Gut me.
finger my seeds
from the core flick
them from your thumb up
and onto the floor where you
will only step all
over me.

Sometimes you sit empty
bleeding out
red on the rug.

I wish on you the knowing-knowing
that your being is tangled up in the talons of a hawk
that is already trying to flee the room.

And that your being in filled with flesh and emotions,
heart and lust, nerves and purpose, as I am.

That when he holds a sign that claims sanctuary,
make sure he is promising your own

Not the promise to the end of his hunger for touch,
for confirmation that he will not be alone indefinitely.

And when you start to allow him to take bites
of your meaty being, He is not there for your taste

just because you've fallen in love with your predator
doesn't mean you should give him your bones

The room is thick with humidity from bodies that pulse to the beat of each lung's exasperated sputter of breath. Your mouth is thick with want. Want to say, want to bite, want to cling to those that your hands don't have the strength to hold.

It is the season of summer
which means my face will be all roses
before noon.
Which means I am celebrating the happenings
of those I wish had wanted me back
and those I will never want in return.
The air is thick with fog
like an open mouth filled with smoke
consistent with melancholy regret

You're sitting on bench outside a class you're skipping
smoking a cigarette you know won't be your last
with a person you don't really love
because you think it won't matter in the end anyways.

In the event

that I am left parched of purpose
abirritate the parts of me that are left gaping.
and imply to me that not all hagiarchies are holy

and in the event

that I am kissed on the hand by a saint
that has been through the process of heterotransplantation
remind me that I long ago gave up the study of frogs.

because in the event

I am left with only those maliferous lips
that emulate cainotophobia
press me to say that I deserve to grow

In the event that all is pressuring me to shrink

Maybe I learned it face down into a pillow
          Feeling heavy day old mascara lift off light eyes, salvaging the reputation
that enervates, dead-beat bones. Maybe it was the way
     Boys seized at your hair
         only to learn that man-handling pins down your sanity
Left wondering if he really thought you were a *****.
    Maybe it was how I’d cut
         my knees scaling the rock invested grounds
of the alley between our houses; slitting my legs
     into paper cut towns, rolling with vigor. Maybe it was how you
         Didn’t learn to exist without being wanted
How the right amount of despondent desperation in a voice would launch her hips,
     and they’d sit layered in his smoke and your culpability,
         compulsive, taking in the show. Wishing you hadn’t attended
Or maybe it was how we read each other romance novels
     in the lunchroom, sharing particulars
          of genitals and true love.
Maybe it was the way we learned to be quiet
     our insides begging for touch one more time, the sweetness
          we discovered in the bones of each others backs, in the closeness
I felt when you told me about your relationship with your mother
    Maybe it was the face close, Lips on the side of a neck.
           Fingers run down your spin. His we still aren’t together
I wonder when Haley comes back. The way he alone,
     creates the complete ruination of a half broken body.
           The way I loved him anyway
the way you learn to stay quiet.

I hate this
I hate myself
for knowing what i wanted
for knowing you weren't able to give it to me
for doing it anyways.

I refuse to let you wrap me up
in your ***** hands.
Because you will only hold me for so long
before you remember that I'm not what you want.

You will be lonely
he will not know better.
That is not an excuse

The church was laced with sculptures and paintings of Jesus leaving most of the family feeling unholy. One girls red lace bra strap peeked out from under her black knit sweater, and to further the discomfort was blatantly hidden by a prudish and insensitive aunt who wore her hair in a too-tight bun. “You may feel a sense of happiness during the ceremony” claimed a sit-in priest before we went to sit in the pews. He then left the immediate family to enter when ready, leaving the room black on black on heartbroken.

The first time was tedious.
I counted 55 tiles on the ceiling to the rhythm
of frantic pumping of teenage desperation.
This promptly ended in a high five and
now my friends won't make fun of me for being a ****** anymore.
Thanks

The second time was filled with
I don't want to have *** today
and always ended in a blur
of make shift *******
and wanting to be far away on the other side
of the newly christened couch.

The third time made me cry
I had never let anyone take me from behind
So when the first thing you asked me to do was lay on my stomach
I felt the need to please someone who I had never met
and to be the girl that you needed.
So I faced the mattress and immediately felt your hand
push my cheek into the pillow case.
This was the only time you were able to finish.

The fourth time I felt wanted.
The next day I felt isolated.
I still think about you and you still don't make eye contact

I needed the fifth time to be good.
I needed to feel better
I needed you to be a good person.
I should've know no one ever ***** me to give me what I need
Its always selfish.

You tasted like every shortcoming I had ever experienced.

