I am bad at flirting…like…really bad
and
I **** at being subtle.
Your blog is quality and so is mine (on good days, anyways).
I may not be that pretty, but I am a good person.
                                        I won’t ******* over.
And I will make you tea at 2 a.m. and not judge your tastes in music
(out loud).
We can watch Spirited Away or Howl’s Moving Castle or Nausica
and tumble and have *** and wear **** shades.
I will make you breakfast and vegetarian dishes
on Meatless Monday.
We can read Bukowski on swing sets, smoke cigarettes, and drink whiskey, stumble behind bushes and kiss until my lips hurt.
We can have coffee in some place in Asheville and sit really close together and make fun of black-keys hipsters
(even though I really like the Black Keys).
You will probably have to listen to lots of Hole and Rising Appalachia
and read my poetry, but I will always
read your work when you hand it to me.
And probably buy you nice things.
Like a flask with some quote you like on it. Or your favorite pack of cigs with something cute like, ‘let’s have *** in that bathroom’
written on it.
Or a nice sweater because…sweaters are nice and my blow jobs are of legend.
I may not know you that well, but I’d like to.
And I think you would like to get to know me
because I’m pretty rad.
And I look nice in green and dark navy blue,
and my hair looks pretty in the sunlight.  
I’m saying all this because I’m lonely and people with good tastes in music are rare.

eating disorders are so hard to

                  Kick

because your eating disorder becomes your

closest most

                     honest

most

             Vicious

friend.

your eating disorder will never abandon you.

it will never ignore you it will never

leave

        you

                                      ­    ALONE

at the End of the day, it’s just you and her.

and I say {HER} because mine is a real *****.

your eating disorder is always there to

                     whisper-scream

in your

         ear.

always

there to swim in your aching(empty)(toofull)

                    stomach

to claw at your skull to

break your heart.

she, my vicious friend, comforts me.

because even though I’m being

               destroyed

               ripped apart

at least I’m not alone.

hell, she even gives me an excuse as to WHY

I am

                         alone

itsnotmeitsmyweightnoonecouldeverwantafatgirl

itsnotmeits­myweightthatkeepspeoplefromgettingclosefromLOVINGme

She knows me better than anyone— knows how b

                                                              ­  r

                                                            ­       o

                                                              ­ k

                                                              ­        e

                                                      ­            n

i am.

as much as I ‘recover’

she is there— curled under my brain matter

like a troll in a fairy tale.

she is there

waiting

watching

counting

smiling

because i always come

back.

i wish with all my heart that

you will never know the word
                                                    fat

that you will never know the sting of insecurity like sunburn on your skin
that you will never feel the need to be anymore than you already
are
because you will be as brilliant as all of the constellations spun into one

i
wish with all my heart that
you will never meet the same boys your mother did

that you will never feel the hot-sloshing cocktail of heartbreak, guilt, and *****
in your stomach.
that
you will never know the stain of a broken society
or the fear of a failing planet

that you will never feel the same bitter hate that your mother does
and that instead of fire you will breathe
peace, but your words will scorch those who dare hurt you
because your mother is too full of fire for you to be completely free of it.

i love asheville.

I danced my *** off at the Highland Brewing Company to a live band, smoked good bud before hitting Rosettas, wandered downtown, walked through a sketchy alley way.

I’ve met the coolest of people
{and some of the not so coolest}

but the good far outweigh the bad here.

this city has swallowed me whole

rolled me around on its tongue

and i covered me with its shimmering saliva— because everyone in aville sparkles, y’all
and i marvel at the inside of its beautiful mouth

there is power in these mountains
and good mojo in the air

we just need better water.

Reasons why I am going to Europe:

I am going to Europe because I am nineteen— almost twenty— years old and, for some reason, I am expected to have my entire life planned and ready to go. I am expected to go to college, get a degree which will give me above-minimum wage pay, possibly meet a boy. Date this boy on and off (as well as a few others) during my early twenties, get drunk a few times, maybe do some drugs, marry someone when I turn twenty six. Have two kids. Pay my mortgage, plan to travel when I am older. Pay my student loans. Do yoga on the weekends.

No thank-you.

