these bones have outgrown these thin sheets of skin.
every stretch causes a mark, a blemish.
they fear for the day they will rip,
tear their outer shell,
leaving them
vulnerable,
open,
exposed.

some things are meant to be hidden away.

I woke up to the sound of a train and it was raining. I might be dreaming.
My mom has always loved
the sound of a train and here I am in someone else’s bed thinking
about how much I love the taste of blood and the smell of sweat.
My plant has a pulse but my eyes might
be playing tricks on me, I have a way of forgetting to separate my dreams
from reality. Sometimes
I share too much of myself with people too soon. I told
him that my grandma had green eyes
and that’s where I got mine and that I’ve got nightmares that test
my patience night after night
with grotesque new realities on display before my eyes
and that my nails are stained from pomegranate and that
I got straight As and I told him to bite me because
I like it
but I shouldn’t have said it all so soon.
When I’m hurtling home in my metal death trap
powered by explosions I take pictures of the sky to show myself that
I’m alive and beauty is only here now and a deer
could leap or someone could swerve and ****
me or the airbag could rip off my jaw and I’ll
spend my life bearing my ******* way that I didn’t intend. I’m the writer
with no jaw that everyone reads out of pity and to get a glance
in the windows of a ******’s life.
When I wake up my jaw is still there
but I’ve been clenching it again.
No adderall, no *******, no caffeine, just the pressure
I put on myself and the weight of life knotting up the muscles in my back
until my ribs start to tighten and constrict my breathing so I pull at the ribbons
laced up and down my sternum
but it is too late and the bone corset pulls me in,
pulling pulling pulling until
my organs burst out of my skin.
He tells me,
“You’re hard to read, you know.” I giggle
but I find it tough to explain the rich cascade of emotions that are tied
to the lunar tides and make me crave coffee at midnight in terms
that don’t make me sound completely crazy.
Well, tonight I am eating dinner and attempting to read while the television
babbles at me from another room
about something I don’t need to hear but I hear
a cracking sound and my teeth are sharp and jagged and crumbling
as I run my tongue across them. I wake up sweating.
When it was sunny I bought socks from the little girl section and I drenched myself in perfume. Later on we were drinking chai tea
and getting *****, so I **** on your fingers
while you choke me and in the morning you make pancakes
and I eat it
but I’m afraid of the flour and the substance because it rises up
under my skin and collects in unwanted pools on my body.
I shouldn’t have drank any beer but
I had three
and I spilled my secrets the second I felt the warmth of trust.
God ******* ****.
I drive in silence.
The poster’s eyes have been following me
all night and I don’t know if it is a matter of perspective
or some delusion convincing me that I’m not alone
word vomiting on notebooks and textbooks and gushing
piles of words onto my comforter. I pictured
growing a human being inside of me and my heart
started trying to run from my chest
I scared myself into an anxiety attack
picturing years flashing before me. Before I told him
that I’m not like most girls
he kissed my forearms
and then he kissed my neck. Maybe I’m crazy for believing in astrology but
last night I was hearing your moans
as roars like the lion you are purring, nuzzling me
until you fell asleep and I remembered
being five and wishing I was Belle, marrying the beast. I don’t know.
I don’t know if I’m crazy.
I kept losing my earring in your bed like I secretly wanted to leave something more tangible than my scent or stray blonde hairs for
you to find and remember me by. I think you like me too much and I’m
afraid of what you’ll find when you get in my mind and see the battlefield
that rages inside of a pretty head.
I used to see the world with the eyes of a child but today I feel like I’m senile and looking at the world from the future and dissecting the past
because I lost track of time again and no one knew where I was for seven hours. I might have been wandering but I think I was asking
a fruit fly for directions when she flew into my pupil and laid eggs on my optic nerve causing the light to fraction
and my thoughts to be projected onto the wall ahead.
People passing by could see it all streaming out of me,
every emotion, every desire, every fear and every image,
even the smoking **** on the cement
from when he left got stuck on my screen
and the dream I had the night before
about a man with gigantic hands
and a woman shielded her eyes
as I thought about the way you use your tongue on me. When I finally
stumbled home the projection had stopped
but the maggots had started and I stared at the mirror
and branded myself with the word ugly.
The pill is folded in the dollar and I whack it with a lighter,
the white shards scatter out and I lay the bill flat and crush crush crush
until the powder is free of chunks. One two three
making ten perfect lines, five on each side and my nostrils are on fire.
I **** smoke from a pipe and get so high that my entire face feels like melting
off and I’m so determined to sleep that I can’t
and I anticipate
gritty dreams but I never drift off.
Three glasses of white wine later I drive to his house and I can hear the train hitting the breaks while we throw empty beer bottles at the moving cars
from the roof of a crooked house. And then, the willow tree
draped over the train tracks
grabs the wind with her branches and she summons
sheets of rain that come blasting down.
I’m afraid of heights and I’m not sure why but I think falling
from the apple tree at age thirteen was the first time I realized that
bones break and they never heal the same way and my hands are shaking but

