when i was a little girl,
during that span of time
when years weren't the yardstick
but rather the speed with which
my popsicle would melt
or the days awaited
when wands of pine
would cover me from
sun-burned scalp to scraped-up toe
with sweet sap,
i would run about the tall grasses
and name every wildflower
that brushed my ankles
oh-so-tenderly.

i would keep a journal,
all in cornflower blue crayola,
about my findings,
my voyages through seas of green
and the whispers heard
in rustlings through the waves,
all turning to fae fairytales between my ears.

everything was named beautiful,
and everything was soft as a cloud
as i laid with my shoulderblades in the earth,
sticky fingers outstretched towards
projected memories far above me.

and now
i often find myself in a similar position,
ribs heaving heavily
as the floral essence
fills my lungs so amazingly--
the leaden comfort in my limbs
making it almost as if i had never left.

it's as if those fae fairytales have finally come true,
the ponderings finally rippling anew,
and the poppies lulling me to sleep
for hundred of years,
millenia stained with
the purity of august's finest daisies.

their perfume roused me one morning,
the sky still bruised and fluttering,
head sticky with a misplaced exhaustion and the woes of age;

the circumstance to which i awoke was this:

the buds,
              the lilacs and hyacinths,
                                                       the baby's breath and dandelion
                                                                                 fluff
i had made delicate wishes upon since my earliest days
had found themselves a home wrapped around my spine,
fragrant petals gracing my stomach with their presence.

as if influenced by draught,
the ache did not place itself
but rather my fascination
with each tickling floral
forming fissures in my abdomen--

i took mental note
of their names
and characteristics,
as many as i could fit in that sap-lined cavity of my mind,
just as lovely as ever.

the soil was as soft as a cloud,
childish glee filling my heart to overflowing.
some things never change.

sometimes, the beauty of flowers
remains
the beauty of flowers,
whether it is plush under foot
or pushing through
bone and sinew.

I have a bit of a blunt proposition for you:
let us move to Wisconsin or somewhere just as hidden
among soy fields and monotony;
let us leave our names behind,
the concrete slabs too heavy for our broken frames and silk rucksacks;
I am tired of fulfilling a Sisyphus contract, to be entirely honest.

I think that we could hitchhike from I-95
and drum our anthems on fleshy kneecaps,
our sights pulled away from the windows of some random Honda Accord
as scenes of purple mountains majesty paint themselves
on the insides of our singed eyelids.

Wouldn’t you love to skip along dirt roads
and forget the concrete jungles
that left painful calluses on your palms
and broke my left arm in a juvenile monkey bars contest,
complete with purple cast and a tablespoon of kids’ ibuprofen.
Pleistocene mulch would no longer plant itself
in our pink feet,
and the scars from past romps would heal.

We could lay in the high grasses until high noon,
until the moon rises high in the sky,
until it sinks behind our worn heels
and lights them with its cool flame.

Our minds could wander in Wisconsin,
wily teenage worries abandoned in favor
of punk-rock philosophies.

Maybe we could even make up that alt band
you dreamed of at sixteen,
as blandess is the birthplace of creativity;
you could pick up a flea market guitar,
and I could sing with a newfound, folksy humor.

We could do anything, and we could do nothing.

That’s the glory of something over the turnpike.

Just shake my hand,
those callouses scraping my crepey skin
and forming a blood bond like no other.

No signature required.

Leave your post stamps on your pock-marked kitchen counter.

There are butterflies in your stomach?
They flutter when you see him;
a furious blush paints your face,
raw brush strokes and
unadulterated emotion
leaving behind a rich pigment
known as cluelessness.
Mix in a bit of pallor,
and it's embarrassment.
They beat their mosaic-printed wings
with a stumble of your feet
or a failed exam,
a 68 in Applied Physics
when you should have pulled a crisp 69.
They find Eden-tier gardens with excitement
on par with that of a pajama-clad kid on Christmas morning,
and I bet you relish in the feeling.
But little did you know,
Miss Little Innocent sitting there
with her head weighed down  
with her heavy thoughts and knock-off Docs
pigeon-toed in a less than symbol
(don't you know that, sixty-eight?),
had elephants,
                          prides of lions,
                                                    *******,
                                                                ­­         the whole savanna
housed inside her ribcage,
bones rattling from deafening roars;
a cognizant mind stumbling from the seismic waves
of leviathan footsteps,
shaking the ground she walks on.
The pain in her chest,
the god awful attempts to provide
for her own microcosmic ecosystem
wracked her frail frame without mercy.
She continued to bounce her knees
and answer your questions
with breathy, exhausting syllables,
but you put yourself out of commission.
You write and write about your butterflies,
but think about how
it must feel to have to accept
lionesses gnawing on your shoulderblades.
Would you ask for your beautiful ******* back?

