I’m a Barbie girl
in a Barbie world.
Life’s fantastic! I
feel like plastic,
aiming for an 18-inch waist
because I can afford to throw my internal organs away.
I feel like plastic,
a neck so slender I have to choose
between eating and breathing;
there’s not enough space for two tubes.
I feel like plastic,
a 38-inch bust and
3-times the average amount of forehead.
I feel like plastic,
a size nine shoe squeezed to a three,
spending three to nine avoiding meal time
because my weight-loss book says,
“Don’t eat.”

I’m a Barbie girl,
in a Barbie world.
Life’s fantastic, but I’m
not plastic.
Bile tastes all too organic,
its taste chasing after me
if I exceed my daily nutritional limit of
2,000 calories.
I’m skinny enough that people think I’m healthy.
I’m not skinny enough for people to think I’m unhealthy.
Anorexia is as familiar as the back of my hand,
poised like a gun to the back of my throat,
waiting and ready to blow.
I’m a sixteen-year-old suicide case,
product of the war of production,
wearing battle wounds in the form of uniform lines
across the tops of my thighs.
I’ve been rewriting this poem since its conception.
I feel like the rough draft: concision is key.
(Be smaller.)
I’m trying rewriting,
trying to leave out things that aren’t
important enough, like:
four of my ribs
and my esophagus
and my stomach
and my small intestine.
I’m testing the limits of realism.
But here’s the thing:
I’m a real girl
in a real world.
Life’s not always fantastic,
but I am not plastic.

I am not plastic.

I refuse to be plastic,
aiming for generic weight range
based on content, not scale number.
I refuse to be plastic,
eating and breathing
like both are vital aspects to living.
I refuse to be plastic,
an actual hip-to-bust ratio
for not a thirty-year-old but a teenager.
I refuse to be plastic,
shoe size nine in size nine shoes,
trying to start enjoying mealtimes
because my “weight-loss book”
has been chucked down the chute.
I’m a living girl
in a terrifying world,
trying to remind myself that “Life in Plastic!”
is not fantastic.

Icarus washes up on Miami Beach over the spring break of 2k16 and finds a world where the gods roam the streets,
where his wax wings burned themselves into trenches of scars down his back,
where we warn our children of the dangers of flying too high,
but forget the part about the riptides waiting if you fly too low.

He asks Siri how far away the sun is,
finds Apollo in the red rocks of New Mexico
off I-40 just outside of Albuquerque,
alone and basking in the heat.
The ice caps are melting.

The sun still hurts to touch,
burning Icarus's hands and leaving fingerprints in the feathers of his melted wings,
but Apollo is much kinder now,
soothing the skin cancer with freckles and soft touches.
It no longer feels like a damning.

This is what happens to the children of tragedies:
they flinch too much,
they fall too hard,
they're fragile as glass but immune to everything the world can throw at them.
Icarus flinches at the sound of the oceans.
He knows the wrath of Poseidon.

Icarus rises from the dead with his irises washed white
and his rips etched with Hades's name:
he should have been a child of Persephone,
spring in his hands and flowers in his hair.
He should have spent his days sprawled in the sun's caress.
He should have been infinite.

Icarus flinches too much.
That's what everyone keeps telling him.
He flinches too much at every lifted voice and crashing wave and
he flinches too much when he feels sunshine on his face.
Icarus is sorry for flinching too much.
Icarus is trying not to flinch too much.
Icarus is sorry that it's taking so long to just get over his trauma and stop flinching so much--
sorry.

He doesn't know what to do now that he's touched the sun
and this time it didn't burn.
He wanted it to burn.
He wants to burn.
He wants to feel his bones breaking all over again because
that's the only time he doesn't feel like he needs to be in control.
Why is he chasing things that hurt?
Why does he feel
like he deserves to hurt?
He deserves to crash.

He finally touched the sun.
Icarus feels empty, and
he's still flinching.

