I feel like handknotted lace
and freeze dried flowers
and burned cedar
rising into the air
praying to be taken
I am still trying to drink every last drop
still trying to sweat it all out
still trying to sleep it off
still
still
still
I want a “finally"
I want a finish line
I want arms outstretched
and reaching
like vines
like crawling ivy
to grow on this house with the ancient white paint chipped by hate
I am so thirsty
I am still so thirsty

It is 1:15 am.
I am sitting here and my *** is numb.
It is the only part of me, thankfully, that has lost feeling.
Everything else is loud, ringing, stinging, and singing.
My pants are unbuttoned.
I believe in small liberations.
In approximately, five minutes I won't be wearing pants.
I believe in big freedom.
My frontal lobe feels like warm tapioca pudding.
I would not be surprised if it oozed out my nose.
I am one who takes things as them come,
even brain pudding leaking from my nasal cavities.
I am also one who shouts a lot, cries a lot, and smiles wildly
and at every possible opportunity.
Settling is not on my schedule
and at this point, neither is sleep.

I will collapse into bed before my knees give out before me.
I will darken my bedside light like the moon when she eclipses the sun.
Blocking out his brightness.
Blackening his reach.
I am too much like the moon.
And I am trembling.

My love, I wonder if you liked looking at dark houses from the sidewalk in the middle of the night like I do, if you delighted in whispering lullabies to the people sleeping silently inside.
I wonder if you had ever felt your heart explode before that moment, overwhelmed with love or joy or hope.
I wonder if you smelled the musk of the dusk dewed grass before you took your last and gasping breath.
I hope you know your momma loved you.
I hope you know your daddy loved you.
I hope you know your brother loved you.
I hope you see all of the people crying,
all of the people who still only see skin as skin,
all of the people with voices like arrows.
I hope you are truly now tasting the rainbow, swimming in the rainbow, swallowing the rainbow whole.
I hope you lay up in the sky,
in rest,
in peace.

I am imploding.
The paint drips off the walls.
Every part of me folds onto itself.
The ground is a rumble strip.
I am fractaling inward.
The skin of the earth crystallizes.
I am eternities splayed forcefully.
The rain continues to fall up.

We were ledge-sitters.

We understood why birds perch themselves on penthouse patio rails

And why airplanes sigh with breaths of relief when they are defying gravity.

We would hold the crooked hems of our dresses while we climbed metal stairs like mountains.

The urge for heightened perception of depths, distances, and the disarranged built in us like skyscrapers we hung ourselves over.

I decided to brew myself tonight.
Let the essence of my soul steep into the scalding water of the ceramic tub.
2. Unpacked boxes remind me of unfulfilled promises.
3. I leave my underwear on the floor for days at a time because my knees have been locked since the last time I spoke to you and I have never been able to bend and touch my toes.
4. My skin still smells like bleach and the pine wood that splintered into my hand.
5. She said that hurricanes are beautiful. I asked if she understood destruction.
6. The amount of dusty and empty flower vases I have directly correlates to the amount of missed opportunities have been blooming and hand delivered to my door step.
7. I am still trying to unknot you.

“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.

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.

“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.

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.

The darkness intensifies everything.
The dripping air conditioner.
The thoughts steadily bleeding like ink.
The drum of your heart beat.

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.

I wish you’d kiss me.
Like last winter.
Our arms.
Like suspension cables.
Our veins.
Like crawling ivy.
Our hands.
Like knotted twine.

I've got this tickle in the back of my throat
because I have something to say, but I don't know what
or quite how to say it,
if or when I do know what,
so I stand here with my mouth hanging open
and gaping
until I start drooling
like a waterfall.
I will stand here
until my teeth fall out
like apples falling from trees
and I will catch them in my hands like wicker baskets.
I will string them onto a necklace
like pearls
and I will give it to you wrapped in heartstrings and ligaments
because from the beginning,
I have only ever desired to give you the most important
parts of me.

I take salt shakers to the water spicket and I make my own oceans.
Tide lines have eroded themselves into my waist.
I know all of the sea monsters by name.
I don’t want to submarine again.
I don’t want to grow sea **** in my lungs again.
There are cyclones I have made with my red and pruned toes because I make what I am.
I scratch at my skin.
Clammy and white.
I peel off layers.
I am only trying to baptize myself again.
I am only trying to baptize myself again.
Salty and stinging my eyes.
I am only trying to clean myself off again.
I am only trying to clean myself off again.
Sitting in my own oceans.

I have three birthmarks.

One on my ribs shaped like a hammerhead shark pigmented into my skin speaking like shadows on blinding days. Protector of humans, night hunter, and forever growing teeth.

One on my thigh like tea barely seeped, a water mark bleeding through the picture and the point. Only seen in the brightest of light and only revealed in the darkest parts of the night.

One on the curve of my hip like a cherry blossom. I am as ephemeral as a bloom. Beauty like roots breaking through sidewalks and death like a handful of sand and gravity.

Embers on my eyelashes.
Eyes white hot.
I am a fury.
I am flame.
My veins course petrol.
My arms are matchsticks.
Smoke is my breath.
I leave ashes in my wake.
And your skin is paper.
Tinder.

All I ever hear anymore are four letter words and the three word sentences that you desperately want hanging from your tongue.

Darling, I have lived hundreds of days without you and I am bound to live hundreds more.

Wrinkles in my sheets will still make shadows.
I will still run my teeth over my lips.

I think everyone is as alone as I am. They are just too scared to write about it.

I stumble across the threshold with a skeleton key in one hand and a crowbar in the other.
I had run like my tights mumbling under my breath about sparking flints and knotted shoelaces.
I promise myself I will lay me down once I have washed the moths from my hair, once the dried blood has bled once again and siphoned down the drain.
And that in my bed, I will spread out my arms and legs
trying to fill the crater in my moon.
Incoherent and blind.
I feel the walls like Braille to the bathroom.
I sit down on the lid of the toilet,
one hand clutching my ribs,
and I, the second flood,
spill out into the porcelain tub.

When I write, I can’t cry.
When I cry, I can’t write.
I have ended up weeping as I am stranded between a rock and a pen.
I want a blood transfusion.
The red for the black.
I want ink to spill from me when they splinter my skin with their scalpeled words.
I want it to fountain from me when I trip on my own sentences and shoelaces, skinning my knee.
And I want it to bleed the permanency of black, when you take my stained glass heart and hold it dripping in your hand.
With your stained finger tips like midnight freeing the mocking birds and scarlet poppies to burst forth from me like water through the cracks of a crumbling levy.

I rolled over onto my back.
I reached up and wiped the sand beaches from the water line of my eyes.
My gaze fell to rest focusing on the corner of my ceiling where three planes came to an infinitesimal point.
The stale air reluctantly circled over and over through the whirling dervish blades of my floor fan.
I tossed to the left. My shoulder embossed with the intricate design of the thin sheets.
I ran my fingertips over every sullen divot in my flesh.
They felt like the imprints of dusty fingertips you left on my soul.
And though I knew better, I blamed you entirely for those wagon wheel ruts, muddy canyons I am still striving to cross over.
I realized it would only take two planes for us to meet.
The newborn air gladly pushing up the wings.
The plane indenting itself into the sky like a seal into melted wax, like the convex curve of a line.
But some lines are never supposed to truly meet.
Like the horizon.
The sky and the sea.
Running parallel.
Running indefinitely.