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Claire G Sep 2014
Let me place your skin back where it should be,
Let my mouth grace the scarlet tatters of your left wrist,
Let me speak until my words are strung dry as my
Throat is, and I will do it all, I will do it all with honor,

And stop saying you’re a burden, because I swear to God
You’re the best ******* friend I’ve ever had and I wouldn’t stick around otherwise;
But I don’t see light flooding the horizon, not anymore,
I see it leaving your eyes, and I feel your weight beside me
Disappear suddenly and throw me from the room, and it seems
So much like I’m breathing for more than one body,
And I don’t know what to do,
And I’m losing myself in the keys
Of your piano and the way your voice
Sounded that day we skipped class,
High notes and low notes running together like warm milk but
Sounding perfectly sweet and perfectly black,
Like coffee, or like a hangover after a wild night.

Don’t you do this to me.
Don’t you ******* do this.
Claire G Aug 2014
I can’t think of anything else when your hand’s at the base of my neck:
A soft, narrow place for your callused fingers, the curve of your top lip.

It was only once I saw you hunched by your car’s back tire
And I felt the feeble, futile throb of fist hitting palm as if you held my heart there;

Over and over, I stayed on the porch until moths circled the lamplight
Until the drug relaxed its hold on your synapses, and you wouldn't look at me.

I can’t think of anything else. You’re grinning at the ceiling,
Your eyelashes rest on my cheekbone, Blackmill pours through the rooms;

Liquor works slow circles through my thoughts and my heart beats shyly,
strongly against your palm.
Claire G Feb 2014
Every morning I paint over purple rinds
Of exhaustion beneath my irises.
Every morning I curl my joints inwards;
I have nowhere to go anymore.

In the end, where am I?
Slandered, spoiled, sea-sick,
Misfit, ragtag, falling star,
Washed up to age-old shores
And confined within their limits.

Nobody can join us, nobody
Will join us, it’s a matter
Of admitting that you’re broken
It’s a matter of building walls around
Your own disembodied pieces.

I watch only through breaks in the smoke,
When on occasion the edges
Fall into sharp clarity,
Like a kaleidoscope of bad dreams;
My dull eyes take in the present
With regard to nothing but the past;
He falls in love with a girl who is
Beautifully, dangerously naïve.

Like the flicking of a lighter,
Life sparks and jumps forward--
Not the steady flame that follows,
I am the curling hush of ash.
Claire G Mar 2014
I am on the dusty plank between winter and spring,          the end

Of February snapping closed over 28, and                             I am

Impervious to the way time has                                          too eagerly

Bounded out of reach—not that I would even,                     awaiting

My certain departure,

Think of drawing myself up straight

And using it for more than finding ways

To stay cold.

I do not want to die,
but what a bother it is,

keeping this up.
Claire G Feb 2014
the music notes of
rain—on rooftops, windows and
hands—ought to be shared.
Haiku
Claire G Nov 2015
This great acre of love, this minefield,
This warm ballooning of affection, this dark swelling,
This gentle melody, this thud against the floor,
This sweet nectar to swallow, this poisoned vein.
His voice is soft on my neck.
His cries are sharp on the phone.
I am sick in the head.
I feel worse than alone.
Claire G Feb 2014
She gave me a drink like raspberries
crumbling into poison;
I swallowed it, I asked for more.
The ***** made me light,
made my limbs fluid,
my lips free,
my heart thunder.

I leaned close.
I breathed smoke into his mouth;
silver coils of nicotine between us,
And then nothing—just his hand
at the back of my neck
and the warmth of two mouths
moving against one another,
nothing between us.
Claire G Dec 2014
Writer’s block weighs on my hands like wet concrete.
There is an ache in my wrist and a light at the end of a tunnel;
There are some things that need to be said. You grip me
As if everything else is too heavy to lift,
You look at me with light in your dark,
Dark irises and I am still trying to fathom
How you can be both my reason to write and my falling apart at the page.
Claire G Feb 2014
What to do, what to
Do when a young boy dies?

Tell everyone you loved him,
Draw up meaningless old memories,
Stretch him between your fingers like
Cobwebs and old chewing gum?
He was your ping-pong partner,
Sat in front of you in Algebra,
Rode your bus?
He lived four houses down the road,
Wore the same jeans,
Walked the same halls?
Or was he your best friend?

