staring at the ceiling, counting the mosquito bites on my arm
there are sixteen
reasons why you left me but I can only remember the one that went unsaid
"you cannot fix yourself"
there is a constellation of scars on my hips
and I can see your face, hear your biting words in them
if I try hard enough.
maybe it's just a reflection of the moonlight,
or it's just one bad night. one of too many.
am I the insect stuck between screen and glass
trying to escape something shatterproof
when the more effort I put in, the more likely I am to die?
even the mosquitoes have become tired of seeing my blood
it fills the sticky night with a sour-sweet stench
of broken promises and lost lies.
but god,
I am the moth who only wants to get closer to the light.
you were my light.
and I'll leave the windows open all summer
as if maybe you'll crawl back in through them
I've broken the glass in all of them anyway
I've named sunrises after you
they too are supposed to be emblems of hope but only remind me of how broken I am
and it's funny
because I used to wish on every star that you'd understand
but now I just wish to be able to forget you.

Hopelessly blinded by the flash of his camera,
I could pay no attention to your watercolors,
engravings, charcoal sketches, oil pastel portraits.
The stark white background of headshots
was all I could see; no room for florals and foliage.
Preserved by his image, I thought I was permanent.
You let me see that I am pastel and charcoal -
smudged, with colors distorted, but never quite destroyed,
always with original traces in the deepest layers.
He was watercolor - he could be washed away,
with only watery blotches as remnants.
But you are an engraving, on the strongest, most brilliant metal,
with your lustrous being etched into every atom of it.
You leave your mark on my skin, beneath the bruises and scrapes,
beneath the rusted appearance and tarnished memories,
down to the fragile ribs, through the recovering heart,
immortalized for centuries of admiration.

Upon your clothesline I have been stretched for somewhere between hours and minutes. The rope burns my skin, my weight sags from pins.
I can feel wrinkles forming where I'm pinched and pulled, and an out-of-place heaviness rests on my drooping shoulders.
I do not belong here, among your delicates, your laces and silks. I deserve nothing more than to be soaked in the wash bin with graying rags.
Yet you have seen something in me, a rarity of fabric, of color. Something that is deserving of special detergent and air-drying.
And in your presence, the bad thoughts and negativity slowly evaporates, leaving me like drip after drip of tearful water.

the pinnacle of childhood
comes with the symphony of adolescence.
the realization that life is evanescent,
the breaking of cyclical routine,
catalyzing the bittersweet epiphany
of long-awaited nirvana.
no longer blithe and naïve,
quaff from the chalice of clemency
until intoxicated with the notion
of no longer being in limbo.
the mendacious oblivion of childhood evaporates,
lifting the veil of soporific innocence,
all traces of puerility gone.
come,
enter the province of adulthood,
and live as a free soul,
no longer required to conform
to the standards of ascetics.

Colors of ocean, slate, lichen,
Swirl behind fairy tale dollhouses,
Their shutters closed tightly,
Occupants fretfully dreaming.
Winds like cold-
Hearted demons roar through the trees.

Strong through the torrents,
With nimble branches,
Scalloped-trunk,
An arc of leafed limbs
Shudders with pain that
Causes it to stand *****.

A shadowy moonrise
Sliver by crescent sliver
Casts the street luminescent
And out of the storming clouds
Of Devil's Point
Falls streaked lightning.

Donald Trump
will never make America great again.
The American dream is dead.
You are the one who killed it.
Dead with Lennie and the rabbits.
George is probably gone now too.
Depression. Couldn't live with himself.
Curley's wife never made it to Hollywood.
Still stuck in the bedroom,
with red ostrich feathers and ***** husband's
vaseline-filled glove.
His breath still reeks of rotten eggs;
only a matter of time before he gets sick - affluenza. Incurable.
Crooks isn't a man. Been diminished to nothing
but a shell. Hollow, and he believes it.
Candy and Slim, worked to death for minimum wage.
The American dream is dead.
******* by deluded denial.
Time to wake up and smell the rotting corpse of reality.

