I woke one morning feeling like
I didn’t belong in my own
        body—
that the skin I saw was not my own
but the flesh of a cadaver;
I thought that the bones within me
must be made of balsa wood and
the deteriorating muscles were surely
thin strips of fabric with
no actual value.

I decided that it was not me on the inside,
but someone else.

The sky outside my window was only
a meager, pale shade of grey, like the ashes
of what her body used to be, and I
watched as the pale pink ribbon of
the horizon began to bleed with the birth
of a new day and I thought about how
all those words you said to me
were actually time bombs because when
you first said them, I brushed them off
but now all I can think about is them and
my brain has been blown
        to kingdom come.

I think I might be brain dead.

But your school picture is still on my
bedside table and when I look at it
a fist grips down on my heart and
I wonder how you are and if you’ve grown,
I wonder if you’re even still alive anymore;
my anxiety is a yew tree bending in a
new formation influenced by the passing
of time and minimal communication—
I become someone I don’t know.

I think that we’re all born with
a different destiny to follow but
when you get right down to it,
no matter how much you’ve changed, or
how much I’ve changed,
on the inside, we’re all the same—
        skeletons.

Except for the fact that I think I might be a
barely surviving Hiroshima victim;
a charred skeleton with no other
contributing human element.

Sometimes I compare you to
        Chernobyl
and I wonder if you ever
draw that connection
too.

I wonder what it’s like to be nuclear.

I wonder what it’s like to burn alive.

There are dark clouds churning in the
early morning sky and I wonder if it
might storm again like it did on that
night when I drove home alone and
that one song was playing on the radio
over and
                over and
                                over again
and I couldn’t possibly shut it off because
who was I to end the life of a beautiful,
(highly relatable),
song when it was just growing out of its
babbling infancy and into its
crescendoing teenage years?  

If I were to write you a letter now
I wonder what I would say,
what I would tell you that I haven’t already,
(accidentally), spilled to you in those
rushed visits we had every blue moon—

I think I would tell you how you
        broke my heart;
I think I would tell you how he
        shattered what was left;
I think I would tell you how
I don’t believe I have a
soul
                        anymore.

The inadequate bookshelf that sat near the door
that my sister used to call her own was
mostly made up of adolescent reads,
books better suited for preteen girls rather than
intellectually budding young ladies—
juvenile vocabularies and simple, non-complex
plot lines do little to craft and create
worldly, knowledgeable women.

I thought I must spring clean the
naiveté away and replace it with
the works of great authors like
Sylvia Plath
                        Simone de Beauvoir
                                                              Virginia Woolf
                        Margaret Atwood
Betty Friedan;
ingenious femme fatales that cut down
to the brittled bones of the misogynists
and burned their marrow along with the
ashes of bras and aprons and 350 degree oven heat.  

Growing up, to me, seemed like a wonderful epiphany
chock-full of ideas and opinions and
clever, ironic remarks that chased satirical witticisms
like felines to rodents and wolves to deer—
being an adult would guarantee me a say,
a vote
           prior 1920’s America
                                                  play dress up as a suffragette
           women’s rights
femininity personified by dolls in plastic houses.

To be eighteen-years-old,
the goal, the legality, the bright light at the end of the tunnel;
the official womanhood it would bestow upon me
seemed like something almost tangible
with the way that it loomed over my head.

Get good marks
graduate high school
travel back in time sixty years
meet a nice boy
become a “good wife”
have dinner ready by five
bear two beautiful heirs
clean up the messes left in the kitchen
fast-forward to the twenty-first century
go to a good college
find a stable career
settle down if the fancy strikes you
live non-docile and full of passion—
the parallelism of times are severely
di
    lap
          i
            dat
                 ­ ed.

1950’s America would never be a home for me
because I am much too wild to be contained.

There’s something about you that
makes me want to write
        bad poetry
and half-assed short stories.  

Something about you that
makes me want to take all my
unspoken words and turn them
into something beautiful,
something worthwhile.

You make me want to be an artist
like Van Gogh or Sylvia Plath;
you make me want to create.

Maybe it’s that blue wave
that crashes down like
an incoming tide on the beach—
        your eyes
when you look at me in
a certain way, in
a certain light.

Or maybe it’s
the way that you say
my name and then say all
those horrible things that make
me want to rip something
        open.

Those words that rip me open.

