the body of this poem is about two bodies, sometimes poetic things are ***** and sometimes ***** things are poetic things under the dirt of what i'd been taught my whole life about my virginity. i was told that if i lost it i wouldnt be able to find it again. i was not told about a boy, tall and skinny and blonde, blue-gray eyes, i was not told that i would kiss him, i was not told that my kiss would be his first. i didnt know at the time that summer would collapse into one moment, i could never have guessed that two crazy transgender boys could coincide with virginity as strongly as we pressed our bodies together. i was fourteen years old and my body was a choppy pencil sketch of anorexia and rib damage, of breast tissue and scar tissue, of anxiety and hipbones. he was fifteen years old and to me he was beautiful, everything strange and weird in our brains was erased and forgotten, fogged up with our heavy breathing. i am wrapped up in firsts and lasts and the first time was not entirely the world-shattering that it was built up to be, we were built up, and then i forget why we stopped. but we stopped. but we stopped being far apart and afraid to tell each other how close we wished we were. we learned how to commit heavy sins, the kind that make you feel good. we learned that our relationship is textbook unhealthy, but unhealthy people means unhealthy partners means unhealthy- means *******, we are trying our best and *******, this is what love means. this tangle of fingers. we learned that we have to not only have secrets but become them. we didnt have to be taught what it feels like to need someone. we didnt need to learn how it tastes to be absolutely sure of something.
my entire life i was taught that i should save myself for a man, but instead i let go of myself and loved a boy.

the less you eat,
the less you weigh
it'll show more every day

the more you eat,
the more you grow
and getting fat is a big no

so stop eating
it'll all be fine
just stop eating,
but dont you whine

if you stop eating,
you'll look like me
and dont you see
how happy you'll be?

i didnt know
that my cousins birthday party was today and so
i shoved bleeding legs into jeans
and pulled a plaid shirt over the
parts of my skin that are wide open
and i
ate the safe things and pressed tears back into the dark
circles below my eyes
found a scale upstairs and pale blue display pulled me in
i dont know any of the things that the
teenaged girls one year older than me
think
im just a fractured kid
one year younger than them
but worlds apart

You
Are not a man.
You are not worth
My mercy
Or my words how dare you
Touch him
With your hands filthy
Threaten to beat the **** out of
My lover?
If he doesn’t give you his cell phone you
*******
Or else he could give you
A ten minute *******
And escape with his life
And his bones intact
But not with his dignity
Not without ***** rising in his mouth and pain shooting through his body and reaching deep into the cracks that I have slowly been helping him heal
You are
Not worth my mercy
Or my words and
If I had my way you
Would be
Sitting pretty under my knife
If I had my way I would have my
Sadistic revenge.
Your bones
Are going to look so good
As earrings.

when i say i want to take kickboxing,
join the gym
it's for the meatheads
it's for the men who think their cars are armor
who think their voices are god
it's a properly thrown punch for the girls
who do nothing but exist in the world
in their own bodies
in their clothes
this is the one time my mother excused me
for screaming *******
to the man who said
a girl walking on the other side of the street
was
a **** **** ***** and
honking his horn
i want to learn how to down someone three times my size with a single strike,
to be the silent
protector
of the world

I did not want to write a poem titled obituary because I was worried that it would become about you. I did not want to read a poem about you out loud because I did not want anything that I wrote for you to fly away from me like you could have flown away from me, but this poem isn’t about you anymore, it’s about me. This poem is about everything I could have written my own obituary about. I was made out of the kind of smiles that show your teeth and I was always made out of the kind of skin that nobody thought they were going to need to turn into metaphors. and my scars are as pink and white as anyone else’s scars, my bruises don’t look like flowers, they look like tiny blood vessels under my skin have burst. I do not want my obituary to say that I was a valued member of a community I did not feel safe in, I wrote this poem as I dissolved in a hotel room in yokohama, I wrote my obituary once on a bus ride home from school, I wrote a suicide note on the back of a US history assignment that I never turned in, I write my own obituary once a month, sometimes once a week. I am not broken. I am not sad, not shattered. I am building an altar inside of bones that don’t usually have poems written about them. I wrote down all the words I couldn’t pronounce without breathing, and I wrote it in ink but it may as well have been blood.

I can’t count the number of times I have read that little quote
Superimposed over black and white photos
Of those skinny girls
Sick girls
Stick-thin pictures of girls that my best friend tells me are impossible
Your words
Nothing
Tastes
As
Good
As
Skinny
Feels.
Oh no, my dear, nothing tastes as good as being whole
Feeling whole
Skinny doesn’t have a taste
But if I had to give it one, it would be
The taste you have in the back of your mouth when the alcohol’s washed down your throat
Sour and burning
Skinny tastes like it's pressing on my lungs
Skinny tastes like the inside of the mouth of someone who you know will never love you
I kissed ana long and hard in the dark but her bones
All
Snapped
When I pressed too hard.

it was the kind of year that lasted longer than the ones around it, at least for some people and i guess that i cant really say what kind of year it was because how am i supposed to remember that far into my childhood? i was little. littler than i can remember being and it's been sixteen years since then and i keep trying to calculate the weight i have gained since 1999. and what i've lost, who i've found, since 1999 we were a tangle of potential. since 1999 i lost weight, i gained weight, i gained heavy strain on my shoulders and i didnt carry water buckets at camp because i thought i'd thrown out my shoulder, since 1999 i have been existing but i dont think that all of the time i've been exposed to the elements counts as being as alive as i am when i'm the only sober one at the park, when the boy next to me is whacked out on codeine cough syrup and asks me to punch him as hard as i can i will try to remember 1999, when i couldnt remember existing.

