evil is a little boy in a black
hood trying to be
good. do you ever think about how many
tears the mother of the
devil has cried? not all the planets in our known solar
system could fathom that kind of
treason.

being home alone at night is my achilles
heel. perhaps we were meant to splinter like
this, he thought when he took his last
breath. perhaps
we were made for
this, and nothing
else.

when he says he
loves me, i want to dip him in
chocolate. when he says he's leaving
anyway, my eyes burn like they've been soaked in
bleach. come, baby, let me straighten your
spine, let me read to you the novels of your
fingertips.

some things, i guess, are doomed from the
start. some countries don't have words for
'all right.' some people never stop
bleeding.

to whoever loves him next:

1. he always refuses to believe that he has beautiful hands. hold them as much as he lets you and don't let him forget it.

2. when you have an anxiety attack or simply just a bad night, he most likely won't try to help you. this doesn't mean he doesn't love you.

3. remind him ever day that he sounds like wind chimes in a blizzard.

4. he acts much older than he really is sometimes. this will trick you. when you get mad at him for doing something stupid, remind yourself how young he is.

5. he likes it rough but please be gentle with him.

6. when he gets so angry it looks like there's fireworks shooting from his fists, do the opposite of whatever he tells you. he'll melt into you soon enough.

7. on the nights where he refuses to let you touch him, keep far away. trust me.

8. don't ever let him see how sad you are. he'll leave.

9. on dates he'll ask other girl's their names. ignore it and remember you're the one he's with.

10. if he doesn't feel like hanging out, don't ask him twice.

11. do not ever, ever take him for granted, no matter how young he acts or how many times he throws his fist at the wall. he is so ******* beautiful and you might not realize it until you lose him.

12. when you lose him, you will cry, you will try to die. everything inside of you will shrivel away.

lately I've been spinning in
circles and counting calendar
days like your kisses, you don't
know what I've been
up to, last week I went to my own
funeral.

everybody was dressed a hell of a lot like
me, all black and black and
cobwebs, crying into their
hands so hard it seemed like a collective
effort to break the world
open.

you weren't
there, I touched everybody's
face but you weren't
there, it took me only two
minutes to figure out where you'd
be.

her hands were gripped around the back of your
neck like a noose, lying in your
bed, still covered with a ton of my stray
hairs that had fallen out last
time you swore you'd try to be
gentle.

when she said your
name i imploded in on myself like a chemical
war, all the bones in my body trying to get
out. did you tell her you loved her,
too?

I took some of my stray
hair and stuck it to your
back, if she took as much time on you as
I did she'll find it soon
enough, and I hope she
does. I hope
she breaks you. I hope
you wake up and she's
gone so that you know what
hurt tastes like. I hope
you lose her as quickly as I lost
you, and you can't drag yourself out of all the
rot she leaves behind on your bedroom
floor.

I hope she doesn't go to your
funeral, because I sure as hell am
not.

say burning bush, say you don't
forgive me. what do you
mean, just friends? if that's what god intended as 
platonomy I don't think I want to 
meet him. 

I don't know 
why but there's something peculiar in how the minute your sister wasn't 
around we discovered how 
neatly my fingers fit into
yours. as everyone 
knows by now, what happens back 
stage stays back
stage and the walls still whisper of what we 
saw in each other's 
eyes right before we
fell into each other. I'm going to
burn for wishing I'd used my
mouth. 

I fit over his
hips like they were made for
me but maybe things are meant to be
asymmetrical, like the way the strings of your
hoodie are always
askew. maybe god finds
calm in violence, maybe he does this 
stuff so we don't forget how it
hurts. 

touching you means an
explosion and I wish they'd see it as bright
colours instead of just a loud
noise, because you, I think 
I could love
you.

I cry myself to sleep thinking of our last kiss
dear god I hope I've never made someone else feel like this 
I once thought I found god in the bend of your spine
I don't know why but you're the only thing that's ever made me feel alive
there's a pack on the counter and it keeps screaming your name 
my comfort is empty hallways, I know they feel the same
everything I write has your name between the lines
the only days I could breathe right were when you were mine
sometimes I see your ghost laying in my empty bed
for all of this pain, I think there's something to be said
the echo of your voice is a reminder I really hate
when I hear it I know I better call my shrink up before it's too late
depakote, klonopin, ambien, prozac
dear god if you're there, tell me where my head's at 
do her hands feel better in yours than mine 
I'm sorry this is so messy but I have to get it down in time 
I'm sick of people on main street asking me what I'm crying about
I make a fist and tell them a loves a love until it burns itself out.

i.
you are the cruelest person I've ever
met but my heart still beats really
fast whenever I think about 
you. I'm afraid if I touch 
you I'll burst into 
flames again. my 
hands haven't stopped shaking since you
left and I never got to thank you for teaching me the meaning of the word
hurt. I found my 
poems at the bottom of your
garbage can and I still can't 
sleep alone. I 
kissed you a lot, and sometimes, you kissed me
too.  

