Counting calories, telling lies
She'll keep this up until she dies.
Empty eyes, empty stomach, empty heart, empty mind;
What I've become is enough to drive myself mad
Empty, empty, empty. I'm nothing but sad.
So here it is girls, the rumors were true
I try so hard to be as skinny as you.
A monster, A *******, empty, empty girl;
I'm killing myself with my poor mental health.
Starving for beauty, beauty is pain
My head hurts so bad, I'm going insane.
Clutching my ribs, my thighs caving in
They were right--
Anorexia wins.

TRIGGER WARNING


I lay awake at night, reflecting on the way your lips feel on mine,
but like a reflex I compare them to the many pairs I’ve felt in many places, how some lingered over my goosebumps, maybe to try and turn that feelinginto lyrics, I don’t know, while others bruised and pushed, too starved of faded
love pangs that the only pleasure was to fill *something—
But one pair tugged and burned across the delicate paleness of parts not meant for him, stinging red from fingers that squeezed with fight and pulled with rage and scratched with a greed that blocked any thread of humanity from a woman’s fear.
His arms created no protective cage around me because he never desired to have me but to hold and pry my legs to take a barely blossomed womanhood waiting for that boy on that bed listening to that song
but teeth bit into my flesh offering no promise of soft, loving nips meant to excite the blood that should have flowed sweetly through my heart instead of pumping so hard it drowned
out my broken no’s as they quieted and died.
I noticed how his lungs labored with power as he finally burdened me,
shamed me with his need, but I realized later even if his eyes had locked with mine, nothing of his liveliness, nothing of his friendship would have lingered there. Going home, the jeep clanked and wheezed, sounding as used as my folds felt—but then he told me,
“I gotta fix that”
The dark corner of my mind rasped that he didn’t mean the tears of my skin or the abandoned pieces of my trust, never to be molded together again, not even by you.

We leave the biting winter winds to bully
the landscape, the cracked leaves
and stark trees are pushed and shoved,
but we lay in our too-small bed huddled
not for physical warmth, but to welcome
heat from another because at times this union
rises above the praise we offer to the summer sun.

My mind, racing at all the future events that wait
for me, anticipating questions I’ve never known
to ask, conjures flowery images, the two lovers
separated by the whim of the gods, yet
conjoined from an inexplicable desire even
in the dark which sprung from fear and cursed
them into a blind-love.

As I form to your body, I realize,
that as your lips gently find mine over
and over again while you dream of things
I only wish to know, love does not demand
irrefutable brilliance.

I wake up and feel death
in the room, sitting and waiting--
the day-owl that hoots
when the sun blazes to every corner
of my mind, taking away
my senses so that time passes,
circling back around itself, as the cold
serpent taking over my body
and saving my head for last.

Beast nature bellows a fit
out of me, my cold hands throwing
objects in reach and the screaming
pierces through my heated brain
with smooth, sharp talons

until I wake up with a face
over me. Not an angel, but not
a demon because the eyes
have goodness spinning in them--
like a light swaying over above,
telling me to follow it. I do,
across cold plains where dark things
curl up and hide against their own hell,
for evil has fear of itself.

Across smooth ground that lets me fly
until I am at rest with a slow heart
that thumps too hard for every
conviction it cannot say to those
that swirled inside.

Alone, I sit with my feet
propped in front of the flames.
Heat pushes along the curve of my instep.
Bug spray coats my legs and arms, stickier
than sweat, which flows like raindrops down the back
of my neck, pools in the valley between my *******.
Even the air feels too warm in my lungs.

Games and night walks do not appeal
to me as I sit in stifling confinement without
a cool breeze to whisper relief.  Suffering the fire pit’s front
row seat wins over stretching my lips into insincere
smiles, watching, but absent, while
my friends talk of a life
I try to forget.

Snickers buzz up to my ears.
I lean my head back
as a whole pitcher
showers me with
arctic salvation.

From the start, I easily forgot
differences, like miles and years.
My mind played your smiles on repeat.
The countdown to our union dragged,
but looking into your sunburst
blue eyes lit me up like kindling.

Typed words transmute me—
pretty wrappings thrown away
to reveal mirrors warped
by my insecurities and a hasty
decision brought a voice that softens
into 3 AM, half-laughs when
my cheeks flush
under your warm palms.

My mind splits half and half
for ends and beginnings.
I shove the bowling pin
from our first date, given
to us with our names in grand,
black letters, to the back
of the closet, listening
to “The Show Goes On”
to weld back together.

Dear reader,


It won't be long before they electrocute the trees with candy colored Christmas lights. Soon everything will be gone: memories, glances, the year. Every thing will dissolve into nostalgia and our lives will become more patchwork and less hopeful. Soul-crushingly sweet our smiles will be, as we watch that disguised meteorite crash into our existence.

Her name was Reno. Her dad joked he named her so because she was the result of a gamble gone wrong.

I could see the stitching around her eyes start to falter, as tears slipped out like a young nineteen year-old girl, running out of the back of a double-wide. Away. Away from it all. Leaving her father, the mechanic who could only fix things with his hands. Running through a field as shimmering as her nails, touching the tall grass with her short fingers.

"I'm not trailer trash," she said, "I've just had it rough."

Reno could see things others couldn't see. Frequently she painted wrecked cars, and I asked why, to which she explained, "Some accidents are allowed to be beautiful."

I fell for her the way her jaw drops after one of my inappropriate jokes: quickly and with such joy.

She had the same answer to when I asked if she liked movies and if she missed her mom.

"Of course I do, Josh," she looked at me and smiled, "Hey buck, have you ever seen True Romance?"

A woman after my own heart.

We watched Christian Slater shoot Drexl, and, like a bullet to the chest, she placed her hand over my heart.

"My, oh my, are you sure that rib cage is big enough for that thing, Mr. Haines?"

She looked a little like Patricia Arquette, but identical to Michelle Williams.

"Are you aware that you look like Michelle Williams?"

Reno ran her hands up my legs, across my torso, and held her hands at my jaw,"Are you aware of how good of a person you are, John Mayer?"

"Ah, yeah. I've gotten that since high school."

She smiled, looked down and up at me,"No, the part about you being a good person? ...You're the drawing on my wall."

I didn't know what that meant.

"I had this drawing-so terrible-it was of the sunset on our hill in Welling Valley," she looked into me and down, while smiling,"Anyway, the sun would kiss the grass every evening, and one day I thought I'd draw it and keep it in my room. When every thing got ugly with my daddy's drinking, and when he beat me something awful, I wanted something to remind me that the light sometimes goes away but will always be back another day. You're my light, Josh. You're the next day after nineteen years of cussing and drinking."

We made love on my bed, as, through the window, the sun bathed our bodies. Her body was a sculpture and her voice was as soft as her lips. I was terrified.

Pulling her hair back, she stood at the foot of my bed, naked,"Are you scared of little ole' me? You look as white as a ghost."

"No, I've never felt so alive... You're so ******* beautiful."

Reno and I lain in bed while Parks and Rec played on the television. Her index and ******* walked across my chest and stopped as she asked, "Josh, have you ever been in love?"

I touched my fingers on hers, studying them with my eyes, and then I looked at her, "Yes, once."

"What was it like?"

I thought I'd feel pain but instead I smiled, "Fantastic, fleeting, and always a little out of reach."

She cooed, "I can't wait until I think I love you like nobody else."

"Me too."



Sincerely,


Joshua Haines