Ill rumors slid down my throat, gelatinous and coated in bitter mucus - reminiscent of when I was five years old, just dared to kiss a slug found in the school's daffodils. They burned my esophagus, leaving me without taste for days. They left me stumbling over too big, too-there feet to the nurse's office in search of Dramamine.

Miss, Atomic Bomb,
how are you today?

Do you feel a jittering in your veins,
hear a chattering of ivory teeth
in your sugar skull
candied by your wish to always be oh-so-sweeter?

When you fell to the ground under his hands,
rough with militant knuckles
tattooed in unlined blues and purples
transforming into nausea-inducing camouflage hues,
and your new, Target brand, $2.99 black tights
ripped viciously at the knees,
did you feel an explosion in your chest?

Did you feel angry,
willing to lash out with toxic words
that your floodgates had always tried to hold back,
the dams now creaking and groaning in beautiful sighs?

Did you,
when it hurt,
fight against that war hero who had held you close
during a time you could barely remember,
blurred crimsons shading the edges of every smiling photograph?

Or did you fold him into your campfire-scented embrace
and apologize profusely
for being so naturally destructive?
I bet you open your lips-
swollen and bleeding through cracks
that could define
‘damaged’
in the dictionary you flip through
when everything is numb,
and only battle wounds of paper cuts will suffice-
just to speak those awful words.

I bet
you allowed him to tell you
that you were a weapon-
self-triggering,
horrific,
prepared to injure
those
innocent,
pink-lipped,
blue-eyed girls he stared at on the street
just to keep what you had.

But,
Miss Atomic Bomb,
someone had to have dropped you.
someone had to have thrown you
from your security,
and I bet against life itself
that the guilt lies in those calloused palms.

I bet you never noticed
the rope tied around your ankle,
expertly knotted so that he could just keep
reeling you back up into his arms.

He liked you on that verge of manic destruction,
eyes wide,
holding onto oceans threatening to flood that little studio apartment of yours
in New York City.

He wasn’t ready to let you truly fall.
He still isn’t.

So,
Dear Atomic Bomb,
know that that
run in your tights is only the beginning of the end.
The scraped flesh on your knees
is only the beginning of
the carnage that could be wrought.

And none of it will be your fault,
your *******, crumbling-at-the-seams fault.

You won’t cause the war,
and you can still crawl out on
shrapnel-coated limbs.

Take my heed,
little girl –
desert.

'One day, she will be nothing but litter on the side of the highway', they had murmured in hidden tongues. So she balled herself up and crumpled anything that she could have been – at least she could be satisfactorily streamlined when she was thrown from tobacco-stained fingertips, if nothing else.

Do me a favor
and color in my lines –
between my ribs,
my heaving chest,
my flushed cheeks.

Keep my mouth sharp,
my words precise and meaningful.

Add a bit of character to my
picked over hands.

Tickle my sides with
Prismacolor
or Crayola
and pinch my body pink with joy.

Color in my lines
and make me everything I want to be.

Add definition with thick black lines,
to give me structure
when I am falling apart.

Make something of this empty outline.

Bring out the beauty that I want it to hold.

It’s ironic, huh? How when the small of your back is pressing into beige carpeting with those nail polish stains from that one experiment in the eighth grade, your rib cage suffocating you as your lungs expand like a party balloon animal, that that’s when you are your strongest? Your fingertips are cold and blue, your cheeks flaming as if you had tried to stick the sun under your tongue, but all the while you only feel a slight warmth coursing through your veins and a pleasant breeze on your thighs. Shrapnel and pieces of broken stucco plant themselves in your forehead, tilted up towards the crumbling cerulean ceiling, but it only feels like the light sprinkling of rain you used to try to gulp down for refreshment. It is ironic that when you falter, you lift your shoulders a bit taller. You feel like you are falling apart, limbs numb yet pricked and prodded as the whole world’s pincushion, but you are being rebuilt out of marble. When your mind’s scaffolding is collapsing, your face still keeps that slight smile in the corner of your mouth stained with berry lip shade. Everyone admires your genuine smile while you know that it was carved by Donatello himself, your torment hidden behind layers of compacted stone.