I stay on the wet roof with you and I let myself melt into this
momentary reality.

if pretending
that i dont love you
is the only way
to stay close to you,
i swear i will do it
a million times over

Last November I said Time Is Dumb
and you said it sounded poetic and
remembering this made me sick to my stomach
because last November you didn’t wear a watch,
the tick of a clock didn’t sound like a dripping faucet
and each turn of a calendar wasn’t an alarm without a snooze.

We had all of us in front of us for the taking
but we threw ourselves into the wind
which took you to warm arms and me to cool kitchen and bathroom floors
and this started the clocks, which haven’t stopped.

I used to count back to everyday in our demise
and when you asked if I still count I said of course
but a second after I realized I don’t
because it doesn’t matter how many days are behind us
or how many are in front of us
because velocity measures distance over time,
it measures the rate at which an object changes it’s position
and as the seasons have  changed so have we.

We meet in spring and fell in fall,
went on wandering winter walks as snow lightly fell,
in spring we sprung our clocks ahead to meet our end
summer was sliced in separation and sadness,
fall was truth and clocks so fast they broke
winter will be wagering within ourselves
I don’t know what spring will bring besides swimming in distance
and in thoughts of what to do with our time.

There are all these clichés about love and timing
but what if you were not suppose to be
my first love, we both had lessons to learn
you needed to flesh out that surface love and
I needed to rebuild walls before inviting you in.

Times isn’t dumb, we are foolish for letting it control us
but we may have learned this a year too late
for we’ve had our distance and we’ve had our time
and they’ve canceled each other out to create now
and it may be all we have.

You can tell a lot about a person
by the way they leave you
so let me tell you about all
the ways in which he left me.

He left me in my room
he left me on Friday nights
he left me by the lake
he left me in April and again in December
he left me on the sidewalk
he left me in texts
he left me in a different time zone
he left me in thoughts unsaid
he left me for the summer and for his hometown
he left me for her, twice
he left me on the kitchen floor
he left me in ticking clocks and calendar dates

He collected leaving like it lead to a high horse
because if you’re doing the leaving
you can’t be the one that’s left and
it taught me how not to leave people
and not to let people back after they’ve
left because they will do it again.

I lived in waiting for him because it was better
than wondering when or
how he’d leave me again
Is this the last time?

He left me outside
of myself and forced
me to reach in and find
all that's left.

He repeated the words
"No one will ever love you"
so many times
that I started to believe him,

and I'm in need of constant
reassurance that I'm safe
because everything he did
plays on repeat in my head,
and I feel as if
I never really escaped it at all.

I got so used to
holding my breath in his presence,
I don't think he noticed me
fading away.

-k.w//Fading

what if we could write on the stars
the way we write with paper and pen?
in that case,
i would be writing love letters every night
for a pretty soul too far away.
i'd point my finger at the sky
and trace it delicately,
then you would go outside at night
the evening breeze would whisper "look up!"
and the constellations would tell of the love
an admirer sends to you by cosmic delivery
across distances of time and reality,
from a world much different from yours.

With every dawn that rises
I find myself
suspended in normality,
scrambling to scavenge some sort
of beauty in the bleakness.

My own past, passes me by.
those who were once called lovers
all love another,
(someone who had always been
desperate to reach the foreground)

So many times have I wished
that I could split myself-
send each piece sailing into the sky
and see which road leads me to destiny.

But- I am whole.
with this, I must decide upon a single path-
accept normalitys cold, clammy palms
gripping my thighs, holding my waist.

The only reason we feel
a way towards something
is because we've been trained to.
it is valid for flowers to be putrid,
and hell to be heavenly,
if we so wish it to be.
the most twisted of things in your mind,
lie in my own morning routine.

You've never met a wanderer like me.

Countless pathways and I remain
barefoot and bleeding along the same trail,
knowing **** well it will **** me;
glass hidden between pebbles,
ghosts kissing my heels,
my own self, blind to the foreground.