no matter what the romantics may try to tell you you're not made of stardust
or outer space you're filled with blood
but now it's spilling out onto the cold tile floor
the same floor that you slipped on and broke your wrist
it's the blood of your first kiss
and the time you made your mother smile so hard you thought her eyes were the galaxies
and all the screams and tears that you've held inside
but now it's dripping down and pooling at your size 8 feet that once wore hello kitty sneakers
and you're coughing and spitting and every word and every memory that has ever entered your mind is spilling out
and you're losing your touch with reality and all you can think of is every mistake of your past
but now they're on the floor too and you've forgotten them with everything else
and your mother will cry and your brother will become angry with the world and your father will blame himself
but maybe you will finally have realized the truth
albeit too late

those aren't f*cking stars rushing out of your tired skin
it's you
and everything you are

The guise of a false hope warily cloaks
an unkempt soul bereft of fortitude -
stolid in the belligerent face of unnamed evil,
an aura of past opulence adulterates naive purity,
the stigma augmented by an insidious breach

of internal asylum. The vulnerability of
a soldier against oneself takes precedence
in the chasmal crusade yet to come; omniscient
intimation gives way to dour prophecies,
ambidextrous in their intricate verbosity.

Molten in the inferno of cross-interrogation,
pliable in the hands of a mortared veteran,
reiteration serves only as a gibe, a grievance
only the most foolish jester would make
before a corroding monarch. The demons

have rallied for annihilation; the starling
warbles an aria of capitulation, its notes
reverberating through the tentative sunset,
a sky of gray and orange mingling with the song
to convey an unequivocal defeat. But after every

dusk comes a period of resurrection, and from the haze
emerges a heroine unrecognizable if not for eyes
ablaze with scarred determination. She strides
with the strength of ten thousand legions, a leviathan's
courage uncovered in her still-beating heart.

The devil flees, uncomfortable in the blinding presence
of mortal accompanied by heavenly body. This -
this is redemption for armor lost, the answer
to her yearning prayers that had been barely audible over the
convulsing sobs that had swallowed her for so long.

Finally vanquished of the toxic beast that had claimed her,
she rises victorious, proclaiming amidst glory a single word -
“Checkmate.”

The stranger in the lavatory mirror
puts on a public grin, repeats our name
but scrupulously reflects the usual terror.
        -“TALE OF A TUB”, SYLVIA PLATH

But I, incompetent fool of mortality,
have appeared in the mirror as nothing
but stretched skin and pained bones
with diluted features robbed
from ancestors before me. Ah,
the recognition of prior greats; it
strikes me in the soul, knowing
that I will never live to the expectations
held before me, dangled above me
like raw, dripping veal over the unfed
lioness of my heart, plucked away one by one
like grapes being fed to Caesar. Appropriate,
perhaps; the phrase of “Et tu, Brute?”
slips from my disarmed lips far too often.

A world of nothing sacred leaves me
lost in the swirling cyclone of cracked glass,
where fighting only brings deep, jagged
lacerations of mind and body
with struggling glances of withered reflection,
of girl battling demons upon demons
on the brink of crippling surrender.
Bonded to this body of paper and lead,
but filled with notions of ink and poison,
the sight has become an old friend, breaking
through the fogged haze of glorified reality.

Brace me against the past, dear
strength, I ask of you, and allow me
to plunge beyond this frosted pane,
to shatter the veil of uncertainty in a manner
to be immortalized for generations of dust
to see, to believe, to trust more than the
painted smile dancing upon my haunted lips
in the belligerent light of the medicine cabinet’s bulbs.

My wall was not always stained red;
the map that hangs upon it has bled
from state and country and continent,
the scarlet of a million lives
seeped through porous paper skin,
akin to the breached security of violated hearts,
severed arteries never to be rejuvenated
with the livelihood of broken nations -
left to weep,
wounds unhealable in the pained whirlpool of terror and tragedy.