Drink your lemonade strong,
but don’t let the sugar choke you
with its sweet appeal on your tongue.

I think that today,
we should all scream
until our lungs ache
from the distance we’ve tread
and the things that we’ve said –
anecdotes that fill our hearts with joy,
tearful stories of all of that wrongness which we’ve faced,
the lyrics caught between our ears
and have been for days and months and years,
all of those words that we’ve written
in bright fuchsia gel pen in the margins of diaries
from our awkward third grade years
that we hoped no one would ever lay eyes upon.
Scream until the last syllables
crawl up your throat in an effort to be heard.
Scream until your tongue ties itself into knots
from the exhaustion of spilling all of your secrets.
Scream until you grow weary,
but that kind of weary where
you fall asleep with a smile on your face
and a soreness in your every muscle
that means you have accomplished something.
Act like a little kid again
and chase after ice cream trucks,
shouting along to
the sticky-sweet cadence
that drips into your ears.
Or crumple into a heap,
***** laundry piled as high as
Mount Everest
on your puke-colored carpet
and
scream.
Just scream
and scream
and scream.
And when you lose your voice,
come to me
and I will make sign language jokes
into your sweaty palms,
fingers curling expressively
as your shoulders lay just a bit higher,
the scaffolding that had been holding you up
torn down joint by joint,
rod by rod;
but it didn’t hurt did it?
It felt exquisite,
like waking up on Christmas morning
to the smell of just-burnt Pillsbury cinnamon rolls
and dented, wrapping-papered packages.
Let these memories whisper through you,
not scream,
and let them carry you to sleep.
You screamed today.
Now,
you can whisper
or send back witty one-liners into my palm
without the fear of explosion.
Now you can chase ice cream trucks with jingling pockets
faster than ever
because you are so
*******
light.

She saw only the most brilliant fireworks,
while he saw only the embers of what had been.

Around you,
my dear
my flame,
my lungs burn
like I just drank kerosene
and I flossed my teeth with matches,
their smoky flavor
charring my tongue.
You set my heart on fire,
the warmth blazing through me
like nothing I've ever felt.

They say that everyone is unique, just like a snowflake. But that day, I saw a similar pain in her eyes – a mind paralyzing throb. Or maybe we held the same snowflake, an infinitesimally small cold much like the shards of ice caught in our hearts.  All I know is that that day, that kindergarten lesson melted on the tip of my tongue, the warmth of the realization you provided allowing it.

What’s in an apology?

To me, it is simply
a torrential downpour of regrets
and just-kissed,
biting insults
wrapped in
1982’s dowry garments,
lacy and dainty and
full of holes.

To me,
it contains a
moth-eaten veil
smelling like
lily of the valley,
a rotten memory
of a sweet time –
piped rosettes of frosting
atop
a filthy sponge.

By any other name:
Surrender,
Atonement,
Vindication –
it is to none;
it is to none but
to soften the blow
dealt by
the concrete slab
of fault.

It is not any sweeter,
not even the gritty feel
of a Sweet N’ Low
between your teeth.

It is novacaine
to the muscles
in your cheeks
that have been scowling for so long.

So,
here it is.
I hope
that feels so much better.

When did you become someone
whose presence I longed to feel
at my fingertips
more than my pulse?
When did you become someone
whose voice had a cadence
that I would sacrifice
my dusks
and dawns
to waltz to,
spinning in your arms
and falling into the rhythm
of your footsteps upon my concrete heart?
When did you become someone
who I allowed to paint on every inch of my body,
never becoming tired of swirling brush strokes
and passionate color?

When did you become someone
who held down my hands with the weight
of your shackles,
slowing my heartbeat to yours,
barely fluttering?
When did you become someone
who kept me in your poisonous trance,
hearing sweet fairy music
whilst dancing a fatal few steps?
When did your soft brushstrokes
turn to pummeling stones,
taking the beauty from my skin
and replacing it with a thready luminescence?

