there is a rotting carcass beneath my ribcage.
my mother says to "stop speaking like that" and "it's all just in your head" but when I try to explain how sometimes my neck aches because my cranium feels like it carries the sun, she doesn't listen.
doesn't understand why I always smell like smoke and I just let her think it's nicotine and tar because that's easier to talk about than the flames on my tongue, or the two burn victims dangling from my elbows.
when my therapist asks why I wear so many bracelets I tell her they match my outfit.
I say nothing about the storms that rip through my bedroom at 4 o'clock in the morning and how I need something to tie me down at the wrists so I don't fly away because I've seen Oz but capsule castles and Prozac princesses are not my idea of a fairytale.
I don't show her my bruised ankles because no matter how many times you click your heels, you aren't going home.
There is a rotting carcass beneath my ribcage but everytime I ask the doctor to pleaseohgodplease get it out of me, he tells me you can't live without a heart.

I am counting scars
like stars
galaxies resting on your forearms
wondering how many times you were sent into the universe
alone.
Bruises cover your back in the form of Nebulas
you tell me it's from fighting comets.
But I know your father is Pluto,
cold and distant,
and your mother was the Sun.
but you keep forgetting lately, you are Auroras daughter.

I've always been good at trivia.
I know that human babies have around 60 more bones than adults and sometimes it makes me wonder what else we lose with age, and if we ever get it back.
I know that the body has enough iron in it to make a metal nail 3 inches long and maybe that's the only reason Jesus was willing to pay for our sins.
He knew his suffering was a part of him.
We are all Gods children.
I know the strongest muscle is in the jaw and how when men get angry it bulges like old house drywall with bad plumbing.
And I know that the human nose can detect over 50,000 scents even if I can never distinguish the smell of your sweaters when I go to your mothers house and I may know a lot of things you could bring to trivia night but I still don't know how to be something you miss.

In my 7th grade English class, we spent half the year analyzing the works of Emily Dickinson because "poetry is Gods gift to the voiceless".

Two years later I would meet a girl who cried verse
and bled syllables
whose notebooks were filled with melancholy metonymy
and she was Gods gift but I have never heard anything louder than the graphite screams etchedin her words.
Poetry is Gods gift to the voiceless but I didn't know.
I didn't know people could be
flesh and blood
and bone and
poetry.
I didn't know she would wring metaphors from my lungs,
snap my bones into line breaks.
I didn't know she would slow my heart to keep time or scatter my middle name when she couldn't find the right letter and I didn't know she, with her scarred fingertips and scabby lips would turn me into
poetry.

you meet new people and they'll say sweet things and at first it will sting everytime they compliment you because those words weren't meant for them but as time goes along the weight in your stomach will turn into a helium balloon, floating to the top everytime they text you goodmorning and things will be going great and you won't even remember his name until one day they don't answer your messages and they post pictures with people that aren't you and the balloon will deflate and your lungs will too and you'll wonder if your mouth is full of scissors or your hands have razor blade calluses because what could be so bad about you that no one can afford to stay

the scars fade and you delete the messages, you forget what their eyes look like and what their jackets smelled of and nothing is the same but everything wants to be