I am tired of being a beggar
Gripping you to my desperate chest,
it only makes you turn on me

My anger, my hate, is only
love pushed back into my giving bones.
Take it, take it,
take these tears
I do not want the world without you

I live on your fingertips
but I can't reach your distant face

Maybe I should take the note, stay away
where I no longer feel the distance
in every space

Hell is loving at arms length.
So why be loved but a beggar
that is a game
inflicting an ounce more love than the pain
reeling me back just to feel cold again

I recall the feel of our bodies pressed tightly in the backseat. The freedom of letting my fingers linger over your palm and up your arm, around your neck, and adams apple. I’d always wanted to know a body, not just the unexposed places between our thighs. Because everything is forbidden. The cool feel of placing my cheek to chest. The intimacy of hearing a heart beat on a quiet night in the summer. The way it will murmur secret love and secret shame. My hands, making a map of the placement of your face, will draw along your cheekbones, high and freckled slightly, down to the lips which part and tell me to never stop. Skin stretching over muscle and bone. Timid virility. Reaching and searching for validation in my touch. This is what we give each other.

Were we guilt of trying to be something we were not?
Unpleasantness went unspoken:
death, ***, depression
Ideas which did not exist
in our buttercup yellow
stake in suburbia

Like a slate was held
over the tops of our heads
keeping knowledge out
keeping pain in
where it festered in our bones
and our minds became darkened
all the same

Dispassionate parents
whose fire rests unknown
bred a lost generation
I and my sisters,
our little brother
all burning up inside.
Contradicting notions
manifesting themselves over the years

Who will we become?
Where does the path
of a sterile, manicured
lawn lead?

It leads to each other
that is how we will find ourselves
in the flesh of our flesh.

I see a white speck on the horizon, like lint falling, a ship moves to a distant place.

“Africa,” Rosa says, “Where there is a dense jungle and then long bare stretches of savannah grass.”

Ellen speaks, “This day is grey and so are we. Rain falls on this beach with rough sand. We come here to say goodbye.”

“I feel all the faucets of my life have flowed into this body, purifying and contaminating,” says Anna, “The grey sky and the grey sea are one and I do not know whether the sun rises or sets.”

“It rises. The day of our lives is new and fruitful. We are but 19.  I think of colorful clothes I will wear, traveling, dancing with men,” says Rosa.

“It sets. This body is inky with pain which tugs the sea in like the night tide. Soon it will drain into the Earth, leaving the seafloor bare with sticky starfish and unopened clams,” says Ellen.

Anna speaks, “I wish I could pause this day and keep it forever suspended above me, like a dancing dream mobile. Or I will keep it in my pocket and we will all forget the consciousness of time. Rise and let’s leave this symbolic scene.”

No we will go on.

“Glory does not find me here,” says Rosa, “But I am made for it. I will work in tall important buildings. Men will know my name. One day, we will walk along the Seine.”

Ellen asks, “Where does my body reside? I will try to conquer it. I use it and I feel it’s power. Power is intoxicating for a woman, so much more so than a man, for there is little power born into us-- we must find it in the world. Men do not conquer me as they believe they do when they touch me. I will be the emperor of myself. I am wielding something virile and bold, I have yet to learn it’s true power. I will use it, I will use it.”

“My body resides under my hands,” says Anna, “It is solid and I believe in it. I feel it’s potential. I will keep it from those who do not realize my claim, and who will try to take it for themselves. I fear contamination in the loss of purity. I see banks of snow, I see a dandelion before I blow.”

Rosa says, “This day is not clear. I demand for the clouds to part. I will sit on the banks of purgatory until my fated day. The sea does not break at my defiance. I am in misery.”

Ellen says, “This day is not clear. I leave this sand spot under the sky. We are too close to it and it is hot at the touch. I await the natural clearing. I say goodbye, I will spend these days inland.”

Anna says, “This day is not clear. I never wanted time to be. I have no solution for it.”

I remember the days of driving back from SAT prep. It was on the other side of the river, your side of the river. On those unholy sundays I was filled with a listless longing. I ambled at the gas station
or maybe that stoplight on Patterson Ave, seeing you for a second in the face of a stranger. At dark I rode with the windows down dedicating songs to the night, all in your name, the reverent word.  

You’re just like an angel, your skin makes me cry

I avoided crossing the bridge back to where you were not. Where ribs of artificial light fell over me
from the lonesome headlights. Those songs fading out around the impenetrable night. And I, slinking down, felt that quell of hope ebb away as the idea of your face became more like a dream.
You were untested, you were perfect. Your hair stuck up and you wore a grey zip jacket.
I marked every glance in the school hallway, my blood struck by those dark roving eyes. I mentioned your name with those first sips of ***** on my lips. I still taste you there. In that blooming period, springtime, when I felt a beckoning towards a becoming of sorts. I saw myself the way I’d be in the impression of your mind, a man’s idea of me. I think I knew our souls were similar,
maybe just by the way you walked or closed your eyes sometimes. I found you in everything, I filled you into the empty spaces.
I loved you then, as a stranger.

Remember that time
when I was
on a first date with that guy.
I brought him to your place
and we sat
at the edge of the pool
while you laughed at the
german-exchange student
swimming laps.

