I am the queen of stutter.
There was a time every creak and crack in my bones resonated between every slur of a word and every pop in my vowels.
I was a young girl with a white picket fence and yet there were still moments when words mixed and broke and-and-and-and
kids thought it was weird.
So I hid the voice with lollipops and suckers because I was
"That kid" and the "Freak" and I started to believe it like I believed my mothers bedtime stories that rested in her cheeks.
I was a broken jar and no matter how many times you tried to put me back together I always broke again and again and again.

There was a time where words came out together,
like a butterfly hatching from a cocoon and instead having feathers. I spoke with a voice of the age of four and before I was five I spoke no more because ****, vowels came out like clicks and grinds and everyone told me they paid no mind but I knew that they hated it liked I hated consonants. And I think the reason I hated it so much was because it reminded me too much of her and it made me feel like I was turning into her and all I could see was her standing over me like a murderer stands over a corpse and for a moment I forgot what it meant to be cradled to a chest, fluttering with a beating heart.



The first time my mother left, It was June.
She gave me a kiss on both cheeks and said she'd be away for awhile but that her love for me was longer than any mile that she would have to cross. I kissed her on both cheeks and it wasn't until she left that I realized that I was the one pushing her out the door. So when my dad came home from work he found an empty house and nothing more, he knew where to find me. I sat out in the pouring rain on a swing set that was older than my veins and waited to be saved to be rescued to be heard to be found to be be be be be be
I, was the queen of stutter.
And I had dropped that off when I moved from the city and I started a new life, carving it out of the trees outside with motivation and a knife. I did not yet understand that life was difficult.
But then my mother did not return and my father got scared because she had been the only one to ever love him the way he needed to be loved. And I did not understand so I started to carve life out of my palms and wrists and every **** kiss and nothing was ever good enough. I was the kid that turned to pill bottles and drugs but it was a metaphors for my dying bones and cracking lips. I breathed air that was blue and told my dad lies that were true and I was lost in a lost world, where being found was something that happened when you were dead and God, I wanted to be found.

So the story continued on and I wrote poetry to encompass my heart and my lungs and I painted over myself, scribbled all the mismatches and righted out all of the wrongs. Life seemed to continue and my dad had been injecting life into his veins and had been living at the doctors and had been tired all the time and had been lonely and sad and had been gone. He promised me a graduation and maybe even my wedding if he was lucky. I took these words with me everywhere I went and trust me if I could marry now I would in a heart beat.

I am fifteen.
My marriage has not yet come but I feel like I have all the time in the world and the doctor is only a place my dad goes to visit now. I can make words come out of my mouth the way they appear in my head and I now know the meaning to carving life into my bones and into the hues of the sunset. I am no longer afraid of every click and grind and twist and churn in my brain because it reminds me that I am alive and breathing and that my veins are filled with blood and that I breathe air like every other person does.
I was the queen of stutter.
Now I am the queen of hope.

cute dancing
separated vertebrae
you are an example
in the making
come find out
what's it's like to love
you'll find it's like
the gills of a fish
sometimes
you've just got to wander
exploding ink well
oh well oh well
cover me in red lines
over my fault lines
it's a dance with the devil
and I'm praying to lux luctis.
poor Lucifer is misunderstood

eyes are like constellations; unless you know what you are looking for and looking at, they are just eyes

All I can think about is the passenger seat of your car.
Torn up apolostry and 150,000 miles of nothingness, the only kind of somethingness I ever grew up with.

You used to wake me.
A few hours before the sun would rise when only God was still awake, when darkness was the only thing we could taste.

I was 5.

A pair of scissors in my hands and a 20 minute drive into the nice neighborhoods.

Ones with spare bedrooms when we never had any bedrooms to spare.

It would be spring time.

Like April kissed May
& the Earth came back home to tell us she loves us after being away.

We would steal flowers.

Fists full of roses, hands carved by thorns. Daises.
Sun flowers.
Tulips.
Daffodils.

We would fill the back seat.
I think - people forgot that the flowers don't sleep at night.
They are still there, waiting for the silence of a sunrise to wake us all up.
Every night I thought they were waiting for us.

For me.

For my hands, still so small, to cradle their broken necks.

My mother was always good at holding beautiful things just a little too tightly.

Now mom - I wake up alone in my bedroom at 3am and I can still smell wet earth and the fear of being caught.

I rise looking for dirt on my shoes, or petals to tell me..

But now I don't find anything.
Just hands still stained with rose thorn kisses.

You used to always say I was a good seed in your garden, and momma I think I've finally bloomed.
A wild flower.
Tired of thunder storms.

A few weeks ago I handed you 1,500 dollars. Poverty is a ***** word we share sheets with.
I know you needed it.
I know I won't ask for it back.
I know some part of you could barely bare to ask, a tongue turned violet, bit backward and ashamed.

I know it's hard to make rent momma
I know it's hard to put food on the table momma

I know,

I know Momma.

But I am 19 years old, and you have taught me to pull the things I love up by the roots and **** them.
To hold them captive.
Like you used to with pills and pipes.

I never knew how to love any other way.

But I thank God,
The stars and the sun,
For these bouquets of heart break.

For this love.
For this insanity.
For this insomnia.
For a garden full of broken steams.
Of broken necks.
Of a home built on top of soft petal carcasses.

You taught me to hurt the things I love.
But I'm just now learning to love from an arms length away.
I know I am fire.
Smoke in these wild fire lungs.
I have to learn to not burn myself.
To not burn down forests I call home.

Momma you've taught me to stop picking flowers in the middle of the night.

And to instead tell them how much they mean to me in the morning.

That love under a cover of darkness, might not be love after all.
Just starving.

A hunger to hold something that I love so much it hurts.

Bones of ebony ivory drunk ate sing
Shaping the plates numbered nailed
Narrows nine hanging sneakers.
A fading necklace
Tying her laces.

Know yourself to the wells of valleys,
She sang, her voice was swelling
Understand yourself like the
Valleys leading wisely
To the eternal tides.

Cliffed-edge hanging dresses blowing
A flag below her waist over wheels
Of her brave weathered suitcase.
Crystal wing bends portraits of
Dinner plates in place.

Lush hair lady ebony-pale ivory sang Through the valleys dressed like
Her portraits of dining plates
Which weathered storms
She would have chased.

This morning there was blood on the pavement.

There are men with teeth where hand should be.
With gapping wound and rot, as humiliation.
Ones who will turn pelvic bones into a shrine,
a good enough trophy.  They will collect fingernails
like seashells from place called body. They will pry
open. They will bite and ****. A bruise for a mouth.
They will turn place called home into place called body.

This morning there were birds in the front yard pulling tiny rubber bands from the Earth.

They will turn knees into figures meant for bending.
Do not bend. With bravery a wronged honor. A
never deserved. An always hurt. Crawl backwards,
make birth a survival tactic. A promise. You will
shed skin off this skeleton. You will be a tremulous

placed called body.
You will not bend.