When did everything that I revered about you
break me into two:
the one who had it all,
the one floating a foot above the ground
with socked toes and lacy clarity,
and the one who couldn’t stand her reflection,
the colors laid upon me no longer bright,
but thrusting me into the concrete jungle
you had momentarily freed me from?
Just answer me this…
when?

“When she was a tiny thing, barely the size of a walnut – wrinkled almost beyond recognition -  I  remember holding her in my palm and thinking that she would grow into something rather large one day. That in only another thirty seconds she would not fit in my calloused hand any more, her graceful limbs pouring over my splayed fingers like sweet tea on a bed of summer sunshine, a softened petal falling towards hard, unforgiving concrete. I knew that one day she would grow so big, my hand a small, 60's coffee shop to her Empire State Building. I knew that one day she would topple out of my  grasping fingers, plummeting to whatever laid below. I could only hope that she would land on her feet. “

And here I stand, feet aching from their sudden slap against the black top.

Do you remember when you were in grade school and, in a fit of boredom, you would slather Elmer’s glue on your palms, filling the deep grains between each of your fingers? How you would get a shiver not only from the chill of the paste, but from the thrill of doing something that was ill-advised. When you would peel off this layer of skin, looking at the fingerprints you were told were only your own, a memento to take with you everywhere you went. Do you remember when in your sophomore year of college, when all you wanted was to fall into the abyss of folded-until-soft papers and exams and Bic Cristal pens; when all you wanted was to fit in? Do you remember that time that you went to that party, the first one you let your feet carry you to with the puke green flyer in hand foreshadowing the night’s events ahead? Do you remember when you took out your worn deck of cards and a little tube in your pocket that you always kept “just in case”? You had meant to impress them with your card-stacking prowess, because how else were you to make yourself memorable? You told them to give you five minutes. In about two and a quarter, they went for their ninth round of some kind of sickly sweet alcohol. You took out your tube, a faded label that distinctly read Krazy Glue, and took the Queen of Hearts and the Jack of Spades in between your fingers with their unique fingerprints. Do you remember when you built that house of cards with small drips of the adhesive seeping out of the seams, but the people you sought out were too intoxicated to see them? They clapped and cheered in drunken awe and you became the “party giraffe with those big sparkles - the things that never leave your face. Trust me I’ve tried.”, as one of your new comrades had said. Do you remember what happened when you went back to your dorm that night on seemingly transplanted feet, weaving between the bushes hoping not to see that shade of green on your shoes the next morning? You put the contents of that tube all over your fingers, in between them where your Texas-shaped birthmark laid. And you ripped it off. Without mercy. The process wasn’t as pleasant as you seem to have remembered. It stung, but at least your unique fingerprints were gone, or so you thought. At least you could be that “party giraffe” like you’d always wanted, I guess. Do you remember that by the next morning the tube was empty? Do you remember that when you tied your shoes at 7:43 a.m. that morning for your Intro to Psychology course, the lines across your joints felt as if they were on fire? Do you remember when your new comrade “gave you five” and, despite the pain, you smiled and laughed with him? Do you remember your trip to Staples that afternoon, when a mousy employee asked you if you needed help finding anything and you said no because you’d been to that aisle a million times before, in grade school and now in sophomore year of college? But today you walked past the shelves of Elmer’s glue: “dries clear”, “now with purple glitter”, “turns your hand blue where it touches, sponsored by Smurfs 4”. You walked right past these plastic bottles and to your trusty tubes of Krazy Glue. Red and green and reminding you of your beautiful house of cards, the drips of adhesive no longer a figment of that memory.

“When the skies are grey,”
a soft voice sang,
“think of the sun that lights every day.

If you see the mischievous fey,
dancing by the babbling, babbling brook
when the skies are grey,

Should they serve you tea and biscuits on a silver tray,
never believe their false saccharine, but
think of the sun that lights every day.

Think of the mermaids who lay on the bay,
Tails iridescent in the summer sunshine
When the skies are gray.

Think of the dormouse with his waltz and his sway,
holding his tiny paws aloft on another’s tiny shoulders.
Think of the sun that lights every day.”

Her voice would float through the nursery, gay
as the blooms in the springtime when she sang
“When the skies are grey,
think of the sun that lights every day.”