And I jumped in with all of my clothes on
and he wasn’t sure whether to laugh
or not,
because of the way I floated
but he didn’t know that it was
something I always did

He texted me later saying
he wished he kissed me
but I didn’t check
until morning
because we were singing loud
and the neighbors were yelling

We lived outside of Richmond
but didn’t like to think of it that way
like it was separate
but the way we put up fences
like rows of wooden teeth
isolated us within

The patches on the
Huguenot Bridge, the old one
made your car bounce
and the radio went
in and out
Remember that time
when we would only smoke
marlboro’s?



That guy’s car
was a stick
so it didn’t move the
same way yours did
and he accidentally turned
down that one way street
on our way to meet you
at that show

But I don’t even remember
going in
because of something
like the doors were closed
but the sound was ****** so
we walked around the corner
to that place we like to go
and sit on the pillows on the floor

At home I sat on the third floor
alone, and the lack of laughter
is louder somehow
And the shadows stretch
further as the night gets
longer and draws
out the little pieces...

Let’s stay sane
so we drive downtown
and see three guys
long boarding
down broad street at midnight
they’re in that band that’s pretty good
so we yell out the window
and break into a long laugh.  

Sadness is like salt
that pool was like the
dead sea
it helps you float
because no one
wants to sink to such
abundant misery

And joy
it was there too
riding in cars with you and
that guy who loved me like a fool

The two ideas of pain and joy lingered over me
like opposing magnets
but the water must have been cold
because I was numb

But when gravity pulls from two sides
it compresses
The Earth breaks and makes a mountain;
I broke and sank to the fiberglass bottom
of your *****, suburban pool.

I wore my clothes today
My clothes
That one greenish sweater
with all the holes

I might as well be
an atheist or a Clemson fan
crimes comparable
to wearing vans

In South Carolina
you follow the rules
unless it comes
to racism and *****

Don’t you dare look like you tried
It’s sports chic
and southern tide

You better have an excuse
for choosing to be you
“I had to wear this dress,
it’s laundry day”

If you ask me
why I’m dressed a certain way
I’ll probably just respond
“*******”

I dread those
unyielding eightball eyes
The way I want
too keep your fingers,
my crooked comforts,
clasped through
my tarantula hair

You said it took all the ink
and left me like porcelain
I shattered
at feeling so precious

I don't feel like a child at all
I used to wish for a way out
into the sparkling world
of drinking coffee and wearing
the perfect black dress.

My young mind was fruitful
with worlds and scenes. I knew the smells,
I knew the colors, I knew the tastes.

That's gone now
I try sometimes to imagine
things like how it might've been
with you if I had stayed until morning

But all I can see are the oddest things
they bloom unwarranted in the trying
space behind my eyes

I see clocks with hands and feet
A mirror that does not reflect me
the craggy bottom of a sea

Perhaps I killed it
those parts of me
when I never found the things
I childishly believed,
optimism is not  for me.
Death of my imagination seems
just like a casualty.

I recall
the old feel of my skin.
My tiny hand, and fingers
“Five”
Dancing on tops of Dad’s loafers
released from the tyranny
of the meaning
of Who Am I?

I am
“Eleven”
under a sweatshirt
skin itchy in places
face, in the mirror
when I am alone
streaking with unmascaraed tears

I am
“Sixteen”
my hand pushing against
a boys chest
but for no or for yes?
I suppose it is fine,
no mind of mine.

I am
“Eighteen”
Womanly
singular
hiding what is unsure

I am
“Nineteen”
experiences mark me
darken me
writing with tattoos
on my fingers

Underneath the seams
of weathered rock
we stir, waiting
for the unavoidable
break

The black beetle clusters
pour like coffee beans
through the cracked red earth

as rain crashes through the barrier
of its dark container,
portending change

The worms use rhythmic twirls
to gasp the air above the flooded dirt
The landscape, it was a wasteland
now, a storm flushes it with life

My organs, heart and spleen
have the metal feel of machines
If I were to cut in half
and part my hand into flesh and tissue


Would I feel the beating?
Ticking, perhaps, mechanical clicks
I am just a cog in this machinery anyway

An institutional drone
following what I'm told
this ******* cycle
and I've turned cold,

an orbiting moon,
I want to detach,
I would, I should,
but the spinning,
out into nothing
the bleak idea of
no gravity
is that what keeps me here?

My grasp is failing
on this thing that like
a silk sheet filters through
my fists, I am starting to understand.

This thing is
the embrace of blood
flowing circulary
in our fingertips and veins.

Together and ebullient
bouyant, bouncing
at the bony freckled feel
of arms, the soapy smell
of our dirt hair and lemon eyes.

It is not the warm months of
being sticky happy in the dark
wooden, refridgerator-lighted
kitchen.

I grasp at something greater
a finish and a start
to pull me back from
poisonous tides,
slipping hillsides.

Its the track of
everyone I've ever been
Because my truth
is that I'm only
me with them.

A track to run
and time to spend.
Finding our ways
back again
in little toothy
smile moments

Stars in the daytime
or ships in the dark
They're my finish
they're my start

The boy lives in his corpse
the girl, her half shadowed body
makes his dead nerves sing
and he tastes acid desire.

He said he would bring her anything
a promise, promising way
out of innocence.
Put away childish things.

With her on his mind
he finds no line
between black and white.
He must choose.

In the point of break
his desire becomes a bleak pool.
He drowns in the grey smudgness.
He does not bring a thing.

The corpse floats
on a sea of penciled graphite.
Between the banks of black and white.
Paralyzed