Her ribs crackled, in the skeleton night.
And I remember my mouth on hers,
where atomic fish hooks attached our lips.
Where there was nothing like kissing
like our God wasn't dead.

She was accused of killing a taxi driver
in the Brazilian underbelly.
Smoking a cigarette, she dropped it on the ground,
spat on it, and crushed it with her bare foot,
saying she fell in love with the way
his sleep-drenched body lay.

And I told her to stay home.
And I told her that they'd find her.
But she didn't stay home.
And they did find her.

Chasing her through the Babylon brush,
insults were thrown and so were balloons of gasoline.
Each pink, yellow, and green vessel floated in the air, as an internal opera heightened.
And sour splashes spread across her body,
as she fled from the vigilante mob.

The children danced along the panoramic horizon she ran beside,
laughing, pointing, singing.
The slumbering sorrow of the situation became evident,
and she started to feel the calm of fleeting life.

Her dreams aborted and her ideals became fallacies,
and with the sound of fuzzy motors in the background, her heart leapt and her feet slipped.

Rope ate into her, wrapping her like the orphaned recklessness of each set of eyes that painted her.
She squirmed amongst the cheers.
She cried with every thrown beer and balloon.
The empty-eyed males gang ***** her.
The women covered the children's eyes,
and the children tried to move their mothers' hands.

And I pushed my way through the crowd.
And I saw her smothered in blood, beer, and gasoline.
I wanted to halt the hurricane that destroyed morality.
But I am a coward.
Frozen by my fear, I, too, am a murderer.
And a murderer I'll always be,
for the burning of all that was good.

Sudden flames soared towards the sky.
Laughter escaped as molotov cocktails exploded onto her body.
Her head turned towards the crowd,
as flames scampered across her face.
I saw in her, what I never saw before,
which was the human race.

And I want to tell her that I understand
what it feels like to be fake, insignificant,
and a shadow on the sidewalk of society.

And I want to tell her that I also borrow
the experiences of others --
that I, too, learn feelings
by stopping and staring at personal wreckage,
like a tourist of emotions,
like an inevitable wish of a human being.

Still-birth emotions laying on the snow.
If I let you smile, will sticky lips let go?
After-birth sensations, beaten under hail.
I want to **** the blood out of your gums.
I want to touch you until your body's stale.

Venus in the snow -- the more I taste you,
the more the echoes in our mouths slow.
Shake it, baby -- **** me like I just got out of a coma.
Nothing more that I want than to be your trauma.

And I just have to bury myself in your emotions.
And to drown in the swell of separate oceans.

I see how white light startles.
I snapped a pic and she spun in circles.
She wanted a photograph
to cover her mother's epitaph,
so she could have a laugh.

She smoked to get away -
but this isn't what'd she say,
exhaling, "All we are is carbon
and a lack of empathy."

We blended into hues of
microwave dinners
and church alters.
I used to tell her to go
just to halt her.

We prayed to get away -
but that's not what we'd say,
whispering, "Help us be more
than carbon and a lack of empathy."

My brain is a factory,
producing every toxic part of me.
******* until my hand gets lazy,
fantasizing about Lexi Belle
and being Martin Scorsese.

My blood is a vacuum,
alone in a crowded room;
my white blood cells like to
travel to my *****,
so I can someday infect
designer uterine walls.

Locked and loaded,
my heart exploded.
The tissue and issues
attracted crocodiles
that swam from the mall,
for miles and miles.

Store-bought baby, my body isn't ready,
to be stripped down to the bone,
and sold to teenage radios,
that'll broadcast my American moans.

Caucasian nightmare:
my skin is not fair.
Peel enough off with chemicals,
until I decide there's no more,
and hide the layers in bathroom stalls,
located in the bleach of Baltimore.

O, ethereal Earth -
tortured town towering oneself.

Under Grace, thy swift death -
and upon mercy, a light, jest.

To be your Savior -
your only favorite -
is what's best.

My mother held me,
and asked what was wrong with my world.
Her rubbery hands in my hair.
"I feel like a plastic narrative," I said,
"and there's nothing I can do about it."

Elizabeth and God exist in a sunflower grave. Her mother and father slit her stomach open and watched the contents pour out like
spaghetti confetti.

Tommy, Elizabeth's boyfriend, rode his ocean blue Huffy, until the tread on his tires grew bald and until the grips were blanketed by dead skin. Looking for her, panoramic views of the horizon leapt beside him. Silhouettes of his legs, churned and kissed the orange and caramel dusk. With every tear in his hamstrings and calves, the **** in his sky grew and swallowed the memory of Elizabeth Mendenhall, Honor Student.

Margot, Elizabeth's twelve year-old sister, was an idealistic soul. Taking a Sharpie, she wrote on her sister's wall, "Liz, there is no death greater than the loss of self, and no life greater than one where we continuously search for what self is." Margot struggled with concentrating and frying eggs - but focused on the sunflower garden, dangerously and perfectly.

Hilary and Brendan were thirty-five and thirty-six years-old. They stabbed their daughter thirty-seven times. They don't know why they did it, they just couldn't think of a reason not to do it.

She begged for her life. The yellow petals of the sunflowers caught blood-drops and, after enough struggle, floated down to kiss and lay on Elizabeth's slow-twitch body. Hilary looked at Brendan and said, "What does this mean?" Brendan shrugged and said, "This is new to me."

The garden was an oven, and digging her grave was like pulling back on a cheap, plastic latch. Elizabeth had pale, pre-cooked pie crust skin. The slits in her stomach looked like peeks into a cherry stuffed filling. Crinkled lips looked indented by a stainless steel fork, back and forth, side to side. And the soil rained upon her like the reversal of hot vapor, returning home.

Elizabeth and the Sunflower Garden.

His dog chased her
through the woods.
The rifle can **** from
three-hundred yards.

Watch her leap logs
and sidestep
sticks grabbing
at her shoulders.

There are three Gods
in the woods,
behind any tree.

No one is as ruled
as the lawless.
No one is as sedated
as the frenzied.

Sympathy couldn't be
measured in screams,
but measured
in her breaths.

Beyond the
honeydew horizon,
the senseless cease.
The half-life of eyes:
her only escape.

Where the tree-trunks
are furnished by the
candied corpses.
Her feet chomp at the
prostituted ground.

She will die, here,
whether she lives
or not.
For what is stolen,
stays.

In flashes,
her face dances
on top of a
broomstick body.

She refills
coffee cups and
her stomach with
butter pecan ice cream
and lovers' saliva.

But her lovers are
strangers
and her mouth is a
place
where secrets are locked
behind smoke stained teeth.

In flashes,
her ambitions escape
into the jet black night.
Cigarettes dropping like
sputtering fruit flies.

A size seven New Balance
buries a Marlboro corpse,
burning out like the light
in her kiwi eyes.

She returns to the diner.
What echoes reign free.