everything i've ever known
turns to dust, spiraling in a
constellation of tremors and
hyperventilation and worry,
so much worry, and every
moment in which i exist i
can feel my heart threaten
to beat straight out of my
ribcage and maybe i
want it to.

why does it hurt so much, so intensely, so often?

consuming chocolate happens to grant
a more therapeutic, enlightening
experience than any counselor
has given you. the sweets
melt into your tastebuds in a
vast array of decadent
flavors, but the remedy
for your heartache is shattered
just moments after the candy is

devoured. soon,
the bathroom is decorated
in earthy browns, chunks
of violet, lines of indigo,
sunset orange lumps, and
snippets of
incapacitated self-esteem
among spots of your own
red blood because

you need to feel
empty.

my face smashed against the concrete
when you kicked me from your
life; i'm still picking jagged stones
from the spaces between my
teeth. because of this,

i don't smile
anymore.

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

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

the tears fell
onto her feathers
in iridescent moonlight
after she broke her own
wing attempting
to fly away from
home.

i am terrified of the voice
of my father because it
sounds of unknown irony -  how
the one who is called to
love is able to spin fear and
anxious hands and nervous thoughts
through words screamed
so loud the blood vessels in my
eyes break instead
of his.

my dog was full of smiles
when she was in pain,
from the ends of
her large, worn paws
to the greying hairs of
her head, because she
was dying -

but we gave her pizza
as her last meal since she
always
loved it.
more than us.
more than her life, probably,
even when she was so dizzyingly
overcome with
dementia and arthritis and hurt, so much
*******
hurt.

and i cried when we lost her
because it was so sudden, sobbed awful, wet tears into
my brother's torn t-shirt
since we didn't have time to change into better
clothes when we put her down. to help her. to save her.

yet somehow, knowing that we
gave her up
hurts worse than if we'd
lost her in her sleep.

and someday, i might
get into a car accident, and
my guts will splatter along the walls of some beat-down car in brooklyn
and someone i never knew will have
to clean me up. my friends
will lose me my family
will lose me my significant other
will lose me. they may
never
get over it.

so i will
send reckless text messages
and tell them that i love them because ******* it
if they don't love me back, i will
not wait for signs that
will never come, i will
learn four new languages so
i can meet so many more of the people who
may change me, i will
go to therapy and learn
from it, i will
create art that bleeds from my fingertips, i will
weave patterns into the fabric
of other people's lives, i will
hug my little brother when he
needs one, i will
kiss them with reckless abandon even when my parents do not
want me to, i will
be okay with who i am, i will
work on who i am, i will
love who i am.

i will
eat my ******* pizza,
just like my dog.

in case i get into that car accident tomorrow.

i can't help but bleed out the good in me

because sometimes
metaphors aren't obvious enough

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?

everything is strange and eerily quiet
and i am not allowed the delicacy
of feeling sad
and i am not allowed
to feel anything
i am hiding bad habits underneath
makeup and there are blooming
bruises on my arms and
she is so beautiful but she's dousing me in kerosene
nights and lighting matches for her cigarettes on top of me
but i - i - i am not allowed to feel this
i am not allowed to feel this
sixteen years is not enough, it's
never going to enough, i am
never going to be
enough

there's no relief in death
but there's some sweet ecstasy within it
which i've been literally dying to try.

my bones are twisted. the
skeleton cracked at year thirteen
with what could only
be age or agony-
probably a gnarled collaboration
of the two.

i think i've been twenty-one
since i was born; at least, that's
what every teacher i've ever had
thought of me: "mature for her age".
so did every ****** guy high off of
green smoke with eyes glazed over in

lust, either staring at me or straight
through my jeans, whistling and howling
like wolves with blood dripping
down their chins and claws
ready to ****** something already

gone.

i think that's why i died young.

it's one o'clock in the morning
and it smells of drugstore perfume, daisies
mixed with something attempting
to be sweeter than sugar
when its truly salt
swirled together with
arsenic and my vapid feelings.

it's one o'clock in the morning
and it feels like static, like the fuzziness
on television screens and the
sensation of the wires in my
brain snapping from this exhaustion
that was never there till i
gave up on the phantom innocence i'd been
clinging to in the hopes it
was still clinging onto the shreds of
clothing at my feet.

