daughter

i hope you never learn this:
when you find someone to live for,
it sometimes feels like dying.

there are some lessons a mother
cannot teach you

there are some sayings
that are lies.

Funny how
they never tell you,

When you find someone to live for,
it sometimes feels like dying.

splintered
my bare legs
i am smiling for you
this is the best I can love you
softer than this wood
this is the best
I can love

please

remember my skin
keep it
i don't know how to
own anything
not even
this love
bony like my legs
my bared teeth
these are
your bones now
these are your bones
to chip
like wood

i don't know how to own anything
i only know how to splinter
smiling for you
saying
over and
over into the
couch
that isn't mine
do you love me? do you love me?
do you love me? do you love me?

the dressing room mirror is scratched
but i still see
i still color
i am blue between the seams
these cut off my circulation
they are sizes too small for an ocean like me
they are tempting
my body and i mourn for one another
my body and i mourn like storms
mother to my flesh
i am a failed mother
my body is too young
for the things i’ve seen
is out of form
we are oceans fighting oceans
spilling into one another
my body and i love like
we are waves
we are breaking
and moving          stones

you're too skinny, girl
I want to be just like you

you're not healthy,
girl
lay me down
right next to you

broken and free is a fine line.
(everybody's pretty
in the right light)
think I could be pretty
unhealthy                       too

i sometimes joke that i'm going to win the lottery & use the money to spoil my cats,
but, realistically, i would use the money to buy a gym membership & a month-after-month-long supply of protein shakes
so that i could be skinny.

mother frowns at stick thin girls;
i'm not sure if it is the size zero that worries her lip, or my longing,
or that she does not understand the comfort in emptiness.

look—
this world is ugly,
but others are perhaps uglier.
when all is broken, at least i shall have my hunger

what is it that keeps you whole?
i want to kiss something beautiful,
& hold it between my lips forever.

grounded in this reality
always, something keeps me. today it is my jeans, digging into the soft skin under my belly, reminding me
this world was not crafted around my form

after all,
we are only burying her
in thought.

like an absent mind,
she isn't gone,
but elsewhere,

drinking spiced tea,
probably,
curled up in an armchair
in a library—

nothing could ever draw her
from a good book,
remember?

there are so many libraries
out there
and so many books;

naturally,
it will take her a long time
to get to this one
and come home.