I am nineteen— almost twenty— years old, and for some reason, I have no idea what I want to do with myself. I went to college for a major in English with a teaching license— I hated it. I tried to **** myself three times. So here, I am, working at Food Lion, running around the woods, drinking Gin and blood orange juice on a Monday night, with no plan. And I am happy. I am going to Europe because what else would I be doing with myself? I am going to Europe because I want to wake up in a hostel with someone else’s shirt on, the smell of salt on my skin, and the taste of wine in my mouth

. I am going to Europe because I don’t want my greatest thrill in life to be going to Whole Foods one Saturday of the month to buy nice wine and a quality meat only to watch the travel channel and hope for places I will go to ‘someday’. I am going to Europe because why can’t ‘someday’ be today?


I am going to Europe because I may get lost in a market place, in a bottle of Absinthe, in the arms of an Italian man, in the bottom of a bottle of sweet Moscato, in a pub in Ireland, in the mouth of a french girl, in a German forest, and that will be alright. I am going to Europe because my feet itch, and my soul is thirsty. I am going to Europe because sometimes it feels like the world is only as big as your home-town, and that is only an illusion that needs to be cured.

some nights the nastier bits of myself crawl up from my throat and sit on my tongue & whiskey isn't strong enough to wash them down

& in these moments
after sitting in a dripping wet and muggy forest
the world seems okay.
my decisions seem right
and all my hopes are in bloom.

i am really tiered of being lonely
and from being seconds away from
being thrilled with life
and wanting to shoot myself in the face
because everything seems to crash down
on my head
when my ears
wont pop

theloraxformula




i am getting to the point of my day
when
waking
up
is like making my way through a battlefield
where Valkyries live in my stomach
when I lay on my back and count my ribs
(what I can feel of them)
and stand only to find my head hurting…again
and I am realizing that your love
isn’t
worth
this.

but this isn’t really about you, is it?
it’s about power
and control
like feeling like a god of titans on a
volcano about to erupt
feeling like pele burning through bones & calories
and feeling some sense
of pretty while
starving myself to death.

but your love
isn’t worth
that
it isn’t worth counting calories in my sleep
playing mad mathematician with meals
weeks in advance
knowing the caloric value of everything in my university’s cafeteria
by heart
and feeling like
passing out when I try to tie the
laces of my doc martins.

your love isn’t worth that
and neither is the hate I have for myself

& i can fix

a million things
[and your heart is one of them]

i can make you tea
make you breakfast
brush your hair
kiss your forehead
& tell you it’s all going to be

o

k

i can wrap my arms and legs around you
and crush you with empathy
let my tears drip down your forehead like anointing oil
or holy water
i can baptize you in a hundred things, i can burn you and
create anew from the ashes in my arms

i can let you fill my bones with your tears
my heart with your heartbreaks
my lungs with your sobs
my insides with your hurt

i can make you a thousand salves
and a hundred tinctures to keep you from hurting
but i can’t fix myself.

if the curves of my stomach offend
you
i suggest you get the
*******
   of
me
but when this rage comes you speak
so
sof
      t
ly
and wonder why i look at you
like you burned
me but
you don't understand how predecessors of your gender have treated me.
kind words have never been spoken to me
soberly or
without weight behind them
like bartering in a dark corner bed while everyone else sleeps
where i stop being a woman, an entity, and become an unfeeling orifice whose name has suddenly become
                                          baby
because a few kinds words were mumbled against the shell
of my ear
you don't understand
how hands have grabbed me in the dark
and how my own hands have grabbed
only out of desperation
to feel something
you don't understand how hard it is for you to touch me and
for me not to feel lightening hot repulsion
as i lay drunk, ready to sleep.
you don't understand how when people touch my hair
all i can feel are hands curling against my scalp
and the way cold-shaking hands curled around my dress
and the way fear has been etched into the lines of my brain like a map of the city i know so well
like that alley i can't walk down alone at night
or that part of lexington where men shout at me hungrily
or the way stranger's hands sometimes 'slip'
you will never understand the weight of my insecurity because no amount of sweetness you can pour onto me can replace the venom fed to me by the men before you
no matter how 'enough' i may be with you
you will never understand how 'enough' isn't tangible
how beautiful doesn't really feel like a compliment
and how much
i doubt you actually love me

if ever the salt in your soul
becomes too much
so grainy that it
fills your veins
and stills your happiness
if it becomes so heavy that it fills your combat
boots like the desert sands
you will fight on
and piles onto the floor when you open your
mouth
if it becomes so brackish
that gin and whiskey will
not drown out  the voices
of the demons in your stomach
i will take your salt and
toss it in the four directions
of the earth
i will give it back the dirt
i will place it on the wings of crows and ravens
to deliver it to the laughing sky
to the sea which craves it
to the cleansing fire
i will give it to all these
and place some of
it in my own heart
under my own tongue
and in my own soul

