor
and a pack of giggling girls to have “the talk”
while bleeding into a *** of toilet paper.

I should love you as a twelve year old,
blue eyes lined and lipstick smudged.
Crouched behind the bushes, expelling chunks
of non-digested pizza and coke.
Taking two bottles of tylenol and laying down
on your kitchen floor, watching the broiler burn.
Calling your boyfriend, and whispering
so your mom won’t hear
“I love you, I hate you, don’t go, leave me to die”

I should love you as a fourteen year old,
thin as a pencil, hair black and straight
Walking with a humming in your head
to your eighth grade classes, slipping away
to the library and reading books on dying
and so you steal a bottle of ativan
from your grandfather’s medicine cabinet.
You take 10.

I should love you as you are now.
Seventeen, eyes darkened to a jade,
and burnt out on suicide attempts.

But I don’t.

im frozen, in June
left for numb
from this reverie
a silent movie
of blues and greys
a painted picture
of icy stares
and cold blood.
there is a silent front
over i-430
the world is made of breaking ice
and broken people
body temp dropping
85.9
stripped down to cellular
i can feel myself slowing
eyes bloom yellow
clinical death

Spreading ***** on toast in the morning,
and too cold coffee in a cracked cup.
I brush my hair back and my eyes go with it,
leaving empty sockets where my soul used to be.
The morning newspaper speaks to me,
Every word is your obituary.
It turns to dark yellow dust in my hands.
Our apartment is my asylum.
It's a house of mirrors, sewn from your old skin.
When I touch the walls, they sting like stovetops.
Your burnt remains season my dinner;
Iced tea sweetened with your ashes.
I hear a hole in my stomach whispering,
I tried to swallow grief but instead it swallowed me.

My body is a bee hive
and my brain is the queen,
fertile and made fat from
the little bugs inside of her.
My ears are stuffed
with soft cotton *****,
and my skin is made with
the flesh from an apple.
And I am pure like the moon,
homesick for the pinkness
that lives inside you.
I am ripe and flowering.
As I rot, you swallow my remains.

I climb up onto the roof of your car,
take off my shirt, and howl at the moon.
And you look at me with those weird eyes.
I pawned all my stuff for those pretty flowers
that bloom inside me when youre around.
And that sticky spot on the bedspread,
that I lap up like sour milk.
And I will make you pure like me,
eat the garbage from your entrails,
put your blood in dialysis bags,
And I'll put on my seal skin and crawl under you,
but you will remain a skeleton,
my salt lick lover,
and we will make our bed on the banks of the river.
We’ll lay around and get drunk
and youll laugh at all my jokes
while tiny bugs gnaw at my feet.

I died when I was nine,
pickled in cancer I floated.
You kept me on the shelf,
next to the salt and pepper,
curdled in my own tears.
My pores weep strange poisons;
flies eat away my face
because you never buried me.
Ive been watching you.
I will boil roots inside of you
and become a child again.