His eyes are grey-blue like the frozen sheet over a lake of
Infathomable
Fear.
His eyes are soft and sharp at the same time like the sweet kiss of metal and they’re dark like holes in my heart
His eyes are open wide and his pupils dilate when he looks at me and I don’t need to ask when he’s that close because I can tell from the softness of his breath and his fingertips
That
He loves me
Like falling rain that runs down my glasses or plaid flannel shirts that we cannot abandon,
His eyes are light when he looks at me and they gloss over like clear nail polish when he walks into a crowded room, animal instincts wide open with fingernails he doesn’t know he is hurting me but I let him hold my hand as tightly as he needs to.

Is this more than you bargained for?
you dont have enough tissues to soak up the blood and you wanted this didnt you?
I wrote the gospel on giving up
you read my text and took every letter to heart imagining the power behind my apathy
Dance, dance, we're falling apart to halftime
just keep jumping and moving and keep yourself sunk in the crowd of poisoned children
And you can **** me, **** me*
It doesnt matter how many times I say it, just shoot me, oh ******* hell **** me now, you think it's just words out of mouths but ***** lips are not making a joke.

i've always been good
i thought
about cleaning out my wounds
and bandaging them
if not with proper bandages,
with clean salvaged items.
but i thought i was done, thought i wasnt going to pull so hard anymore and that i would be satisfied with thin red bubbles of blood that scabbed over in an hour,
i wasnt
so when the skin on my thigh split like an ocean, like a mouth,
i wasnt ready to disinfect properly.

Burning
Ruined
Open wounds
Killing everything you dont like about yourself
Emptiness
Nobody knows

http://vocaroo.com/i/s0WQ9j4rDjc8
.
.
.
.
There’s something about the word flesh,
your circuit board is copper,
there’s no way to tell who is made of metal,
I am made of metal and blood and your voice is sort of like ice which is to say that it’s too hot for me,
that your saliva is acid
which is to say that your breath is possibly an antidote.
How many times have you been opened up like a white man’s mouth, and do you think you could swallow me or should I skip dinner again? Should I skip family again?
Should I break myself into bite size pieces to be more palatable, should I be another long sleeved t-shirt so you do not need to ask me why I am cracked-
We are a doll’s tea set. Sometimes you try to hold a tea party and even the dolls stand you up, sometimes you hold a teacup at just the wrong moment and it shatters.
Sometimes you never manage to pick up all of the pieces.
I’m fine, which is to say that part of my head is on fire and the right side of my body is made of wax.
You are beautiful, which is to say you are constructed out of pain.
you are not broken which is to say you are destroyed, we are fighting which is to say that we are blasphemy and gospel at the same time.

Dear, please, listen to what I’m saying I know you don’t want to hear me say that I care. Sweetheart, don’t convince yourself that you are anything but lovely, please don’t let your skin become a sheet of paper but if you do, please come to me and let me see and let me hold you and let me fix it. My dear, your hair is wild, reaching up for the sky trying to fly you away but please never think that it is only prevented by the number on the scale, please never listen to protruding ribcages and Cassie Ainsworth. Darling, you do not need to love yourself in order to have other people love you, and anyone who truly loves you will help you learn to love your own sweet self. And sweetness, your kiss is like chocolate and your fingertips are like sunshine, your tears are like icicles that fall from the roof and every drop that soaks into your bedspread is like an icy dagger pressing against my chest. Baby, you put on your armor- your MCR t-shirt, your crop-top, your baggy jeans, your thrift-store hoodie, your high-waisted shorts. Put on that armor my love because nobody should ever make you feel bad for feeling good. Everything passing through that beautiful head of yours is worthy, valid, real.
everything you are is something for me to love.

i did
the thing i said
i would never do again it's
dripping
down my arm
summer's coming
so i went up
on my shoulder
where nobody could see i
thought i
was gonna
be clean but
i cant
i'm not good enough

i just got back from a trip to japan and i know i should be grateful to my parents for taking me but i'm getting dizzy from blood loss, i never really had enough self control.

baby, its not ******* pretty
the way i havent showered in, i think, going on a week?
it's not beautiful, the way my hair snarls around my fingers when i try to make myself look half-decent
it's not pretty or poetic or deep when
i cant get out of bed in the morning
it isnt tragically beautiful when i hurt myself to feel something
anything
depression isnt pretty
or poetic
or lovely
depression isnt pretty girls with long hair who cry in window seats next to rainy gray days
it's me.

It is my job to feel your pain
It is my job to keep you sane
But I need help from someone, too
You didn’t give up on me,
So I wont give up on you.