words tangled in my ear like vines
and cackled laughter, hands balled
up in fists, a cacophony of everything
i'd ever been terrified of. my
mother never pondered where
the violet-blue patches of skin had
appeared nor where i'd lost
my tooth the last day of second
grade, discovered three days
later by a janitor in a pool
of blood from a fight
broken out on the little
girl with no one else.

the tooth fairy gave me a dollar
for the gap between my teeth
but the tooth itself had cost me
so
   much
         more

i'm trying to make memories with people who won't **** me but you're still there, and maybe you're always going to be there, and some memories do not heal for they are too powerful to drown in the ruin of myself and your poison is still lurking in my throat. nothing terrifies the marrow in my bones more than knowing that you are the pain in the back of my mind, and it has been six months since you left me dead, six months since my poems were all written on the moon instead of dreaming of the stars, six months since you slurred that you swallowed tablets to detox me from you, six months. you. you are your smirk, you are your dumb pick up lines, you are your flirtatious text messages despite the lack of a relationship we hold, you are your stupid ******* rocker jeans and the way your eyes used to glint in the navy shade of 4am, smoke curled along the edge of your lip, your hand reaching for the belt loop of my jeans. nimble fingers hold guitar picks and make music as opposed to love and there was no love there at all, just the idea of it embedded in your teeth and in my hands in your hair and the smell of art and lust and strawberry chapstick and the wreckage of my being up in flames.

is my blood still lingering on the cracks of your lips? have i stained you?

i-

well,
      ****.

i've spent my whole life
searching for an escape route
that has never appeared
at the fondest of times
but ******* it, i
will paint that sign myself,
in the rusted blood seeping
from my heart,
if it means this will end

i do not know if this
scares you

but someday,
i will no longer
drown your memory
by writing ****** poems
at 1:13 am

and you won't exist to me

you kiss me hard with your teeth and
blood coats the roof of my mouth, metallic
and sharp, and i will envelop
myself in darkness
for that is where
i belong

and when fireworks stop cracking on the
night sky
and when the stars
refrain from blinking down at
streetlights guiding the path to our future
and when you kiss me goodbye with
burning lips
and my own are unscathed whilst my neck is
blooming third-degree burns,
flesh melting on the site
and when the sun turns to moonlight
because its own flames have known
no heat
and when i will stop finding metaphors
about firefirefirefirefirefire
and when every winter
you'd put us through ceases
its frozen barricade
and when i stop
discovering myself hovering over the
edge of a lake donning memories
that refuse to drown
and when i
stop wishing there was some possibility
of drowning myself in the bathtub -

i will finally have the guts
to say

i don't love you