At approximately 7:43 a.m., when perfect cars with perfectly tinted windows spewing their perfect, cancerous smoke rumbled past on the busy streets between chain coffee shops and designer pumps clicking on cold pavement, the coins would clink in my ruddy can at the highest pitch. This was the time at which wrists wrapped in non-cracked watches and nails painted with calculatingly  precise white lines would help flip dimes or nickels or pennies from mountain rain - aloe vera - citrus burst scented hands. They would flood the bottom as their eyes flooded with pity, their shoes chuckling harshly as they walked away, my holey-socked feet mottled with embarrassment. And this would continue, as long as I kept my teeth bared, instead of behind my thin lips, and my eyes fresh with sea water, as if I had just seen a kicked puppy in this lifeless part of the neighborhood. Chain link fences would warble woefully with the wind, caging me into my “office”, if you could call it that. Just a ratty Coleman sleeping bag, stolen from the scraps of the others in the streets, a small bottle of water, and a couple of pieces of bread a woman had given me. Her hair had been perfectly curled, pale fingers entwined with the auburn strands. Her coat had been freshly laundered, but her bread was moldy and stale. One day, in the middle of the summer, humidity wrapping my skin in horrid sensation and soaking me to the bone, I thought just how much I was like that puppy. I lived off of bread crusts and orange peels, droplets of water from discarded water bottles and sugar-loaded frappuccinos left on the sidewalk in the morning rush. Those with perfect manicures and bad-mannered stilettos might as well have stuck a post-it note, maybe bright blue with spots of sun fading, on my can saying “low budget beast”. Because that is what I was. I was a zoo animal, flaunting my aggression to have a photo snapped of me or a little treat, maybe a few coins. Thirty-seven cents could put light in my eyes like some who saw the subject of their addiction for the first time in hours. I could attack, sure. And that’s what they expected. They could donate two seconds of their lives and be thrilled by the spectacle that was me in my holey-socks and stained American Eagle sweatshirt. I thought I was human, perfect like them, but maybe I truly was an animal.

His fingers were in her hair,
gold twine wrapped around ivory stumps.
Their legs were thoughtlessly intertwined,
ivy twisting and curling with ease.
Together,
they moved so gracefully;
at the quiet melody of Bach
or the deafening sound of cannon fodder,
they would never miss a single nuance,
a single chance to lay limb and limb.
His eyes, silvery taupe,
laid upon her languidly,
skimming over her sweet cream skin
and thinking of its syrupy taste
while she only thought of his bitter coffee mouth
and Daniel’s breath,
heavy on her face around two p.m.
And with that,
she thought of when she would come home
from whatever she had been doing that day,
a grin in her often somber eyes.
but when she would feel the mechanism click under her skin
and the metal would grind to open,
the light would be lost to pure black.
Shot glasses would be stacked like a house of cards on the coffee table.
pots and pans would be piled in the sink haphazardly,
like shrapnel from the afternoon’s disastrous activities.
And she would sigh,
a honeyed tone fogged with realization
as she would collect the bricks of his card house
and ran the water to dissolve what could be
from the collection of sharp tin in the kitchen.
Her eyes ringed with mascara,
she would shake him awake,
shaking herself like a leaf without the stability of its branch.
Once she saw the gunpowder eyes,
her fire would be extinguished.
He would groan and ask where she’d been.
She would say at work.
He would ask why she went.
She would tell him she didn’t want to,
didn’t want to leave him.
But in truth,
she had wanted to rekindle her flame,
to let it roar in the open air
instead of it being muffled by his touch.
She would apologize,
Her honey scent now sour
with guilt, forced upon her by the guard
who held a pistol to her head,
which held, without her knowledge,
no bullets.
To make it up to him,
to make it up to
anyone else she had hurt that day,
She let him wrap his ivy limbs around her frail body
and consume her -
adorn her with thorned roses
and stinging nettles.
He said they looked beautiful,
made her taste even sweeter,
smell even nicer
and she believed him.
The ****** marked her skin,
leaving red streaks along her arms,
but she thought of them as her flames
finally making an appearance.
She was satisfied in her forest,
where no one would hear her fall,
but everyone would see her burn.