it's one o'clock in the morning
and it looks as though everything has been
painted monochrome. it's a series
of hazy greys and blurry whites, but
it's mostly a black delved so dark
i can't see anything through it; it's
not transparent enough to even
glance at the stars blinking down
toward the earth because the nighttime
won't let me see anything but mysteries
and untouched memories.

it's one o'clock in the morning
and it tastes like blood, so much
blood. there's metal on my tongue
and it's everywhere because there's no
knife anywhere, just this transpiercing
pain in my stomach and my lungs are
being sliced open and the gore of my guts
is spilling onto the tile floor and there's
blood covering my hands and my
face is cracking against concrete and
i'm puking rainbows again
and it tastes of heartsickness.

it's one o'clock in the morning
and it sounds like nothing. it's
the kind of nothing that
everyone notices: the breath that
stops when one gets the news
that their loved one is leaving
them for good, the nothing after
a performance that's left everyone
contemplating the universe and love
and whether i actually want to
live at all, the silence following
the coffin being shut. it's the nothingness
of sobs and heartbreak and
death. it's the sound of
loneliness - particularly mine.

when the word "****"
resonates from the lips of
any teacher, i cannot
help but perceive
how many students' heads
fall downward, staring at
their disquieted hands. i am
wondering how many people are closing
in on themselves, lips pressed together
in thin lines, burying themselves

six feet under into graves
constructed however long ago.
somewhere within the catastrophic enclosings
of their minds, they are the people
reminiscing violent robberies, not
of television sets or radios, but of
innocent souls. they are suffering
from the post-traumatic stress

of feeling  naked skin and cracked
ribcages and heaving lungs
never burn in the turbulent
wildfires left
behind in their burnt
lives; a simple word
is enough to have them
reliving the mournful
affair forming their
empty chest. i glance around the
room for students whose
memory gnaws at their
scarred skin, and

the  problem is
is that there are too many.

i wanted to scream so loudly
the cells circulating my body would
freeze - sadly, the ice which
settled in my blood cells refused
to cave in. the weight of this
has not left  me yet and she
was more beautiful than a
monarch in flight before
she clipped her wings
clean off and the wind
from the act blew us
all away and i'm failing
in this attempt to discover
any merits in thinking about someone
who is unable to come home

yet i'm still texting her
"please come back".

stage 1 of therapy and i have not
made progress. the whispers
stalk me through the battlegrounds
of school corridors - "she tried
to off herself with anxiety pills and left
no letter full of blood"- there's
no part of me left to imagine.
why are my secrets never my own? do
they not belong to me, do they
not belong to me, do i
not belong to me?

stage 2 of therapy and i
am still so terrified
of funerals
and of coffins
and of suicide notes
and i
am so horrified that my heart is drowning
my body is bleeding i won't admit
this pains me so much and i must've
loved everyone so hard, so deeply
there's nothing left to share
this hurts so
this hurts so
this hurts so bad
the repetition is crushing my skull.

stage 3 of therapy and i am
not dead. i am not dead.
i am not dead. i think i'm
losing my sense of self and
everything lacks meaning
and i am dying
and the breath is struggling
and the lungs are struggling
and everything is struggling
and i am dying.
but i am not dead.

stage 4 of therapy and i haven't yet
shot down the parts of myself
attempting to strangle the blood
straight out of me
but i haven't shot myself, either.
which is progress.
progress.
little
by little
progress, a word which i have never
yet delighted in the pleasures of feeling.
progress.

we met two years earlier
on a night when my makeup
was smudged against
the tears. i jumped in front of
your car with aching
sobs burning in the rear
of my throat, knocked
backwards into traffic
with blood seeping out
of the crack in my wrist. i

screamed and cried as
my lungs caved into
this pointless oxygen
addiction but you called
an ambulance anyway, holding
my hand despite the ******
fingertips all the way through. you

visit the hospital each day
till i'm released, whisper "it's
going to be all right, love, stay
golden for me please" into my
hair when you believe me
to be asleep. i fell for you

as hard as the stars would
fall for the moon and our
love story as beautiful
as a flower blooms in the
winter despite the cold.

you were diagnosed
later that year and i watched
the sickness eat at your
heart. i clutched your pallid
hand as you shake, and you'd
never stop trembling for months
on end. you heaved stardust
all over the floor and drenched
your clothes in perspiration
and i could taste the champagne
tainted on your lips

but at night i
whisper "it's going to be all
right love, stay golden for me
please" in your ear, knowing you
aren't sleep.