You’re a Monday child, born on the first day of the week--
the weakest link--
You’re like the moon.
You’ve got nothing to give--
the sharp darkness of your crescent is someone else’s shadow,
and your light is nothing but the reflection of something bigger
and brighter than you.
You’re a disappointment child,
potential building like the Tower of Babel,
everyone telling you that if you had just tried hard enough,
then you could have touched God.
But you’re just a Monday child,
an extrovert who runs up the electricity bill by leaving on
all the lights when you’re home alone,
how even with your earbuds in you leave the TV on.
Pretending to be near people who are alive makes you feel a little less like you
already died a long time ago.
Darkness doesn’t take days off and
neither do your thoughts, so
wrap yourself in stars.
You want to find light in the constellations but
it’s hard to trace lines between dots behind fog.
Mondays are longer on Mars.
You were born with stress in your veins, heaping projects with no real due date,
in a constant state of waiting for Friday,
but weekends are for the weary,
and the taut line of your spine implies that you
don’t deserve a break.
The thing about Mondays is that they’re crushing,
filled with longing,
the way that you only feel homesick when you look up at the moon and her fraud light.
You wrap yourself in nebulae and galaxies to try to
keep the homesickness at bay while you sleep.
Nothing will ever be good enough.
You will never be good enough.
You are a Monday child, a bitter aftertaste of someone else’s loss,
like you’ve smiled too brightly at a stranger leaving a funeral home.
You dug your own grave a long time ago.
Your eyes are clouded with looking too far forward, stretching yourself backwards,
hanging onto the aftertaste of the weekend while living for the next.
You hang like laundry,
brittle in cold wind,
the step between that no one likes to linger on.
You were born on a Monday.
But your eighteenth birthday fell on a Wednesday,
your sixteenth on a Sunday,
and you are more than a desperate reach for empty space.
The Tower of Babel did not touch God.
You are not here for someone else to tell you to touch God.
You are not here for someone else.
You may be a disappointment child,
with your Monday fog eyes and shaking hands,
but sometimes you have to choose your own joy over someone else’s expectations--
because I was born on a Monday,
and poetry comes easier than physics but nothing
calms me down quite like solving differential equations.
I was born on a Monday,
and I’m used to looking at other people’s faces and seeing disappointment
because I don’t think I'm quite what any of us wanted me to be.
I cling to the past the way that Monday clings to Sunday,
but daydream about the future like it’s Saturday.
The problem is Tuesday through Friday, because
nothing quite makes me want to die like the concept of
planning out the rest of my life.
I think I’ll be alright, though,
because on Monday nights I look at the stars and think that
I might be figuring out how to feel alive,
like maybe home is in the constellations that I still don’t quite know.
Maybe home is in the Mondays,
or maybe it’s in the weary camaraderie of humanity’s ability to cling to weekdays.
Most days, I have to remind myself that this is just the beginning,
simultaneously relieving and daunting,
because I’m scared of the future and I’m scared of being disappointing.
I’m a Monday child, born under a full moon that feels like home
whether I’m looking at it from Jamaica or Germany or Kansas City.
Chaos comes with the start of the week,
and losing myself has always felt comforting:
that’s the only time when I have no one else to be.

fidgeting with fickle strings, twisting
pulling and breaking like eye contact
snapping, the sound of teeth cracking
out of the game, out of the ballpark
never hit a home run never had to run home
homeward bound is such a strange term
rooftops sheltering storm clouds
while it downpours outside the windowpanes
pained expressions painted with water
watering down words to find a format
MLA citations of a speeding ticket
slow down there, rockette,
you won’t get anywhere that fast
i’m going nowhere fast now
everything in slow motion now
space cadet, always spaced out
coloring pages with disregard for lines
patterns and patterns and patterns and
ripped out notebook pages covered
pages of equations of how to go
shooting out of this town like a star
burned out down to the core
aging exponentially to fight the decay
termites digging tunnels in the wood now
collapsing haunted houses
housing skeletons and coffins in the closets
closest person turn out the lights
lighting candles like a vigil
candied hearts with a sour aftertaste
tasting pieces of words as they form
syllables, stumbling and tumbling
rolling down grassy hills
bug bites, goosebumps, a chill
just play it cool in the depth of humidity
humility is a lesson to learn in the heat
heating up old left-overs for dinner
left-over bumblebees bumbling bumbling
where is that buzzing coming from now?