She wove a crown of nettles, guarding her thoughts and threatening tourists who flocked to this grand garden. Roses made a home in her auburn locks, wrapping her mind in a cloak of impenetrable flame. The things she had fallen prey to, the things that had turned her world upside down, were ironically the best guarded - intrusive verdancies her intrusive sentinels. Little did she know her knight in shining armor was lost in the brambles, collecting a bouquet of roses she would never receive

From within the darkness,
the shadows and the dullness and the anonymity,
lay the darkest being of all;
her name was unknown,
but her effulgence was told in every storybook
and her raven tresses held the most impossible light.
She would sing amorous hymns,
luring in princes from the four corners of the world.
Their hearts throbbed for this uncertain triumph,
their deceiving prize,
while she sat prostrate upon the cobbled earth beneath her
and prayed for this darkness to consume her.
The light, indulging in its golden treachery,
had left her chained for centuries and eaten away at her true intentions-
to fall into the darkness riddled with indifference.
The darkness had always been kind while the light had abused her,
taken advantage of her innocent nature to collect shiny trophies
who begged for her heart and for her hand.
Her throat had become raw and she now prayed for silence,
a moment without the promise of such a cacophonous ache.

To tell the truth, I am a huge book nerd. Or so I’ve heard. Ever since I was eight I have been reading Dickens and Alcott and Fitzgerald, Melville and Steinbeck and Bronte.
In the early months of my nines, I could be found in the closet, eyes scrunched hard and every muscle in my body straining. This was after I had read the Narnia series for the first time and tried to reach the Dancing Lawn, wanting to waltz with a prince and play chess with a dame. I would put on a flowy skirt and hobble around in my mom's wedding heels, pretending to be a Victorian lady. My shoulders back and neck held painfully high, I still have never felt more  confident. So weightless.
The relationships I made with Holden, my always childish best friend, Moby ****, my pet whale who barely fit in the bathtub, and Jo March, the spiteful young woman who taught me how to write freely, built me to a place I thought unattainable. Occasionally, the words would fly over my head, leaving a slight breeze of understanding to push back my curls, but the confusion was alright with me as long as I could immerse myself in the world that the current characters lived in. And sometimes even these worlds seemed so horrid that I couldn't imagine the lives that would have been lived in them, my largest difficulty being a scraped knee or a paper cut from my latest read. The characters that I had thought of as beautiful and honest were truly insensitive and materialistic (speaking of one particular Amy March).
Although I may be a book nerd, the books that I have read have allowed me to look into the true nature of the people around me, their values and their motives, and the state of the world around me, whether it is lying in shambles or standing amidst the distant stars.
Written works have this odd power, maybe a little too much for such subtle things, where they can touch the edge of what we thought we knew and turn it upside down. And that, in short, is why I love reading so much. So, yes, I am a book nerd and, maybe, so are you.

