i can still feel his hands around my neck.
the fingers like words and “i don’t love you” and it stings although he wasn’t the first to say it, i can’t breathe.
she haunts our hallways, our floorboards are cracking
beneath our feet, our home is crumbling
between our fingertips and
i can feel her weight on my chest. sometimes
i think that she should just go by the way that her footsteps echo after she’s gone. i remember
a wall full of holes from where his fists
kissed ever so gently.
i think that wall is what my heart might look like but lately
i’ve had trouble finding my pulse.
i can still feel his hands around my neck.
does he know
why i can’t look him in the eye? does he
know
the blue makes me feel like I’ve swallowed too much water, does he know i can’t breathe?
i think I’m still trying to understand why
beautiful things die in my fingertips and why he stomps on every rooting bulb my wilting body tries to plant, why he ripped my roots from beneath my feet and why my hair started to fall out why
he put his hands on my throat and how i still feel them there.
has he figured it out?
does he know that lemon scented bleach would taste better than
her on his lips and the *******
they splatter?
i can still feel his hands around my neck.
i was born into light, into pain, into love and
he wasn’t the first man to leave a mark on my body and i feel like he is the works with the universe to watch me fall
things fall and shatter without you touching them, things break while you’re sleeping and
everything about him and her stings like saltwater and everything about me
bends for him like light.
i can still feel his hands around my ******* neck.
he crashed into her hips like his hands to my bones, like fists to walls, the walls
rattled, my ribcage
rattled, he was
rattled and i can still feel his hands around my neck,
pushing, like me trying to ******* make this work.
what is this?
his hands are like ghosts around my throat,
the memory of her wrapped around his body instead of me
wrapping, holding in place
icanstillfeelhisfuckinghandsaroundmyfuckingneck
i am not stupid you know.
i can only see that he moves like these words write themselves, and he
speaks like music bleeding through a closed window,
i swear, i am still cracked
though i still have tattoos left from the tips of his fingers from those heavy-handed nights,
i swear, they didn’t even sting.

you should’ve never unpacked your bags,
because it gave me this expectation that you were in this for the long run. i’m still running. i have swallowed so much blood that tastes like your regret from biting down my tongue to cage it behind my teeth from screaming about you to a world that wants my blood for ink.
i am more than a number, but 24 makes me feel better than 26, so i sit in jeans that leave red marks on my hips and make it hard to breathe, but see it’s two inches and
i am more than a number, but i know every test score i ever got and still remember fourth grade and question three and crying because suddenly my mistakes had weight and i couldn’t fix things by saying sorry and
i am more than a number, but i was always the middle child, always the not-quite one, not the best friend to anyone, just a girl with kind eyes and jeans that are a little bit too tight and
i am more than a number but to you i am seventeen, ten and three. and lets be clear; it’s the three that haunts me, because *** doesn’t matter and ‘girlfriend’ is just a label, but i wish i was the first girl you truly loved, and sometimes i still wish i was the last, but with you i fear i’ll forever be just another number.
i drove over 17 bridges the other day and next week i'll do it again and i think nobody gets what that means except maybe you.
i just tell them i love the scenery, that somebody must've made these trees blush just for me.
you know how i love to change the subject?
i bet they'd love the view. i bet you would too.
and all these metaphors for other things are beside the point.
this is a metaphor for why i don't wear my seatbelt, a metaphor for why whiskey knows me better than you could ever try to.
all the buildings seemed to sag yesterday and all the stars are doing that cliche thing where they talk quiet jet noise and some lumbering giant made everything shake.
not those hand metaphors, not another one of those & keep the sea to yourself,
i think it was a train, it's sound hugged the embankment for a moment and then trailed off into nowhere,
and that's kind of like me
how there's a town called 'rescue' close to my home and it's no coincidence that i've never been there.
i’m just flatlining now and hoping that you can look at the next girl the way i looked at you.

it should be noted that girls don't always come from venus, that some boys might be a little deader than they were before they claimed you took their breath away.
some girls have barbed wire around their hearts, and others have white flags. some boys have touched more cigarettes than thighs, more blades in the bathroom sink than the ones in her shoulders. the city might whisper the name of one boy and tremble at the thought of another; a girl might  have a hit list with only one name on it — her own. some boys will **** just to say they lost their virginity and some boys will spend the rest of their lives making love as though they could gain it back; some girls have lost their tears and sweat in the upholstery of the same car that might belong to one of these boys — and some of those same boys are sweaty handprints on the backseat windows while others are fingerprints on your throat, but no matter how you look at it, he will always leave his mark, won't he?
it should be noted that some girls will miss you like hiroshima playgrounds miss the laughter of young children, but others will miss you like an 11:30 flight at 11:31, and i bet you never knew that some boys will never tell you that they miss their father just as much as some girls calling everyone else 'daddy' except for the one they truly need; you'd never believe me if i said that some girls look at the night sky where they used to see their reelection in the stars, but now only see another broken mirror.
it should be noted, that not all boys are from mars.

