Settle black darling
In the crook of my ribs
Eat out my lungs

I’ll blow smoke when I wake
—Thunderclouds

I hurt my hands on purpose, punish myself for the things I can't control like this hole in my brain you're too busy to crawl through
I tell myself that im healing, that three days sober is a start to something better, that maybe I'll wake up for the rest of this lifetime without bruises or "how did I get here" maybe something will stay long enough to understand that I do the things I do because he's doing the things he does an hour away from where the sun stopped rising 12 years ago where the waterfall stood still and I'm left here with all this stillness inside of me, like I feel too much so I have to punish myself with numb and you have to punish yourself with maybe I could have stopped her from breaking her own wrists
maybe nobody gives a **** about maybe
nobody cracks a smile with hope strung through their teeth like Christmas lights or tinsel or something
I tell myself that my dad doesn't have to drink to sparkle anymore and neither do I
neither do I but I do and I end up with are you sincere tattooed on my hand with no idea as to when it happened or when I would ever think that it would be a good idea to look down at all of this breaking and bruise and be reminded of you but I did and I do
so no,
maybe nothing sparkles anymore

I keep telling myself that if I lay here long enough something's gonna swallow me and it's not because my heads been somewhere else lately it's because I sleep on the floor. Even when I don't. I sleep on the floor. The mattress has holes because mattresses get holes sometimes when you don't have blankets to cover them and you're too cold to put the cigarette out on anything other than yourself or what you have to sleep on now. Last year I'd spend every day in bed with a little bag full of drugs and a map to the bathtub just in case I forget what I took two seconds ago because I think it happened yesterday and I take more. And then I'm shaking, not because I'm cold this time. I'm seizing and nobody is home because everybody leaves me for preachers or church or a campfire or someone prettier. This part is foggy. I remember again a bathtub, an empty hotel bathtub and my mother and I say mama did you leave the door open on purpose and she says I went to church. She went to church. She went to church. Bathtub. I sleep there. Even though we are in a hotel I sleep in the bathtub because I like the way my anxiety sounds when it echoes. I like to hear it. Play it back. Memory. Back to the only house I've ever lived in alone.  I'm seizing. I stop. I hear you. I somehow forget that it's 4 in the morning. It's my birthday now, nobody knows but it's my birthday now, teen years behind me but still a teen year drug addiction and you tell me to look out the window so I do. And the sky's on fire. I don't fall asleep again for three days but the sky's on fire. And so am I. And so are you. And I don't want to go back to the place I go to when I see the faces but I put myself here. I push and push and push and then I act surprised when something falls off the edge. I'm alone now. Even when I'm not. I'm alone.

I have voices in my head.
sometimes they are mine and sometimes they are that girl walking down the street without a hat or a home address and I know this because I know things without knowing them.
there is hurt here, in this car full of silver and new and no smoking or I'll rip your fingers off.
my mother knows how to say amen like she's still dedicated to the Catholic Church I tell her, you should have given that up the day they refused to baptize me.
everyone sees dark in me where there is none.
I was a baby and I was a baby and I'm still a baby, or I wish I was.
I'm a baby who cries and says good morning every day even if it's not.
I say good morning when I wake up after missing dinner
I refuse to touch China now
my hands don't listen to the voices in my head all they think is break break break and the break break break sounds itself like cracking open and I need to lobotomize the dishes in here before she gets sentimental about handing them down to me when I finally find someone who isn't scared of waking up beside me to find my throat slashed
here it is. truth, because there is no right or wrong there is truth.
and truth sets you free.
it sets you free and it has you without a hat or a home address and you still wonder why nobody sends you letters back.
you say they forget your name. Or your middle name but it doesn't matter.
I only answer to "baby girl, do you want me to call the doctor for you?"

The lust we share on cold midnights, lucid
and gentle but so passionate and rough
can keep me hypnotized. Translucent blue
eyes shine like moonstone, glinting bright with love
hidden from sight. I want to call you mine
but I know better than to pine over
a man up way too high, stuck on cloud nine
not planning to come down or to get sober.
I’ll let myself get lost a little while
in the forest of curls behind your ears.
I’ll wander your body concealing smiles
that give away feelings that interfere
with the promise to love myself before
someone else. I am who I’m living for.

when someone thanks me for writing the things they wish they could say out loud I apologize for hours until they stop wishing and ask me why. I usually tell them the same thing
"do you know when you're driving alone and that one song comes on, you know that one. that one song with a million different memories dripping off the tongue of that one man who sings like he never got on that airplane and so he didn't not make it back to the ground? and you're thinking about crashing and when you're thinking about crashing you almost do crash, because you were distracted about crashing and you get scared and realize that you just want to not want to crash? well that's how I feel all the time. Even when I'm completely still. Or when you're in the bath and you see faces in the ceiling and you wonder if the faces you're seeing are significant? like maybe you're seeing their face because they never meant to hurt you or maybe you took an extra 20 milligrams today and you're just a little out of sorts."
I'm not done explaining why I'm sorry, but this is usually around the time they interrupt, all "no, I apologize" all "I shouldn't have asked"

fast forward three years
you're living on the coast binding books and your hips together
and i'm still in the small town that turned me into a sinkhole
you got out though, huh? you got out just fine, you have always been stronger than me
you have always been able to get well and get up without anyone bringing you bouquets of hands

you sit down to explain to her that love has made you reckless, that too many people
have been easygoing with your heart; let it cross the streets alone.
drunkenly leaving it in cabs in other countries
so for a while there you weren't sure who to give it to

my dear, I know now that you were never a hotel I could check in and check out of
you were in the best way possible, the mental hospital,
the time I woke up with nobody but the voices in my head (they were all yours)
(I couldn't leave until I got better)

you tell her you fell in love with a girl who never burned your letters,
who showed love in all the wrong ways, never picked up the phone, "honey", you'd say,
"she was nothing like you" ... "kept her hair light to contradict the dark inside of her,
didn't trust anyone to blindfold her and walk her down the street"
you try to tell her my name, but you can't
you can't remember what they call me, call me, call me,
I never picked up the phone

fast forward three years
you're living on the coast making love and mixed drinks a little too strong
and i'm buried near the sinkhole in town, next to the dog my dad kicked a little too hard
out the door of the house he lived in with my mother
i've got your name tattooed on my neck

