you never tried to analyze me.
you never took a flashlight to the darkest parts of my mind, never checked my aching bones to make sure they were alright.
you never checked my lungs to see that they were filled with water, never saw my shoulders, the burden they were under.
you only saw my face, readied and pristine, my face constantly smiling whenever i heard your name.
you never examined the backs of my eyes to see what keeps coming back, never checked my spine to see if something makes it crack.
you never checked my muscles, you never checked my heart. if you had dusted it for fingerprints, you would've only found his marks



[this heartbreak hollowed out my bones, and weighs a thousand pounds, it pushed me underwater, but your name, i can't quite drown out. you're trapped inside my head, i hope you do get out, you're the burden i am under, i really have no doubt. if you had checked for fingerprints, you wouldn't have been invested, if you had checked my heartstrings, you wouldn't have been tested.
you failed the science test this time and i'm so sincerely sorry. but if you had checked for variables you wouldn't have had to worry]

To the thunderstorm I used to love,

you pounded me, beat the windows with your fists,
brought the rain down with your thunderous roar.
rarely, it would hail, and the melting ice would
gleam down the streets, still soiled from the
summer day before you came and took over all daylight.

A severe thunderstorm warning went into effect around
2 a.m. - estimating to begin at 4 and
end at 9.

You came at 5, and it never ended.

While the rain once glistened, it now stings my skin,
crushes my thighs, squeezes my hip, compressing
pressing presser tightening twisting the calf, stabbing
the spine.

I am not in control.

The purple crush of your swirling eyes is
a rush of wind - a cold front in the summer
mist - the shattering of a two-hundred-year-old tree.

I saved butterflies from you only for them to suffocate in their cages. The rags indoors, the frames, they never stopped you - only the rain
prevented your fire.

You are right when you are gone.

The road is a blurry mirror, aging eyesight in the wet darkness.

The grave of my teenage daughter
is a restaurant she was born at 16.
I was told she began smoking long reds for long breaks – they lasted 15 minutes at most – and she had her first sip of alcohol there. Coffee liqueur from a straw in booth 14 from a customer who later became her lover.

The next lover was the second to slap her, and following that was the first kiss she ever received from someone she admired – even though he didn’t admire her back.
It was near the gumball machine, right between the hanging claw and the golfing game. Neither had worked in years. But the lights still flickered, and she always used to talk about how the neon chants radiated across his grimace when he asked her for a kiss.

Even he knew it was only for her.
Even she knew it was never for him.
But she agreed anyway.

The waiter told me that she smoked an entire pack of Menthols after, as if to brush her teeth, but it didn’t cleanse a mint memory. It only burned it away, etched it into the cement curb where we last saw her – drinking one last time as the yellowing sky stretched over the horizon and left her smoke as ash against the morning mist.

Regretful Memories

Unsurely, I can feel the certainty in your kiss. It lingers, like unrequited love. Hopeful, lustful, incomplete, lost.

What’s missing, your fingers play my hair as if they were piano cords.

Nothing, I breathe in. Everything, I exhale.

You taste like burnt cigarettes. And mint. I count how many stars I saw in your eyes, and I know the lightning in the sky doesn’t matter. Thunder, thunder, thunder. Bang. Bang. Bang. Rumbling thunder. You play them away. And my feet are off the ground. My skin is electrified and I realize that I am alive. Then dead. At the same time. Bliss. Is that what this is about?

Yes, you beg.



Yes and plead.

...

Published in LALUNA Magazine, Norway - April 5, 2014

She's an alphabet artist
she paints in words,

from a palette of adjectives,
nouns and verbs,

the landscape she finds
in the folds of her mind

she exhibits in volumes of verse.