You make beautiful stanzas get stuck in my
head like lyrics to a bad pop song;
I can’t erase them and the
only way I can think of to cope with it
is to write them down like a schoolgirl
with a well worn diary.

I think I might as well have hypergraphia.

I am an unprofessional
medical doctor with
a pen, paper, and
Word Document
suffering from a form of
verbal ***** because I
can’t possibly think of a way to
        speak my mind.

I think I would make a very good mute.

I wish I lacked a voice box
because then I wouldn’t have to
be the one that has to
say all the right, comforting things
at the all the right times
and all the right places.

Sometimes it feels as if I’m
being eaten from the inside out
by some sort of paratrophic organism
that sits atop my frontal lobe and
dictates my life and fluctuates my
anxiety and I can’t even think about
some things anymore because of this
nervous clench I get in my gut when
I let my thoughts get too jumbled.

But you—you make me want to write
the most heartfelt and sappy sentences
and you make me want to
be more than just ordinary.

You make me want to be extraordinary.  

I guess that what I’m writing is
an apology in the shape of
a few stanzas and a few metaphors.

And this is an “I forgive you” for that night
that we spent outside your house
arguing over the stupidest of things,
so stupid that I can hardly
remember a single word I said to you.

Nothing gratifying is ever
painless to obtain
and I want to be a fighter like
Hercules or Alexander the Great.

I want to be extraordinary with you.

I could tell that you had smoked a cigarette
yesterday before I saw you because
your shirt smelled like smoke and
your lips tasted like
lung cancer.  (I like to to pretend
that it doesn’t really bother me that
this is not the only connection
you have with my father.)

My parents, my sister, and you, my darling, all
have green eyes.  Green like miniature
earths turning in space, like Lake Michigan capsizing,
like the summer leaves in the woods behind my house.  
Sometimes I think that I’m more closely related to
my grandparents because when I
turned down the emeralds, I was given
sapphires to use as kaleidoscopes instead.

And, you know, my father called me a month ago and
wished me luck “in the big city” and I still
do not know if that means he knows
where I am or not; I have
not heard from my mother in over five years.  
(I like to pretend that your relationship
with your parents is much easier than mine.)

Do you remember that time when you told me that
                       “everyone sins?”
I do not think that you took into account
the amount of which we all sin.  (All sinners are equal,
but some are more equal than others.)  Sometimes
I think that the Viking blood inside of me
makes sure that I identify with
the villains            more than            the heroes.
Sometimes I think that
                                            you are the hero.

But, darling, there so many things I
tip toe around when it comes to you, and
I am not sure why—religion, politics; the
Chernobyl boy, the inked boy, my father, my mother; the
moths that live inside my gut, the layer of dust over my limbic system.
I wish that I had the words to say that I can never
be what you want, what my
family wants, what anyone wants.

I wish that I could tell you how I
think I am drowning in the in the gene pool,
how I am convinced that I’ve broken three bones
without actually breaking them, how I lay awake
at night, scared to death that my
dreamcatcher will stop working and that the
nightmares will finally catch up with me.

There are broken wishbones in my bed that
I keep as trophies of losing to luck and
blood stains on my clothes from all
the lambs that I’ve been forced to slaughter.
All I want to do is tell you why I prefer
cigar smoke            to            cigarette smoke
and how I would rather have you
quit all together than live another day knowing that
you’re dying faster than me.

But darling, I watched the world spin last night
when I opened my eyes and looked at you
looking at me, and for now, it’ll do.  You
can be the nightlight in the corner of my room.
Wait for me in my chrysalis. Listen to my wings flutter.

You broke a wishbone with my father nine months before
my birth and I am the outcome of the small trophy you
held onto when you lost to his larger luck line.  Sometimes
I wish that you didn’t make such a
sacrificial lamb of yourself.  Sometimes
I wish that I could dig my fingers into my skin
and rip out every single vein that looks
too much like pisces fish, like amethyst bracelets,
                      like rotting cadavers.

Mother, I don’t think that either of us have ever been
too good at doing what is expected of us.

You wild horse, you wild heart, you wild storm—
there is a lighthouse somewhere north
from here that overlooks the lake, and I can’t help
but marvel at the fact that you get to be the
light that calls us home when I can still see you
sitting in your locked car until the garage door closed.  

(A hummingbird’s heart can pulsate
up to 1,260 beats per minute and now, I think,
so can yours.)  Your ribs
were not enough to hold your
tick,
           tick,
                      ticking clock
in one place.  Mother, your teeth were not
strong enough to hold your words inside—from you,
I have learned resistance in the witching hour;
from you, I was taught how to build a
backbone in the hour of the wolf.

