In the end, you never came home.
I sat by the door with my arms turning
to dust aching for you to return.
You left the kettle on
and I drowned myself in it.
Chamomile, Earl Grey, Lemon, English
who cares what the sachet says
as long as it's hot and burning
my tongue because every little pain
is a pain I've to endure.
It takes my mind off you.

Women
are not mysterious.

We are not shrouded
in cloaks made from the night sky.

We are not anomalies
or irregularities in the data.

Our nature has been hidden
from men, by men.

We have not been studied;
Not extensively, thoroughly, over centuries.

Not the way men have been, either.
There was no equal footing in
analyses.

Women were test subjects, when men were patients.
When we were "relevant" at all.

This pattern literally kills us quicker.
In medicine, and love.
In the office and the bedroom.
In the workshop and the nursery.

In the kitchen.

In the kitchen.

Some food for your soul:

Everyone is magical.
You don't need a pointy hat and a ******.

Everyone is intellectual.
You don't need spectacles, white skin, or a *****.

Everyone is environmental.
Just go outside.

You just need to be you.

Subscribing to the binary
and rejecting it completely:
One ties your hands,
the other your feet.

Be all the parts of you. Then you can feel
Whole.

Sustainability
An odd moniker
That has come to represent
That we cannot hate and mine and drill
and pillage and ****
the Earth and each other
Indefinitely.

So what can we do indefinitely?
Sustain (not so odd after all).
Sustain our love and kindness and patience.
Reform our economies and sanitation.

Build lives that foster life;
Plant, and nurture.
Harvest, and dry some seeds for next year.

Marching makes a point.
We need to tell others how we feel.
So they can help us
Do what we need to do.

Impeach hate. Kick it out of office.
We have everything to lose.

When it comes to human beings
There is no such thing as a lost cause.

There is such thing
as a human being
which is not my
burden to bear
anymore.

I'm giving myself total permission
To let go of you.
And that means writing you
poems too.

The artistry of protection;
the elegant deception.

Poisons of the mind,
And their bitter antidotes.

If my life is a work of art,
Then it is community theatre.

And I am thankful
To everyone who keeps
The curtain
From closing.

*Thank you

Once,
or a million times,
you hid behind your one way glass
or your no way, plastic frames-

And I let you.

All our connection gets refracted;
Split-
Into the many colours of our defence mechanisms
that just reinforce
our loneliness.

Take your glasses off. Let me see you.
I'll take mine off too, so we can blindly make eye contact.

We passed today like strangers
In the street.

You saw me, and glared-

But said nothing.
You are very good, after lots of awful practice,
at saying nothing.

I'll beg you one more time, say something.

I've composed this message a million times
in my head.

But seeing you-
hating the feeling that you hate me
becomes unbearable.

Because I tried my best to love you,
and yet
I am worse than a stranger.

Once the clingy thing you could not stand,
Now I'm blamed for abandoning you.

And back I am again.
Feeling it is fitting:
We barely knew each other anyway.

ever so lightly he lays a finger on my lips and tells me to stay quiet. he tells me that his body pressed on top of mine is what God would have wanted, he tells me that my little girl face is so sweet like a scoop of vanilla ice cream, I have no flaws yet, but he had a spoon.
'no' can't resonate from my lungs when I barely know my left and rights and my ups and downs.
lying down in an office, the therapist gives me a stress ball that has the world painted on it. our snacks are light but the subjects are not, I tune out the sessions but I hear a question out of the blur, "do you remember what he did?" I squeezed the voodoo stress ball so tightly my world starts spinning, -I reply- he taught me to keep my silver wear drawers SHUT. I'm five years old again and I don't know my lefts or my rights or my ups or my downs. Life is not a box of chocolates it's a bowl of melting dairy.
-I'm grounded- for lying. two weeks in my room and they take my blankets; that's what the doctors told them to do. While I shiver in the night all alone, I'll think about what I did wrong. We are so disappointed in you Savannah.
Im starting to feel less vanilla and more... rocky road. I'm to be seen and not heard. I have two ears and one mouth and I am to be using them in that proportion.
I've gotten so used to hospital socks and cold spoons and the mindset of 'you're the problem' and 'boys will be boys'
Later in life I'll get to tell him that I no longer have a vanilla scoop for a face, I have bags under my eyes and tobacco in my teeth, the only thing sweet about me is this menthol flavor in my mouth. I fixate on anything other than speaking so that the world can't hear what I have to say, even if the law believed me, even if my friends believed me, even if our parents believed me, a prison cell could never hold you.

my heart
will never be as heavy as the ones of the
children who are forced to learn the anatomy of a gun
in two seconds
flat. it doesn't matter if you believe in
god. god finds calm in
violence, god doesn't come
here, to the schools that are named after presidents and
townspeople who've done good
deeds, places
that were supposed to be
safe.

my heart
will never be as heavy as the ones of the
parents who sent their kids to
school in dresses and ironed
khakis and two little
pigtails and got them back in
body bags. there are no
flags here. no Purple Hearts
for the kids who couldn't wait long enough to find
god.