My toothbrush thrown on to the ***** floor of an apartment that I had to sneak in and out of. The sound it made mimicked the sound of my ribcage snapping from my heart spilling over with a mixture of relief and guilt. You said that I reminded you of going home when you were small. You never told me you hated your mother

Hearing someone say that you were almost good enough to ****, but turns out you aren't as good of a kisser as they had hoped. Remembering that your first thought was you don't have to kiss to have ***

After nights upon nights of sleeping on couches and finally being invited to sleep in your bed. I had already made myself a make shift nest on the floor, when you told me that you would never let someone like me sleep alone. We kissed and I felt the romantic short-comings spill out of my mouth and into yours.

I should've know you'd spit them back in my face.

Ask me why the tea cups have faces on them
Ill tell you how they laugh at things when its not appropriate for me to.

Ask me about why they are filled with shots of tequila
and I'll say that tea doesn't make this conversation any easier.

The ode to saying yes before you should.
To allowing yourself to let him take
much more than you were ever sure you wanted to give.

Why is it that I let myself settle for less.
For the 60 seconds of being the most important person in the almost empty room

I hate you for holding me in your bed like it meant more
I hate you for thanking me for sleeping over
like I had been special
like I had done you a favor.

I hate that you made me think that waking up alone in the morning was normal.
I hate that you never really hurt me enough for me to let go.
You are teaching me to abandon things before they abandon me
my first lesson was you
and I still haven't mastered the art quite yet.

I hate that you are always there when I'm feeling desperate
I hate the way you touch my waist and drunkenly ask me to stay
and how I always do
thinking that maybe I was the reason you wore a button down shirt.

"Most people are too afraid to feel like this, and for that I actually find you incredibly brave"

Sometimes I try to write about you
and how you crushed me into little
pieces of broken heart.
And how you let me sail away in an ocean of
peach flavored *****, and didn't even come to wave me off.

I try to write about how you made me feel small
and unwanted.
How i couldn't manage to handle it gracefully
like girls in the movies do.

But all I can ever think is ******* for clouding my brain and making me unable to do the only thing that makes me feel important.

I heard you ****** it up again
It never feels right and you are left empty
on the couch with the taste of someone who won't kiss you goodnight.

n

Kneeling on bruised knees
Holding callused hands
breaking already broken hearts
you wait for someone to help you fix your voice.
You've been raspy for a while now
never having been this half spoken
The words just get caught in your throat on the way up
half because you don't want anyone else to hear them
and half because you forgot what its like to be heard.

Decided you didn't want me
after you figured out you couldn't finish
unless you couldn't see my face.
Learned that if it was anyone
but the other girl
that you'd rather not be aware of who.
So you could atleast pretend
you still had the one you really wanted

Things do not happen for a reason because
All they know how to do
is happen

It was never about how you made me feel
It was about pretending that I was happier than I was
It was about how I felt intellectually supreme when I took a drag of your cigarette and stared out onto the ocean.

It was never about my attraction to you
It was about being a more sexually liberated college girl
It was about pretending and wishing that I could handle being unattached

It was never about being with you
It was about Far Far Away being so close
It was about feeling different than how I wished I wasn't perceived

Teach yourself to let emotions
pour loudly and unapologetically out of your mouth.

Learn to decipher the intentions of your peers
and learn to by pass all those who cannot handle your full extent.

Throw up your words and worries all over my lap
until you are left with nothing but an empty brain
and a quivering body sprawled out on my floor.

Spill the ideas of someone else’s existence
all over my new shirt
and don’t even offer to clean it.  

Fallen face first into a puddle of your word *****
with a *** and coke stained blouse
I will clean it up  for you anyways

Mistaken silence for criticism

Absentee opinions accompanied by a faulty mouth
I hang in the silence in noose of other peoples needs.

I wanted to be special in the eyes of someone else
I played the body of her, while you imagined her face on mine until you realized

I am not her
Will not be her
Cannot be imagined as such.

For this I cried
and for that I feel empty.

You aren't worth my words

We came home.
She got sick overnight
over an hour
over a minute.
Over a dinner table conversation
Over a “i think we need to talk.”
I felt nothing.
We came home
She got sick
I felt my mother turning into
something more like a child
that needed to be tiptoed around
because she could no longer feel the sun
or the salt that was from anywhere but her eyes.
Leaving me to try to make shift something as wonderful as the sunlight

We are told that everything we do, has a consequence.
Those who dangle their hearts in front of dogs
could be left with a tattered ones.
Those who swim in deep water could drown
Especially those who never learned to stay afloat by themselves

you say that love is more complicated than cause and effect

and that mouths speak what brains think and hands touch what hearts want
And sometimes you feel like you're being controlled
not by your soul but by a group of ruthless
limbs and organs that could be exchanged
when you die anyways.

and that carrying love is like

seeing the entire sky after only seeing out your window.
hearing the gunfire voice that you still learn to sing along to.
feeling the cold without your coat to keep you comfortable, warm and safe
and you are left disoriented, deaf, and numb

but you come back even after the consequence
with a sewn up heart
and a new life jacket.

you say that they will always come back to the ocean
even after its left them gasping.