I didn’t know the dead boy.
I know a living one who did.
One who went on church missions
Went to parties;
Smoked with him,
Set up dates for him,
Now there is so much
I have to say,
But I won’t say it;
I will make things worse,
I will lose it, break down the walls,
I will fall into him again
Out of sorrow.

All the way home I bang the steering wheel
And shout obscenities at the empty
Windshield, frost-fingered,
Lifeless.

I am so sorry.
for Christian
Claire G Sep 2014
We’re all wrapped together,
All of us in his bed:
The pale strips of sun
Through the blinds,
Hands and fingers,
Him and I, arms
And legs, torsos,
Lips to teeth, all of us.
His voice is a blurred and
Narrow line and then
It widens; my heart closes
And opens as his eyes do.
Could I put my pen
To paper and find
The shape of his mouth
The breath in his lungs
In sprawling,
Lonesome black lines,
In my own distracted fingers?
Or does it take the whole
Of us:
Brightening sun,
His body in mine,
Together to make
Something worthwhile?
Claire G Feb 2014
Snagged and spindled on my sweater cuffs,
Memories spray forward in sparks.
The scent of new linoleum,
The stoic hush of the phone line,
And my bedroom window, sealed tight
Against the ghosts of you and I
Kissing barefoot on the lawn.
Claire G Feb 2014
It is a whisper of a word
Foolish, or explosive.
It is both prostrating and proud,
Igniting swaths of hope in the eyes
Of adolescent girls who catch onto it—
Stroke it and dance with it, doe-eyed.
As if they've never heard it said!
as if they've never felt
It hit that place inside
So raw and tissue-thin
It leaves a bitterness to float
Up, and spread across the surface?
One too many times
I've closed my skin to the bright
sky, wrapped up in you and
the sins beneath our fingernails.
One too many times
I've wrangled with my own hands
To sever the cords,
To drop the **** word at your feet,
To fall away.
Claire G Jun 2014
The river’s edge
Cutthroats and you
Nails on backbone
It’s nearly two

Eyelashes bristle
I’m spilling my wine
The pathway’s black
I’m wasting my time

You said you’d be good
You called me away
You said that I should
Stop feeling this way

As the river spins gold
My stomach is turning

As my fingers grow cold
The horizon is burning
Claire G Feb 2014
There’s something real ******* intimidating about a blank white screen.
It’s like there’s a glaring eye in every pixel,
and the cursor, in its intervals, stands stiff and haughty,

blinking again and again like a demand or like a question--
how, why,
                  when, what, why, why?

Camellia, you’re crazy;
          Camellia, you’re lost;

Camellia, there’s ***** beneath your bed—
lock the door and stop answering your phone.
Claire G Feb 2014
With a sharp snick, the flame opens against his thumb;
The cold stone of the pipe, a judge’s mallet
Waits between his lips,
And I imagine sparks
Flying like hot pepper to his throat, and down,
Down to where he speaks, to where he sighs.
His mouth is paper lace on mine.
I breathe in the bittersweet ashes
Like a promise to obey,
And the weight of these wings on the blades of my shoulders
Disappears
Claire G Apr 2014
The thing is that there was so much I could have done differently,
But it was too dark to see and the night was broken all over
So bits of it fell through, collapsed and disappeared, rose above the tide—
Every hour I asked myself where I was,
Every hour there was nothing to think but that you were there
And those were your arms, around the waist of somebody else.

You looked at me like we knew each other and I drank myself dry
There on the beach, I drank so everyone laughed at the things that I said
But there was still your mouth, blowing smoke rings, and your eyes cast sideways
As I threw rocks into the river instead of throwing myself,
And you asked me to come along with the rest, to one party, then the next one
For the life of me, was there another reason that I went?

The last party had two things to offer: strangers and bedrooms.
Everything else was empty beer cans and the way you looked at me.
I rose and fell like waves, I was somebody’s friend, then I was a drunken guest,
And I announced to the room that nothing mattered
Because my senses were flattened, somber; I knew I was there for one reason
I knew I’d laugh about it the next day and wonder why I hurt so badly.

But I am not strong enough to let it be; I was not so drunk that I couldn't hear you
I am not so healed that I don’t want you to want me.
On the contrary, think of me.
Think of me, please, miss my hands and my mouth and my sidelong lashes,
Swim through liquor by night until the morning cuts open your middle
Until you hurt in a way that is treacherous, blinding, until you’re left with nothing else.

— The End —