i drink whiskey because
after so many
shots
something like a dragon wakes up in my stomach
and crawls out my throat with the exhalation of cigarette smoke
i drink whiskey because the dark brown
mingles with the fire in my veins
and the wild south of my soul is reawakened
a part of my soul that lingers in the bricks of marie laveu's and between alleyways in the french quarter
stirs up like a ghostly collection of downy feathers
and the fear that is carved into my ribcage seeps out
i drink whiskey because the salt of my fingers plays
with the back of my throat
coaxing all this fear out, chased with mason jars of water
i drink whiskey because it makes me feel ugly and fierce
i drink whiskey because it makes it easier for me to burn bridges and sever ties
i drink whiskey because it makes being used by men with pretty faces and holes in their dead chests easier to swallow the next day
i drink whiskey because it makes me rowdy and alive
i drink whiskey because snarling rage needs to be let out sometimes
i drink whiskey because it sobers up my headi drink it because it helps me forget that i didn’t say no
i drink it because it makes me angry about what you did
i drink it because i remember the way your hand pushed mine down and the way your hand curled into a fist in my hair and yanked at the top of my dress
i drink it because i didn’t tell you no

he snaps his barbed jaws made of thin sticks— you know
the kind that
SNAP and CRACK ominously underfoot when the woods have grown too
quiet, too calm, for all to be well
teeth gnashing— this the sound of dead leaves skittering against pavement and river rocks at dusk (that time when you need to settle down and get a fire started, but you’re not quite sure of where you are)
              homeless
wandering the woods in search for something he will never find
hysterical, eternally lost his

eyes

are the dim, barely there glow of camp fires that go out too early
fingers the cold that creeps around the base of your sleeping bag and along your neck
cheek bones the sun-bleached sides of mountains
his voice is the unrecognizable call from some animal you cannot identify in the depths of the woods, but not so deep that you cannot imagine it coming towards you. not so deep that the sound doesn’t make your hair stand on end.

his feet are bound with the ghost skins of snakes that lurk under rocks, darting out only when you have one foot precariously balanced on its side.

he travels — howling and yowling like some hell cat out of deep
mountain lore— starved, half crazed, ravenous
fever hot and parched
his mouth a voracious, vacuous, vorpal cave
that leads down into his river stomach— that part of the river you thought was deep, but revealed its true nature with the electric sting of broken legs after jumping.
his howl is the pounding of the wind at your tent
angry hands running broken glass claws against your skin as you walk against it.

he is jealous of those who wonder the wood for he has no true home.
his ribs the skeletons of eerie, too thick mountain laurel trees and the hollow shells of long fallen oaks.
the light of the moon burns his moth-wing skin on nights when the forest is full of her radiance. so he yowls, furious and powerless
rattling and shaking his bones — the dead arms of trees that stretch out over too steep mountains, acid burnt and raw

his name could have been pestilence to the christians
but only the Natives know his name and only whisper it lowly
and on nights when the wind is calm and he cannot hear their summons—
Windigo.

his only purpose is that he has none.
his motivation is endless hunger
that is older than the mountain itself-
or maybe it was born with the mountain…
he in his rabid madness has long forgotten the origin of his emptiness.
he is hungry, and you are in his wood.

I can imagine

myself as a midwife or a medicine woman—
waking early
               wandering
the wooddesertmountain
with bad-*** boots & a patchy coat, pockets filled with rosemary and crystals
driving an old truck that smells of rolled cigarettes and gasoline
drinking hot tea out of a mason jar.

i see all of this & I wonder where this image will land me.
   Portland in the fall?
Nevada in the Winter?
                              Colorado? Montana?
But I need the trees.
My power is in the mountains.
Or maybe it is in the moon—and her face isn’t bound to the side of the mountain

i need the howl of coyotes, the smell of pine, the sound of running water over rocks, cold air, wind.
i crave this to the center of my
bones.

i want to dance with fire women, sing air songs, pray to the earth, bathe in the water, and
speak with the
spirit mother & the red father that binds all of these together in a chaotic harmony i will never understand.

i need to paint my body with the stain of poke berry and

run, foot against stone, against decaying leaves.

there is a savage within me
that needs to run free

that needs to bark at the moon and breathe clean air.