I woke up to the sound of a train and it was raining. I might be dreaming.
My mom has always loved
the sound of a train and here I am in someone else’s bed thinking
about how much I love the taste of blood and the smell of sweat.
My plant has a pulse but my eyes might
be playing tricks on me, I have a way of forgetting to separate my dreams
from reality. Sometimes
I share too much of myself with people too soon. I told
him that my grandma had green eyes
and that’s where I got mine and that I’ve got nightmares that test
my patience night after night
with grotesque new realities on display before my eyes
and that my nails are stained from pomegranate and that
I got straight As and I told him to bite me because
I like it
but I shouldn’t have said it all so soon.
When I’m hurtling home in my metal death trap
powered by explosions I take pictures of the sky to show myself that
I’m alive and beauty is only here now and a deer
could leap or someone could swerve and ****
me or the airbag could rip off my jaw and I’ll
spend my life bearing my ******* way that I didn’t intend. I’m the writer
with no jaw that everyone reads out of pity and to get a glance
in the windows of a ******’s life.
When I wake up my jaw is still there
but I’ve been clenching it again.
No adderall, no *******, no caffeine, just the pressure
I put on myself and the weight of life knotting up the muscles in my back
until my ribs start to tighten and constrict my breathing so I pull at the ribbons
laced up and down my sternum
but it is too late and the bone corset pulls me in,
pulling pulling pulling until
my organs burst out of my skin.
He tells me,
“You’re hard to read, you know.” I giggle
but I find it tough to explain the rich cascade of emotions that are tied
to the lunar tides and make me crave coffee at midnight in terms
that don’t make me sound completely crazy.
Well, tonight I am eating dinner and attempting to read while the television
babbles at me from another room
about something I don’t need to hear but I hear
a cracking sound and my teeth are sharp and jagged and crumbling
as I run my tongue across them. I wake up sweating.
When it was sunny I bought socks from the little girl section and I drenched myself in perfume. Later on we were drinking chai tea
and getting *****, so I **** on your fingers
while you choke me and in the morning you make pancakes
and I eat it
but I’m afraid of the flour and the substance because it rises up
under my skin and collects in unwanted pools on my body.
I shouldn’t have drank any beer but
I had three
and I spilled my secrets the second I felt the warmth of trust.
God ******* ****.
I drive in silence.
The poster’s eyes have been following me
all night and I don’t know if it is a matter of perspective
or some delusion convincing me that I’m not alone
word vomiting on notebooks and textbooks and gushing
piles of words onto my comforter. I pictured
growing a human being inside of me and my heart
started trying to run from my chest
I scared myself into an anxiety attack
picturing years flashing before me. Before I told him
that I’m not like most girls
he kissed my forearms
and then he kissed my neck. Maybe I’m crazy for believing in astrology but
last night I was hearing your moans
as roars like the lion you are purring, nuzzling me
until you fell asleep and I remembered
being five and wishing I was Belle, marrying the beast. I don’t know.
I don’t know if I’m crazy.
I kept losing my earring in your bed like I secretly wanted to leave something more tangible than my scent or stray blonde hairs for
you to find and remember me by. I think you like me too much and I’m
afraid of what you’ll find when you get in my mind and see the battlefield
that rages inside of a pretty head.
I used to see the world with the eyes of a child but today I feel like I’m senile and looking at the world from the future and dissecting the past
because I lost track of time again and no one knew where I was for seven hours. I might have been wandering but I think I was asking
a fruit fly for directions when she flew into my pupil and laid eggs on my optic nerve causing the light to fraction
and my thoughts to be projected onto the wall ahead.
People passing by could see it all streaming out of me,
every emotion, every desire, every fear and every image,
even the smoking **** on the cement
from when he left got stuck on my screen
and the dream I had the night before
about a man with gigantic hands
and a woman shielded her eyes
as I thought about the way you use your tongue on me. When I finally
stumbled home the projection had stopped
but the maggots had started and I stared at the mirror
and branded myself with the word ugly.
The pill is folded in the dollar and I whack it with a lighter,
the white shards scatter out and I lay the bill flat and crush crush crush
until the powder is free of chunks. One two three
making ten perfect lines, five on each side and my nostrils are on fire.
I **** smoke from a pipe and get so high that my entire face feels like melting
off and I’m so determined to sleep that I can’t
and I anticipate
gritty dreams but I never drift off.
Three glasses of white wine later I drive to his house and I can hear the train hitting the breaks while we throw empty beer bottles at the moving cars
from the roof of a crooked house. And then, the willow tree
draped over the train tracks
grabs the wind with her branches and she summons
sheets of rain that come blasting down.
I’m afraid of heights and I’m not sure why but I think falling
from the apple tree at age thirteen was the first time I realized that
bones break and they never heal the same way and my hands are shaking but

I stay on the wet roof with you and I let myself melt into this
momentary reality.