She reminded him of a traffic light, always red or yellow or green..
When she laid lazily on their futon, manicured toes hanging off of the edge, he thought that she would never look more beautiful. And when he would wrap his arms around her frail frame, he could only see her kaleidoscope eyes ringed in day old eyeliner and every freckle on the bridge of her nose (her only insecurity). He would finger the gold chain around her neck, carrying the weight of a cracked peridot, and remember that night as her copper head fell softly on his shoulder with a whisper on her lips.
But another layer of her beauty, the one she showed to the outside world, would have been exhibited at his sister’s wedding that March.
For months, she would tow him to various shops on various street corners, seating him on the same uncomfortable bench and forgetting him in the midst of speaking avidly about chiffon with a sales assistant. She would search for her perfect dress: black, slinky, and slit up the leg. An ideal far from what he knew, the girl who laid scrunched up on the couch in her  pajamas at three in the afternoon. The girl who would occasionally ask for hot chocolate in the peak of the summer heat, thin arms draped in a heavy cardigan.
Later that last month, he decided to surprise this girl he knew with a pair of sunshine-coloured heels, just high enough to invite a kiss on the tip of his nose.
She received them the night before the wedding, expertly fragmented contempt in her eyes, and slid them on her feet. And kissing his nose just the way he had pictured, filled his heart with the utmost love for her. Little did he know that in the early hours of the morning, she had slid out from the baby blue covers of their bed and out of their apartment to the community dumpster, carrying the shoe box with her. When she returned, she tiptoed to her closet and pulled out a pair of cherry-red pumps, admiring them and their wicked gleam.
The next morning, air laced with the scent of black coffee, she slipped on her dress and her red heels and became a different person, no longer the frail girl he loved. It was like the flames that had dyed her shoes had lit her too aflame, entering her bloodstream and blackening her thoughts with the excess of smoke, for when she walked out to see him, ‘I ♥ NYC’ mug in hand, she sneered and opened their cookie-cutter door to his utter surprise.
And upon her return, she was once again simmering, her head further inflated with smog. Her dainty ankles were manacled by thin red ribbons, making her new persona permanent. She yelled and screamed and shrieked insults to pierce his vulnerable skin, ignoring his flinching as her clicking heels carried her forward. And when his ears ceased to hear, and thus ceased to satisfy her need for attention, she left a complementary mark on his cheek, the perfect accessory for her wardrobe’s new addition.
The two did not attend the wedding. His sister sent letters profusely, hurt and then confused and then worried, but she would grind them to shred under her spikes and toss them nonchalantly into the shoe box of her beloved’s.
Months later, she was still a traffic light. Some mornings she would wake up next to him and smile a smile that was too big for her face, and he would forget what she had done. His girl had returned and that was all that mattered. But then she would slowly walk back her closet and look longingly at the shoe box that held all of his suffering, and all he could do was hope that the shoes would not make a reappearance. Despite these prayers, they always would and not five minutes later, her would once again become her new accessory, covered in livid bruises and swellings.
Then one day, he felt oddly confident after days, weeks, months, years of living in constant hesitation. And when her light turned red, he disobeyed the law and kept on driving, making it past the light once and for all.

My brain and my body are best friends, you see.
My frantic thoughts slow to resuscitate my lungs should they cease to breathe;
then my trembling fingers take my razor sharp words and put them to sheath.
My chapped lips, bleeding and lacerated, sew themselves up
to hold back the torrent of mumbling, jumbling mess that pours like wine from behind my teeth.
They will walk hand in hand, heels clacking on broken pavement,
crushing the buds that have shoved triumphantly through.
But, please, don’t let their berry lips and pinched cheeks fool you,
for they are anything but innocent.
Most days, when they have nothing to them but bone and sinew,
blood and flesh,
they simply sit in cacophonous silence, daydreaming about any rescue.
Any helicopter pilot that could see their message in the sand
right before the waves crash over and they are swept away:
the words, my brain, and my body.

the seven things i cannot share  
the seven things i cannot share:
1. anxiety (a storm that never ends, the rain slashing my cheeks when it used to softly brush the hair from my eyes)
2. fear (constant; the breath that i pull from my lungs or the thoughts that run rampant in my mind)
i. of things i cannot see (of uncertainty; of the mystics beneath the waves that can grab my ankles and pull me beneath)
ii. of the darkness (the only thing that makes me blind; the only thing that takes away the power that i am afraid of, yet have learned to depend on, like my feet upon clotted soil)
iii. of silence (the thing that dampens the cacophonous torrent to leave a blank slate, begging to be filled with words i am unable to say)
iv. of emotion (the thing that rules in a diamond-encrusted throne in my mind; the thing that has given and taken ten times more away; the thing that has ruined more than built)
3. quiet (the few words on the slate that accompany my chalk-caked, raw fingers; the few words i was able to share under cover of anonymity)
4. truth (the harsh mistress that holds me by a chain and muzzles my philosophies to speak only the sentences required, the syllables necessary)
5. memory (a liquid picture of the grand and the traitorous that falls through my fingers like oil)
6. pain (the intensity that demands to be soft; the thing that i can relate to the most and suffer from in its similarity)
7. happiness (the genuinity that can be used as a weapon, sharpened steel and a weighted hilt; the thing that can build skyscrapers and grasp the clouds to also start wars)

and what i wish i could:
myself (every ounce of stardust, of sea foam, and of burning light)
    i. hope (the unerring sense of optimism: that this star won’t explode, but glow brightly with the power of a thousand suns)
    ii. dreams (the seemingly impossible and “just within reach”, the moon at the height of day)
    iii. loves (the strength with which one can be weak; the strings and cans through which i can share the things i never thought i could, ears and mouths pressed to rough edges with the intent of nothing more than to be there)