i held you so close to my
heartbeat but dear god,
when yours stopped
i died with you.

you robbed me,
at the tender age
of non-consent and
bony knees from
something i will
never win back

and i'm not
talking about
virginity anymore

a girl the year above me
killed herself today and i can't
stop thinking, can't stop spinning,
can't stop hurting; there's a gaping wound
in my chest the size of her heart but
i didn't know her, no, not at all,
and everyone is crying
but everyone is crying together.

i talk to trees instead of people. they listen better.

i will tell you this: the devil
is inscribed in the details. when you
haven’t spoken to someone
in months, it’s like greeting
a stranger anew; they are not
who they were five months ago,
or six, or seven. they are a
collection of newfound

cells and new skin and new ideas; they
are not the brilliance you once
observed at 3 am when they
were crying out their reddened eyes
over the fact you did not
love them like you used to. even
if they find some new person kissing
their wounds in a failed attempt
at intimacy, they may still latch
onto your once-love as a blood-*******

leech. the god of trickery and emotional
manipulation is named “my ex-
boyfriend” and i don’t think i like him
very much. “are you missing me” he
sighs to me over the phone, and i
cannot reply. if i whispered “yes”,
he’d grab my wrist and pull me into
his side again; if i whispered “no”,
i’d observe it devour him alive and
bring him into the warmth of a
broken heart.

rummaging through the drawers
of my closet, i find pieces of you
tucked into your old t-shirts
and the notes which cracked
my frowns into grins and the
guitar pick you'd left behind
along with your heart-

oh how i long to throw them to the flames.

all my love's going to drown.

to the girl who wrote me asking
me for advice at four o'clock in the
morning when her brain was high
off of an ashy heart: stop
******* around with toxins, and
no, i don't mean the drugs
turning your life into
unwholesome chaos. i mean
your ******* friends who told
you that
your problems are nothing
your demons are nothing
you are nothing. stop
it. you're better than
them.

to the friend who asked
for advice on how to turn
herself into a walking
skeleton: get over
yourself. anorexia and
bulimia will not fill
some hole in your tragic
past, they will ravage everything
good in you until you
are nothing but the flesh
you have despised. do
not ask me how to "become
an anorexic" because all you
are asking me is how
to die.

to the boy who i have
dedicated so many poems
to: god, you are so oblivious
to everything. to the soulless
"i love you"s spoken out of
pity, to the feigned grins, to
the fact that you are ripping
me apart. i was always told
to not love someone
who was sad because they would
drag me to the pit of the ocean
with them, and i should
have listened. there isn't
enough of me left
to share.

"her writing depresses me" he says

my voice quivers, falls up toward
space and crashes
down
against the sea-salt waves. my voice

s-s-s-stutters, repeats the first
syllable five times and once again
for an even six, repeats, repeats,
repeats. my voice is

quiet and every teacher i've
ever had calls on me with a
"speak up!" but no one ever
listens.

writing is the only voice i've ever known
you will not take that from me.

"why?"*

my breath hitched at
the question and i
thought my heart
would jump straight
from my ribcage, and
maybe i knew it would,
because you do
not want to know
why or when or how i
stopped loving
you

you just want me
to hold your
hand again, you
want the nights of
sugar-tainted lips
and whispers of i love you,
i love you when the
world around you shattered
and pieces of the broken
sky felt like the glass
shards in your lungs

you never really
wanted me
you just wanted
a hand to hold

everything is meaningless and i
mean it. there's no point to this
there's no point to me there's no
point in existing other than to
breathe and love and make sense
of why we're here and
i'm sick of people telling me that the smart ones
are the sad ones
because i'm not smart,
i'm sick.
i'm vomiting up all the
feelings that are so overused
and overexaggerated that i cannot
tell what is normal or not
until someone informs me
that daydreaming
of slashing wrists and leaking
red when i
drop a glass of water
isn't normal. i used
to think everyone was
this way and i used to
think there'd be some
cure
to this, some magic pill
filled with stardust
and a tendency for
chemical codependency
that would make
me stop throwing up
all the feelings
bottled in the pit of
my stomach. (the
magic pill made me throw up,
just not the bad things. only
the good ones.) and
i can't stop thinking about
how everything is meaningless
and we are all here
and they are all there
and no one will ever
know one another completely
and that's not okay with me.
it's not.

i-

well,
      ****.