i'm
spitting blood into the sink
because I brushed my teeth six times
in an hour
today
what must that be like?

to dream without drowning
beneath black water
snakes turning themselves inside out
without ghost haunted sheets of the past
hanging over me like witches feet and nooses
so i’ll dream about black water and snakes
and creatures with holes in their chests as large as oaks
and maybe  i’ll wake up different

i’m searching the backs
of subarus for your stickers.
feeling sick in the soul
but this can’t be exorcised
or driven out with iron
prayer
and holly stakes.

dried scale snakes
twist in my stomach tearing the
lining to bits while i swallow down
more blood. brush
rip gums and smile
a hyena grin
as it comes over cigarette yellowed porcelain
and shiver.

i've been a woman for nineteen and a few months years
and i've never looked at waitstaff
and asked
can i get that with a side of guilt?
but i should have
because it feels like that's what i
am ordering
instead of fries because
all the salt in the world
can't cover up the taste of guilt and self loathing i feel for eating sometimes
this is for all of the ladies i know who look at cookies
longingly, but tell themselves no
only to eat an entire box of them later
and cry
and most women will never admit to it
but i've been there
and cookies don't taste so good when
you're tossing them up
and this is for the ladies i have watched in the grocery store
eyeballing the candy bars like they are men in dark
allies or
snakes in the grass
because the magazines sitting right beside
them are watching you watching that candy bar watching you watching your weight watching those inches around your waist watching you
and telling you that you aren't good enough
a moment on the lips forever on
the- hold that ******* thought
because my lips and hips have two things in common-- they are big
and they want all this
******* to stop
every time a woman prattles off how many calories are in a drink
i can't help but correct her in my mind because
i know for a fact that there are five more calories in that than she told me
because i've been counting calories and playing games with my stomach since
second grade.
i may be **** at algebra, but i know intake out-take math like
i know the smell of my grandma's cigarettes.
eating meals with other women
is unbearable because i am tiered
of having to eat entire cinnamon buns
to myself because
my friends wont split them with me
and i'm tiered of watching women
talk about eating too much but
wanting to get
back
on
it
tomorrow like
feeding themselves is a crime
and so the next time i go to
cookout for a blueberry shake
i'll ask you to leave out the guilt
because it fills my throat up
like sand and my teeth
are brittle and tired from being
bared and ground
while i
battle with myself
over the baked goods at
a coffee shop
wondering if
i feel like hating myself
today

& the world

will keep turning

even if you and I are dead to the world

           too tweaked to sleep

            too drunk to be awake

              too hateful to be together

we will sleep

                  and love untill we are we again

& the world will

keep

turning.

greetingsalutations

                          goodmorning

                                            *******.

want a bump?

                   nah, I’ve had enough of your ****.

*******.

              yeah, ******* too.

-insertsmug-teethknockedout-filthyfuckingsleaze-grin-here-
­
sounds like a beautiful day.

Sometimes you have to understand
that the people you feel you need most, don’t need you.
These people you give everything to will not love you in return, no matter how much you try. They will not love you more for the poem you found that reminded you of them, the scarf you gave them because it matched their eyes, the time you drove at three a.m. in the rain to hug them goodbye for a trip, the time you rubbed herbal salve on a black eye, or the way you can describe their laugh in a hundred different metaphors.
Your efforts will be wasted and your body will be aching for that moment that they smile— that moment where you feel like you are worth something.
But you are worth more than those tiny smiles of gratitude and the fluttering in your stomach you get when they think something you said is funny.
You do not need to wrap their feet in your hair for a moment of appreciation.
Running your body ragged for someone who only speaks to you in times of convenience, only praises the love of another, or leaves you without a goodbye is not okay.
Their love will not fix the sadness in your heart, and their attention will not make your heart less heavy. Sometimes you have to let people go before they burn the happiness out of your body because constantly wondering why you are not enough for their attention is no way to spend the rest of your life. Sometimes you have to understand that they will never love you and that you will survive without them

this must be how a tiger feels
declawed
staring through the glass of a cage
at children
pointing
and mothers
scolding
and lovers walking
handinhand
do they revel in their sadness
because i imagine
they sleep all day
for the same reasons that i do
because staring at people watching you
bask in your own misery is
tiring.
but i am not a tiger.
i am a sad sad girl
addicted to misery
eating her yogurt
imagining herself a predator
while wanting a doughnut