she's not an artist, the only reason you say that is she eats less than 400 calories a day, without counting. she wears scarves and gloves in the summer-time: inside. her life mission is to categorize the vowels into three levels of hell. so far, she's found purgatory inside the tiny bowl she uses for an ash tray.
once, she spray-painted the wall that she passes on her way to the collective mailbox. it reads "send me peace signs in the shape of dying swans. love, me". she types exactly two words daily, ten point arial font.
she crashes funerals by wearing the only rainbow item in her closet. it made the local news one night, but her name turned inside out in people's throats and they ate without realizing they were different.
her eyes are green.
she sleeps on her back, straw-faced and shrinking.
she faked her own death to see if anyone would notice; then posted it on youtube. three months and 603 views later, she shot herself at an anti-abortion rally. they buried her with the reams of paper reading fox hat. fox hat. fox hat. fox hat. fox hat. fox hat. fox hat. fox hat. fox hat. fox hat. fox hat. fox hat. fox hat. fox hat. fox hat. fox hat.

buying tickets, rip the stubs, hang them on the wall, scrapbook form complete with small pink hearts punched out of the children's cardboard.
gun powder paint, dripped on white mugs, heat-dried, upside down in cupboards that belonged to your grandmother, pour black coffee in the morning and sip.
t-r-i-b-u-l-a-t-i-o-n-s spelled in sign language, on the wall, across photos of sky, clouds raining, lightning flash, blind some farmer, smash some wheat, rip barns into pieces and set one half on top of 18333 sw 32 st.
salt the caramel, lick the spoon and put it in the dishwasher, contemplate the meaning of life, curse god three times because that's a lucky number, write the ****** mary's name thirty-six times across the tile backsplash, latin roots swimming through your head, you only took one year of it.
take wool yarn, knit socks for the kindergarden teacher, put out your cigarettes systematically down the arches, dye them pink, wrap the box in last year's christmas paper, drive four point seven miles to a place that would be better with blankets and closed-tight eyes.
toes say it's a long walk back, so jump the cliff and pray loudly to the seagulls.

i.
you remind me of drowning,
of bubbles floating upwards in a dream,
of a creeping pressure that threatens
to crush my hyoid bone.

you smell of suffocation.

ii.
you remind me of songs sung
on your last breath, when the
traces of air barely register
in your lungs.

there are ticket stubs flowing
from your mouth, past lives
in your eyes.

iii.
you are the sweet note in a song,
amplified until my ears scream
in an attempt to drown the noise.

broken glass and christmas lights that don't light up anymore, i hung you about with glitter and gold, called you art, kissed your face. there were tattered things on our clothes, i spit words into the gutter and they ran down the stream into the ocean where the letters got tangled with a sting-ray, a clown fishes fins. tiny fawns painted themselves across your palms, they sung me to sleep at night, wandering down my back and across my nose when i couldn't breathe because there was something knotting my veins into pretty patterns, stopping the bloodflow and shutting down my liver slowly. ric-rac danced two-steps and alcohol-drenched cakes infiltrated tea parties where lace was all the rage and ladies always wore gloves, *** was a thing never spoken about. the fifth most dangerous city in the us took me under its wing, tucked me into train station corners while paedophilia took hold of the government and shook us soundly. people held candles into the night sky when the family was killed, when the police asked if they were involved with drugs, when tiny bodies littered the basement because they were old enough to identify the killer. notebooks and traced fingerprints hung on the walls like christmas decorations before thanksgiving, pictures of you taken in secrecy, dipped in fluid that looks black in the dark room.

i knit sweaters. they have rabbits and bears and deer on the front.

i put my voice into a jar,
and mixed it with lightning for you.
your tears made the sun shine brighter.

i'm a frightened child, swinging
her fists anywhere they can land,
writing effigies across her
thighs with an inkless pen,
talking letters into the air,
addressed to a mother that
doesn't exist. i am a child,
and i want you to hold my
wrists steady, kiss my
forehead, rock me on your
lap and murmur into the space
after my face and before the
wall. i want you to wrap
me in a quilt, place another
steaming plate in my hands,
and listen to act one two
three four five six outro
final scene ending. sob
into your shoulder and unclench
my hands, i want to write you
letters.

so the editor found herself again
and decided that love never lies.
her parakeet befriended me,
but i didn't like birds.

i started out trying to write the world
and barely made it through the week.

she and i used to take walks
at three in the morning and
speak of the little things other
people don't notice.

i couldn't believe the crayon lines
were real and she didn't make us up.

she drew herself into the margins
of every book she read, then
returned them to the library
and hoped a suicidal soul would notice.

i screamed murals into a tape
recorder, and it only stared.

she had a collection of bird feathers that
represented each of her favourite
authors, because each time she read
another book, there was another feather.

we never sailed together, even
though the moon yelped for us
and she gestured for us, and

*(really, i was the one left hanging, empty hands and a broken neck)