ii.
your skin rings up memories of moonlight and 
granite, a gaping
desert lying open like
it's as vulnerable as
you when it gets
dark. you have a murderous look in your
eye but you never broke a hair on my
head, you saved every phone log of every time I ever
called you. i heard your last girlfriend got arrested for domestic 
abuse and you never wrote to tell me. did it
hurt you more than 
I could? I hope you found what you were
looking for out there and I hope you never
lose it unless you
want to. 

iii.
something about your
eyes makes me want to know everything about the middle of the
night, I watch you
move and I whimper inside my
head. I haven't touched you in what seems like two whole
lifetimes, if I ever even did at
all. I hope I can again some
day. years later and your music stillI makes my ears
raw. I hope that bullet didn't
hurt too bad, I hope 
it brought you the happy. I'm sorry I never
could. 

iiii.
we are a modern day romeo and juli
et, it took me two 
years to realize how lovely your
lips looked and I'm still wrecking 
barriers, I'm still 
damning christ. my best friend has made it
clear she does not want me as a 
sister. I wish they'd let me
love you because you, you are all I've got
left. I might be the bullet but I will never be the
shooter, I'll take everything on
myself. you are so fragile and i am so 
sorry.

people tell me i’m
lucky because at least i lost
him knowing that he
loved me, at least it wasn’t as painful as a
breakup. if this isn’t
pain then please tell me words for this swallowing
wound in the middle of my
chest, explain how i can’t find my own
hands even in broad
daylight and every time i think i
see him around our
house i know to take it as a
sign that i need to call my shrink back up, tell her
about the ghost at the core of my
life.

i can still feel his
hands in mine, long pianist man
fingers and encompassing
palms, wide open like a
map soaked in
blood.

he was so long
gone by the time that they
found him, his own fragile
mother couldn’t identify the
body, i was the only
one who knew how my hands were supposed to fit his
hips, the only good part of him
left.

my doctor tells me that i’ve passed the threshold for
grief, this isn’t healthy, she
tells me. how am i expected to know the meaning of that
word when the only thing i can
explain is the incessant ringing in my
ear, the sound of the
bullet that went farther than i ever
dared.

we were supposed to get
married, he just didn’t have the
money, but he gave me everything else off his very own
back. at night i stay up repeating the names of the
children we were going to
have, all three of
them. now they seem like more of an
insult to the holy
trinity.

god, how did you feel when satan
fell? i demand you on your
knees, begging me to
believe in you again. do you know how it feels to be in love with a
ghost?

it didn’t take much to get him mad. one wrong word and he’d erupt like a volcano, destroying everything in his path. how could you ever think it was okay to let your children know by heart the sound their mother makes when she’s pushed down the stairs? one night the mirror at the bottom cracked, a shard lodging itself into the centre of her forehead. this is a sign, i would’ve said if i was old enough to understand. take a reflection back on why you still think you need him. i haven’t talked to him in four years but it doesn’t make much of a difference, the seed of our last name still sprouts in my heart like an arsenic root. i wonder what he’s doing now, i’ve spent the time trying to fit into the holes in the walls that the beer bottles left. i don’t know anything about him except the colour of his anger and how he could never open up without the turn of a corkscrew. if his point was to teach his children never to touch alcohol, he got the point across. one night in our house was enough to understand that. he’d throw full bottles at the walls, saying he had a tough day, but the stains on our carpet still say he never loved us. maybe, i told them, the day he drove away for good, if we had the potential to **** him he might’ve loved us just as much.

there were nights when you'd turn
away and you'd refuse to let me
touch you. if you want to know what a broken
bone feels like put your hand right
here.

when I heard of
Katrina I had no one to hold my hair
back, I had no one to tell me that hansel and gretel don't end up
eating each other.

lately I've been cutting up
bibles and bleeding with the
moon, there's things we know how to
fix and things we
don't.

if church was your
bedroom I ****** the sixth
genesis out of you, I pulled adam's second
son from your hair while you moaned the fall of jerusalem into my
mouth.

when we were good god considered shutting down
heaven but when we were bad, when we were
bad satan cried himself to
sleep.

once a boy called me for three hours just to talk about my favourite
movie. i never said i
loved him. like everything
else, winter murdered whatever we
had and the next
summer was very
foreign. once a boy loved
me and never told
me. the last night he walked away from my
porch i pictured him as a cloud of
tears, as a white
flag. once i loved a
boy and when i told him, he said ‘i
know.’ my best friend tells me i’m good at making
fists. i try to find
god in vintage wallpaper and downtown
bars, sitting so
long that my ears flood with the signal
notes of a lonely man’s
saxophone. here, you can smell cemeteries and
playgrounds on the same
street. here,
boys never love you
back. once, i broke a rock in my bare
hand. once, a boy i hardly ever
talked to told me that i was a good
poet in the way i explained
things and asked me please not to become a
dead one. i didn’t know what i
meant when i told him i’d
try. once i loved a boy so full of
anger that his god begged him for
mercy. i think i almost
loved a boy once.