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Ella Snyder Jul 2013
“You look so sullen today,” he would tease.
He would try to iron the wrinkles
on my forehead with the palm of his hand.
The worry lines that I have had from before I understood
trembling breaths and foggy thoughts,
the creases that are not so easily pressed away
with soft words and even softer touches.
Daddy, I have loved melancholy
since I broke my wrists the first time
and learned the name of every bone
in the human body
because I realized I liked the unknown,
but I liked knowing it better.
Ella Snyder Jul 2013
I curled up in the curve of your pelvic bone. It felt like soot-filled chimneys and water-warped floorboards.

I compared our fingers. They both resembled willow branches as they brushed together.

I climbed to your ear and I caved inwards so you could hear the ocean in my frame singing to you.
Ella Snyder Jul 2013
“I am sorry I called you a fat assed ***** in seventh grade. You were smarter than me and you had your life bundled up and handed to you. I was…jealous.” Is what I imagine Keisha would say in her apology letter to on her deathbed. The white blonde hairs falling out of her head as she shriveled up like raisin.

When I knew her, her skin was always *****. She wore fluorescent clothes with spaghetti straps and she had a stick and poke tattoo of butterfly behind her ear.

Before I met her, I was scared of her because I accidentally confused her for the 6’6 ball slaying giant who could dunk it faster than you could say “we’re running sprints next practice” was also named Keisha, but then I found out Keisha didn’t play basketball (well) and was white.

Keisha rolled with her crew of other fourteen year olds. They wore matching hi-tops and hoop earrings. They were tsunamis scaring the innocence out of the other pre-teen kids. They spewed sewage on any slide-rider or sea saw-sitter that set their sights on.

She would scream obscenities at me from the sidewalk. Too proud to let her toes touch the sand that I stood on.

In my ignorance of the consequences, I said “stop” and she shouted, “say it again” and defiantly I did.

Her jaw would come unhinged like a snake as she lunged fangs first. She laid her hands on my shoulders by the swing set shoving slurs into my face in a way that said “I didn’t fall far from the tree; I was dropped by hostile hands the first time I tried to say ‘no’.”

I stepped back from her fury and I wiped the verbal ***** from my eyes. I walked away, understanding at that vulnerable age that there was nothing I could do to quell the rage of someone with venom in their veins.

The tables always turn, but I would have stopped that Lazy Susan with my grubby fingers the instant I fully swallowed the fact that her front door was a mouth of its own. From the moment she walked in, she was chewed up and chewed out. Drowning in stomach acid, to be spit up back on to the street. The child of chaos covered in caustic burns they said she “earned.” Mutilated by their incisors, canines, and molars. They drained the very life they had expelled into her bones, digesting the marrow of her wire hanging. As a result she was starving. She was bare ribbed and hollowed out. She lived with her hands stretched out before here, blind, breaking her wrists from trying to twist her way out of the straight jacket of her situation. Slashing the souls and skin of anyone she came in contact with because she was scared of the monsters that birthed her, that sang her to sleep in the next room with livid lullabies.

Hate germinates hate. It is an airborne infection eating away at the soft tissue beneath your skull, overtaking any capability to function lovingly.
So to Keisha, as you hang in holy suspension between here and somewhere else, you were corrupted by a corroding covenant and lived in absence. You lacked self-control and displaced your damagedness on anyone more available than the wolves that raised you, but you are not a laughable collection of Mr. Vultura’s failed general science quizzes, forged parental signatures, and blue bruised knuckles. You are just as human and bursting forth as me and every other person on this planet. You are vines and branches yearning for the sun, for the brightness of hope and peace. Now rest, because you are forgiven and now infinite.
04/29/13
Ella Snyder Jul 2013
Come over here.
We bought this love seat for a reason.
No use in wasting such a lovely purchase.
Good Lord, no.
My only motivation is proper stewardship of our possessions, you gorgeous man.
No, I don’t have secret agenda of snuggling and reading a book curled up in the nook of your arm.
Just sit yourself down here and read your literature.
We won’t talk.
We will sit silently.
Absorbing.
Inhaling.
If I reach over to your arm, don’t flinch.
Just curl to my shape.
Just grip my shoulder like it is a pen and you are a writer.
Then write about my not-so-unknown intentions in your margins.
05/01/13
Ella Snyder Jul 2013
The darkness intensifies everything.
The dripping air conditioner.
The thoughts steadily bleeding like ink.
The drum of your heart beat.
Ella Snyder Jul 2013
To my future lover,
You know I hate this phrase, but “I told you so.”
You will brush my warnings off like bread crumbs.
You will forget that I explained every pothole and sinking sandpit to you.
You find the hair the shower drain and remember.
You see the middle-squeezed toothpaste tube and remember.
You search for the television remote and remember.
Remember.
That I am just as wild as my hair.
That I tell you that you are wrong even when you aren’t.
That sometimes I have a hard time saying “Good morning.”
That sometimes I have a hard time saying “I am sorry.”
That sometimes I have a hard time saying “Good night.”
That I have an eternally stubbed toe from tripping on my own feet, shoes, and tongue.
That I play too much.
That I cry too much.
That I am too much and too little, but that makes me just enough.
That I love you and will love you even when it gets hard.
Like burnt waffles and diamonds and your will and my skull.
If you misplace your memory daily,
I will remind you with my whispered words in your ear, with my gentle finger tips, with my soul bare before you.
Ella Snyder Jul 2013
I wish you’d kiss me.
Like last winter.
Our arms.
Like suspension cables.
Our veins.
Like crawling ivy.
Our hands.
Like knotted twine.
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