Sometimes the words I love you swarm like hornets behind my teeth, a phrase so heavy it only has eight letters just like I lost you.
Sometimes in the pause you take before you speak, I wonder if you’re fighting to keep down the same things as I am; trying to swallow a confession that seems less like a secret and more like stating the obvious.
We were funny, we were bad at holding hands, I hated when a car goes over the tracks, you had this way of making silence the loudest sound in the room when it hit the floor.
I made a home out of your hands just like how many beautiful things go without reciprocation.
We seem to have found fault in being whole, somewhere alone the way, we’ve started enjoying breaking things;
Like my ribs when you’re gone and I want to know if you can tell the difference between the absence of my voice and silence.
You are the only thing I’ve ever let go that makes my hands ache.
I’m still trying to piece together what made you lose your faith in me, was it how everything starts with gritting teeth and everything ends with you walking away? I should’ve known, the way you used to hold my back like you were checking it for exit wounds.
It took me 2 car wrecks and 6 shattered mirrors for me to realize that the world has so much more to say when it is silent;
if I didn’t bruise so easily, if I wasn’t looking for a way to be made of a river, if I needed the silence to mean something, then I would ask you to build me out of quiet revenge and goodbyes that stick in your sides like tree branches, I would need you to build me out of reasons to believe instead of reasons to be afraid, I would turn my kneecaps into strawberries in exchange for potter’s hands so I could mild you a bulletproof spirit.
It was silence and your lighter, I was cold, you were drinking; that was our backbone.
You were alone, I was going too fast because sometimes you don’t have to be in the wrong place to be looking for the wrong thing.
I am afraid and you are warm; this is the beginning of a forest fire filled with broken glass shattering in broken homes with broken people inside on a broken piece of land in a city that has too much rain for someone to build an emergency room in.
I spend nights up until my body can’t handle itself any longer,
mornings have come like a hammer to my head-
instead of my face, all I can see in the mirror is an unfamiliar expression,
something like a dead battery.
All I ever wanted was for you to be my fire, I am tired of these old lives and would like to see them burn.

i can move furniture around as much as i’d like, and you will still bounce off the cushions;
you’re down the hall, i’m waiting for you to come home, you’re in the holes from thumb tacks, you’re calling my name from the other room
do you still feel the weight of the wall/door/body on your knuckles? does it still sting from contact?
you’re in every song, you’re the space between here and there, your fingerprints on DVD's, your mark on my bedroom door.
how is it that i am stuck holding your rearview mirror in all of this rubble, how you went from always watching your back to checking mine for exit wounds to becoming one?
months later, and you’re in bills and documents, your shorts in the old closet, your tie from prom under the dresser
your ocean eyes cracked into old photographs ripped from frames, your chicken-scratch left handed writing across paper in green marker, i should’ve read the signs.
how is it that somebody can take every bit of you with them, but leave pieces behind so you can remember the crash?
even the stars spelt out your name, the moon held us together, i handed you all of me on a silver platter and you spat it back in my face
remember when the world felt so small, so effortless, when love was always returned? I didn’t know what I was getting myself into that day in March, I didn’t know how it would feel to rest my head on my pillow, swallowing back tears. somedays I wish I had been less reckless, but most days I think about the way your tongue wandered my mouth and I remember that love isn’t meant to be held carefully.
why is it that i cannot get your ghost out of these walls, why is it that i cannot get your voice out of my head, everything moves in clockwork, if only these clocks worked.
maybe things would be different, maybe everything wouldn’t feel like deja vu, maybe i wouldn’t be checking my back for you to re-enter,
im gaping.
you made me feel like something more than a few broken plates and then you broke one over my spine and the world shifted on it’s side, what happened to us, baby?
your hands suddenly on my throat over you ******* another girl behind my back, i caught you but you snatched my breath right from my body
and i was blue like your eyes and i forgave you
and here i am, clinging onto pain because that’s all that’s left of you
when will you stop poisoning my thoughts? when will i be at peace?
you prey on the weak, but i am not a weak thing. it takes the strongest kind of person to hold another up when they’re already falling, my hands never shook when being your brace, maybe you just needed something to reduce the swelling of your mundane childhood, maybe it was the absence of your father and the anger you had built up for him, maybe you could contort my face into the one of your father, i can tell you now that painting my skin black and blue gave him no consequence for his leaving.
you cannot hurt me anymore. i no longer fear you. you cannot hurt me anymore. i no longer fear you.