Blue spit laced with the sour taste of pining
for someone other than the one you love.
The tea bag immersed in blood red water
thats the same color as the hands that were
supposed to catch.
Everyones eyes that are looking and not understanding
Yeah ******* too.

You stopped filling my bucket
and now i am empty

You hold me together the way bobby pins keep the hair out of my face. Keeping the distractions hidden from my eyes.

Spinning me in circles, except not like a carousal, but like a blender, slicing me into pieces at the same time.

I struggle with the in-between moments.
In between the ice-cold glasses of water
In between the way bodies fit together
In between the way that they suddenly become
two completely different pieces.

FWD: you didn't even have to tell me you lost feelings, I ******* felt it.

You struggle with seeing the important moments.
The day you decided that brown eyes aren't so boring
The day you introduced me to your mother
The day that we had the conversation that changed us from a perfect fit
to a square that a toddler is trying to shove into a rectangle shaped space.
Close but not quite.

FWD: I grew up, you didn't.

You act like liquid
conform to your surrounding
rearranging all the things that define you.

you are trying to scratch off your freckles
Widen your eyes with your fingers
**** your stomach in.

Tangled blonde ripples being torn through by the harsh fingers of your sister

the same way that he pulls through them now

To be guilty of stepping on cracks in hope that your mother breaks.

Stepping on daisies and crushing all the four leaf clovers you can find.

Thats the reason that i found her toothbrush
Got kicked out of school
Can’t find anyone who doesn’t make me feel less.

Age 6 when my best friend got a new puppy
Well you might have gotten a new puppy, but my cat does magic in the attic at 12am every night'

Age 14 when my teacher announced in front of the class that i was the only one who got a 100
I didn't even study

Age 16 when i lost my virginity
Yes I'm ready and i love you too

Age 16 when i broke up with the boy i lost my virginity to
We can still be friends, and no i don't regret anything

Age 17
*Ill think of you even when I'm in college and everytime i ***** someone else

Write so that people can relate to you. Consider your audience.
I do not put my thoughts on paper, so that i can ease the minds and feed the mouths of the people who can't take my being. I don't need to relate to anyone, because i am enough of a human to move mountains myself.
2. Write so you get all your feelings out and move on.
I write to have something to remember my state of mind. Because when my experience has packed up and moved on, how will i relive my puddle jumping, my cigarette burning through your ***** wife beater, my tear stained photographs.
3. Make sure to edit your work for grammar.
********, you're irrelevant if you tell me this

You will always be the ocean
and i will always be the sea glass

you will be wearing my hard edges
and i will be swaying to your every current

Until you wash me up on the shore
and start to only come around every once in a while.

Play my heart stings
the way that you attempted
to make noise from an untuned guitar.

With you
i am attached to reality

Without you
i could float past the clouds.

i. I am elastic bands stretched just far enough
to stop springing back
but never far enough to break.

I am the camel with one too many straws
on my seemingly strong back.

Sometimes i am the straws.

ii. The elongated faces of my parents
weighed down by my lack of prevalence
the empty fridge door
the failing grades hidden.

I answer to their expectations
and i wonder what will happen
when they aren't the ones i need to please.

I am the promises of expansion
And the clinging to the known

I am silently imploding.

iii. I am the college acceptance letters that got lost in the mail
The 33% acceptance rate, the school that only looks at talent.
I am the lack of talent.
I am the hopefulness that i just can't see it.

I am the accepted to every school you don't want to go to
The i don't know why you still don't have a letter
Maybe we should just commit to another school...

The white girl with 2 white middle class parents
you don't need money, you're already privileged

I know i am, but sometimes it doesn't feel that way.

iv. I am your secret girlfriends toothbrush
placed in your closet.
I am finding it and wondering
when you bought me a new teal toothbrush.

The stammering explanations
The realization that the toothbrush wasn't for me.
That it had already scrubbed your saliva off her tongue.

The teal toothbrush goes flying, hurtling at your head.
I don't like the color teal anyways.

I am leaving you for myself.

h

You were put in the same Lit class as the boy with ****** knuckled and a taste for poison
So he could beat your heart into a tiny ball of tangles veins and crushed muscle, and then throw up his whole stomach onto it.
He was there so that you could decide that your heart looked better intact.