Yesterday I swallowed a tiny glass capsule
much like that
I've been walking around in for years
amongst these picture people.
My palm clung to walls made sticky by the heat,
skin to pane,
I could not bear to let go.
I wanted to enjoy their stapler smiles
but the fog made it impossible to see.
I only called it what it was
when I breathed it into the glass.
It was always there.
I wished it would fill the whole thing,
wished I had a match,
so it would serve some purpose.
So my capsule becomes gray and troubling
against its paper background.
So they stop and stare,
Look at the girl in the bubble.
I think she's suffocating.
Like it's a revelation.
Like Gabriel himself hand-delivered
tiny glass pills for them to swallow.
Let me be their spectacle.
Let me be the object of their pity.
Let me be a one-woman-glass-capsule miniature show.
I'll be their tired metaphor.
I'll choke on shimmering shards so they can watch my blood color their roses.
I'll drink until I'm heavy with turpentine.
I will destroy myself.
I will make it clean.
Tiny glass capsule
in my wooden palm
who did you once hold?

It was not supposed to be that way.
No green-purple spots in my eyelids, I said,
said
no graveyard asphalt on the back of my knees.
It was supposed to approach me modestly,
quietly,
with blushing fingertips and eons of time.
I had imagined it would approach me modestly.

In the meantime, I could visit a brothel
or two
***** my heart out, spread open its capillaries.
Poetry is prostitution of the lewdest kind
and how lovely, while I **** my paragraphs
to eat a man
or two?
There was one
with hardened fingertips and no more than a second to spare.

I had imagined it would approach me plainly.
No sifting through mounds of shell and bone, I said,
said
no puppet shows.
No masquerades, and my veins were supposed to do their job.

This was supposed to be my play,
my knight takes rook,
my girl takes respite.
I was supposed to come out golden.

He was not cruel but it seeped out of him
like mustard gas.
Sickly, yellow,
I inhaled it with relish
acid burned its way down my cheeks
through my chest.
And how beautiful, to love and be loved
without feeling it crush your lungs.

She grins without calculation
She laughs without rumination
She spends sleepless nights
dancing with her arms around new best strangers
I do my dance in the corner of my room.
The rhythm! the rhythm of my head
as I bang it against the bed
4/4
electropop
watch how I groove
as I pace
in the corner of my room.

Mother doesn't sleep
Mother shovels through my journals
rakes through my brain with pliers, tweezers,
forceps she drags through the hemispheres
with a wet face.

Could you be a fool
just for tonight?
Can we pretend my mind is mine?
I swallowed these things so that they don't poision the water
running through this house.
I did it for you
I wanted to be like you.

She lays out her pillow in her friend's living room and tells them
abut the boy in her fourth period
who holds her gaze like it's precious.
They giggle through the feathers
It's midnight and mother sleeps.

Fourth period I peeled my eyes.
I crumpled the paper and threw it away.
Could you be a fool
just for today?

I bled my secrets out of my forearms
and you saw the stains on the carpet.
I fought to keep an eighth of the things she flaunted for free
why can't you see
I did it for you?
I fear the day
I be come you.

Mother, sleep a while longer
you spent all night crying, clutching
sopping piles of meaty tissue.
it's yours. My skull! hollow—
I am tired now
that you see me:
jaded, wayward daughter.
Let me sleep a while longer
dream of she:
everything I could not be.

I am tired, and I am tired of making it beautiful.  Petals flung over the edge do not soften the fall. Adjectives do not halt decay. Spinning corpses in sugar is a sticky, pointless ordeal. If I let the moonlight paint me in all her violet shades they begin to look more like bruises. A single star, a gunshot wound. I think about how small I must look from all the way up there. I think about how I won’t live past twenty.

It’s such a dramatic scene, a fanciful notion ripped from the history books by a girl who doesn't know how she’ll fit into them. There was one like her before, who dug her palms into the rails and stared out at her burning Versailles, and she wondered how it could be so cold when there was so much light. Another kisses her daughter and son’s shining cheeks goodnight, sits on the tiled floor of the kitchen with her head in the oven. There was the one who painted and broke, loved and broke, painted and loved and shattered and broke. The other flies all her life and goes down at Howland, sinks for its remainder. All of them, statues with shards of rose colored glass transfixed in their eyeball sockets.

Maybe we were made to be romantic and lovely and tragic. Maybe we have no choice but to carry these diamonds and bleed from the backs of our ankles, streak the pavement rose red. Maybe we were destined to scar everything we touch, for what is beauty without pain?

I’ll paint my nails and bite them to the beds, I’ll **** boys who are cruel by design. I’ll spin endless corpses, spin relentless circles in this frigid corner of mine.

Flash of a camera goes off and I rush into the shadows, because the picture will look all wrong if I am in it.
Conversations circle my head aimlessly, all connected by a single thread that has slipped from my grasp.
A game of cards that I watch from the sidelines.
Memories are made in front of me and I cannot have a slice of them—they are not mine.
I was there, but they are not mine.
Because you smile when I wave
and I laugh at jokes that I don’t fully understand
and we complain, compliment, communicate,
but you are a stranger to me.
I am a stranger to you.
You, polished jade stone in vicious waters,
yet the waves yield to you
and your iridescence
and all of your beautiful stone companions. I am a pebble who gets caught
in the tide, too desolate to swim back to shore, too afraid to join you in the deep.
I cannot stop fighting the current.
There is no hope for me if I do,
for I will sink, settle on the sandy floor with my back arched and my hands shaking
and join my fellow forsaken, solidified into a gritty brick of aching bones and broken spirits.
I will no longer be your burden. I will be something you do not bother to look at twice.
You will float above me with nothing to haunt you.
But even as I am fighting the current all my life
I am still dissolving
bit by bit.
As though I am destined to fade away no matter how hard I try to stay.

I cannot explain all the pathetic measures
my eyes will take to avoid your gaze,
all the paths my legs will journey to avoid bumping into you on my way home.
All the ways I knead my hands to the bone and all the toothpick excuses skewering my tongue.
And I cannot explain the way your presence deflates something inside my chest.
I don't know what to do with all that empty space. It echoes.
I fill it with the thimble's worth of pride that I scrape together,
every meager flake of validation I pick from the floor. I shovel slopping handfuls of sawdust
to try and soak up some of the shadows
but everything dissolves in that oily void, green and hideous.
God, it echoes, and everyone hears it.
I muffle it with my radio silence.
I look at you and I see everything I hate about myself
under a microscope.
Every blemish, every scar, every gaping hole
that you lack.
Stop, look. Here. Wrong.
Hear?
I blind myself with radio silence.
I don’t know how to live with an eternal reminder that I am incomplete.
You, and the place you hollowed without even knowing it.
Green and monstrous.
It echoes and everyone hears it.
I love you, but I cannot explain my radio silence.