When your heart is the ocean
it feels like every tide is ready to break,
bloom bruises along the coastline
and send tsunamis through my veins.
There’s so many secrets in my chest
that it hurts to breathe sometimes,
I choke on all that hurt, and I need more
than the salt in my lungs.
Truth be told, it’s lonely on the edge
where everything is green and
you’re just another shade of blue,
so ready to destroy (but not
in the way they want you to).

A girl with a roar too big for her body
sharpens her ribs into points:
a trap for her tender, thunderous heart.

She’s been here too many times
before, counting seconds
until the inevitable,
the call to arms, the battle cry.

A summoning to the field soon to be
stained red, where grown men fall the hardest
and the survivors do not celebrate
because this is not victory.
There is no after-party.

You can’t fight with your foundations
and escape unscathed,
these wars take their toll in the end.
She’s lost her loved ones here before,
you see, and this is her returning to the crime scene,
taking a walk through memories half-faded.

She’s coming to terms with the blood
on her own hands,
one wound at a time, one heartache,
one less voice at the end of the telephone.

People like her know
the truth behind silent suffering,
feel the acid rising in their throat
and know how to stomach it.

Don’t pretend to know how this ends.
It’s different each time
and sometimes the strongest stumble,
caught off guard by an unfamiliar rhythm
in their lungs. Too easily choked.

Not everyone is as ready as she is,
unprepared with their soft
exposed, bared to the world, to the place
where it all ends.

She hopes they’ll make it
but it’s a free-for-all
and she’s made it this far.

This isn’t where she falls.

If the stars of your heart
are scattered, if your tongue
gets tangled up in all the things
you wish you could say, if
every breath comes from
lungs wrapped up too tight
in your pounding veins,
tell the world: I am the sky.
There is a light in my eyes
that could outshine the sun,
I carry the weight of the universe
in my spine, exhale the cosmos
from the gaps in my ribcage.
You know how tall you can
stand, even when storms rage
around your shoulders and the
ground shakes beneath your feet.
There is no limit to your
ability to feel, so embrace it.

This week I turn twenty
and nineteen is ready for the future,
nineteen doesn’t snap and growl anymore,
nineteen isn’t all struck matches
and lips like gasoline,
not all clenched teeth, clenched fists-  
closed heart and sharp tongue.
Seventeen and eighteen hold hands
because they need each other
to cope, and nineteen knows better
but it wasn’t enough
to shake off the nightmares.
Nineteen was the start of something
so much more than the sorry excuse
of seventeen, from which
sixteen still hasn’t recovered
and doesn’t want to talk about it anyway.
Sixteen missed her father
and eighteen couldn’t have cared less,
seventeen spent longer trying
to justify her emotions
than actually feeling them,
but nineteen was left with all that
bitterness and nothing
to sweeten the deal.
Twenty is ready for the next battle,
ready to pat nineteen on the shoulder
and offer her a place to rest,
twenty is the words “it’s safe now”
mumbled in an ear late at night
with arms around a lover.
Twenty is still purple, still violet, still violent-
there’s growing up still to do
but twenty is okay with that.