You cut off a rabbit’s foot the day I was born,
but that foot was yours all along.  I am
walking around, trying to find the rabbit, trying to
give it back, but I fear that I am
falling down a hole my father dug with his bare,
          blood            stained            hands
years and years before my sister was born.  
Sometimes I wish that you didn’t
turn my childhood into an enigma.  Sometimes
I wish that I could dig my nails into
every slipping memory, every unfinished story,
                      every last word,
and rid myself of the doppelgänger I found
in the looking glass of your bedroom.

There is a secret to being holy, I hear, but
I don’t think Jesus will share it with me.  I stepped
on your grave five years ago now and
I don’t think you have forgiven me since.

Mother, I have never been too skilled at
                saying, “goodbye.”

There is a body floating in the water of Lake Michigan again, but no one is willing to fish it out.  There is a body floating in the pond near my subdivision again, but everyone already knew that anyway.  
        I am sitting eighty miles away, overlooking a city that is not mine, thinking about how the moon outside my window is the same moon that you can see from down below in your partially frozen-over dirt bed.  I am thinking about the vampire that sits in his apartment, chugging two-to-three bottles of blood a week, and wondering if he is haunted by the same ghosts as I am.  
        It’s taken me eighteen years to realize that I was infected with a different variation of his curse all along—I am less human and more lycanthrope than I would like to admit.  I am not like you, I am not like him, I am my own breed and that terrifies me.  (There are black cats prowling in my heart and fragments of mirrors in my liver and salt that bleeds from my heels when I walk.)
        No matter how many rabbits’ feet I tie to my keys, how many dreamcatchers I put above my bed, how many cloves of garlic I hang over my door, I am never able to rid myself of the chill that goes hand in hand with the phantom you left here.
        Mother, I think I killed a man two full moons ago and I haven’t been the same since.  I threw his body into the lake and watched him drift out into the unknown, watched the kraken drag him down, watched the water spew him back up like a cork.  And now I need you to make your way back to the land of the living to sit by my side.  I want you to cut off my head and make me a trophy animal.  Create a rug from my fur.  Eat my organs and freeze the rest for winter.  Use me for your own survival.  I just want to be helpful.
        I want to be everything the vampire was not but my fingers are breaking from holding on too tight.

                                                               ­                                          I should let go.

There is a man from my city that spent his nights
killing and ******* men for the hell of it.  Sometimes I worry that
his blood might be in the water like 160 year old cholera
or 30 year old cryptosporidium.  Sometimes I worry that
I breathed in the stardust from which he was made, that I
swallowed the ashes from which he burned.  I do not think that
I will ever be American ****** enough to fit the bill, and
this might be my one true happy thought:
at least I am not a serial killer.

I closed my eyes in August and saw the dried up teeth of my
estranged grandmother floating in a pool of blood and thought about
how the phone works both ways.  I opened my eyes in
October and thought about spitting up the chicken bones I had
been choking on since second grade, when my father
helped prepare dinner for the last time.   (I think I might have
                                          sacrificed a couple people to the devil
                                                        without actually meaning to.)

I find the numbers
             13,               16,               and               18
to be unlucky and I am beginning to fear that the pattern
will continue, that 19 will be the year I finally get bitten by
poisonous snakes outside of my dreams.  God whispered in my ear
and told me that a different Helter Skelter was coming.  He told me to
keep breathing easy, to trust in his light, but when I
asked my Magic 8 Ball if I should quake like the Earth in 1960, the
day after Satan released Dahmer from Hell, all I got was a
bright blue, “Better not tell you now.”

The séance I conducted last year in a blackened, decaying cemetery
did nothing but rattle ghosts, and the four-year-long pity party I held prior
did nothing but chain those ghosts to the floorboards.  I have
never been good at abandoning my thoughts and feelings.  

Some mornings I wake up face down in the Green River or
with my head severed and on display in a refrigerator of a house that
is not mine.  Other times I awake buck-naked in Death Valley—
sand coating my tongue, my tonsils, my esophagus; burning
and scratching into my flesh—and I know that I will never
be able to forgive my father for destroying everything
he ever made or his mother for turning into everything that’s
just      out of                     reach.
There has never been a time when I have been
good at letting go of grudges.  I am far too aware of my own existence.

At least I am not a serial killer.