i found out the meaning of home somewhere along the broken highways of new mexico, red sands chock full of iron and cars carrying tumbleweeds on the underside of their exhaust pipes. i found life out in the desert, spinning off road and out of control until the crash, totalled, broken bones and putting the pieces together again. sometimes it’s hard to love someone when you’re always with them, like how looking at the same side of the moon never gets old because it hides in the daylight, like how eleven-hour car rides can turn into tense late hotel nights.

i found out the meaning of home in a kaleidoscope, neon street signs in a language i’ve never been able to speak, looking for eyes looking for me. there’s something unnerving about the dead of night in kansas city, like a piece of me that no one else has ever been supposed to see, old marks and places where bones were forced to regrow, old sunburns that just live under the skin instead of on display again. i keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, but i’m not sure when the first one fell in the first place, like i’ve been waiting to figure out if i’ve ever belonged in a single solitary place, like how every single star that i’ve ever seen sounds like it could hold a home in its heart for me.

i found out the meaning of home in the decay, the falling apart at the seams, plucked out by a compulsive need, snapping loose strings from the sleeves of hoodies until there’s nothing left of me except for the unravelling. the southwest is scattered with the rubble of long-abandoned twice-owned properties, old lots where children never played because the tar has always been melting, liquidating, capitalizing on the collapse of what used to be.

i found the meaning of home but i lost the memory. every word i’ve ever spoken is rotten poetry because i can’t remember what i’ve said or who i’ve claimed to be. i feel most at home when i’m lost, when i’m wandering, and now i’ve been far enough to know that the twisting highways of the midwest will never be confusing again for me. i need to go further, farther away from the mess of puzzle pieces that i’ve been handing out to anyone who wants a part of me. i’ve always been disjointed, like since july i’ve been popping my jaw into place every time i have something to say because it doesn’t want to stay the way that it should be, like i don’t want to stay the way that i am but i have to because it’s expected of me.

i lose myself every time someone asks me who i want to be: lost until i know everything, then pushing and going and moving and never ever staying, making a home in the bones of the sun before she ejects me, evicting me from the ghost town of what her heart used to be. why has everything become arizona to me? like the edge of the grand canyon promising something better than a downfall, a mile down of feeling like flying, like standing on the edge gets my heart racing. maybe the only reason i ever wanted to be dead was because everyone stopped listening, and i’ve always been a performer before anything.

i wish i could find answers from highway signs, in the songs my friends sing in my car as we speed, five ten fifteen eighty, integrity. i wish i had more words after eighteen years of spewing things that don’t have meanings. i wish things were easy, like the rocky mountain breeze coming down from the north and infecting the humidity in a way that makes the sky feel more free. i wish that i could find something that made me feel that free, something besides the seconds before the fall, the anticipation of the drop, the sensation of weightlessness that only comes with being bound or released from gravity. maybe someday i’ll grow wings, fly faster than this toyota ever drove me. maybe home is in the shapes of the clouds, a castle in the sky blinded by the sunrise. maybe home is in the memories, and maybe that’s why i always feel like i’m chasing things.

how many times have your eyes haunted mine?
--a fading dream as daylight finds its way through your window frame,
like wooden fences with invitations to climb, to rise and rise
til you're mountain high,
to the top of the Tower of Babble and touching God.
cotton candy is the texture of heaven on the tongue,
the bite of hell when it sticks to the sweat on your fingertips.
everything is hazy at the state fair,
and no one knows how long they've been here--
your smiles make days blur and slide, like you've painted your nails
with the fabric of space-time.
phantom touches from lingering gazes are all i know now,
extinction of the way that i used to be,
because your eyes won't stop haunting me.

you are more than the second child
you are more than your mother's eyes
you are more than your self-prophesied
self-inflicted demise
you are more than your downfalls and your doubts
wind in your wings under the sun's collapse
can you feel the scorch on your back?
the burns don't scar but leave phantom marks
from where the wax has melted.
apollo always smiled too bright,
so warm that it burned out your retinas
and washed the color from your irises.
the ocean will sooth the memories,
aloe vera for old haunts and past loves,
broken families and falling, falling,
falling