iii.
He reminds you that you may never be loved
In the way that you are supposed to
His heart opens as it should
A halved pomegranate
And the jewel flesh spills forward
In effortless bounty

Yours was wrapped in butcher paper
With care, long ago
It lives in the freezer
In the way, way back
Ice crystals form slowly
Until they resemble a silver blanket of moss

Everything you own is covered in blood.
     They arrive on moments composed of crumpled paper, tired and degraded by the heat and pressure of God's palm, left in Her pocket too long. ******* and apathetic inaction meet in the center of the sheet where your pelvis, your s e x rests while you sleep and lie and lie and sleep and sleep and lie. A Rorschach blot card where you see the death of dignity. Mother, Roommate, and Tinder Dates that you never bring home see everything that they had hoped you weren't.

     Cochina. Pig, ******* pig.

     And I can't read that last verse out loud. That tells you everything you need to know.

Everything you own is covered in blood.
     You bleed when you don't feel enough, or when what you feel isn't what you ought to feel--silly ******* scholarship with the brains and the championed cheek bones (if you just lost the weight, she says to herself sometimes, and her friends don't agree, but there is a deafening lack of disagreement that takes the room).

     Bold girl who never made suicide jokes because she was so so so good at this game called self love until she wasn't. Until she ran out of bad ***** juice. Until she felt the weight of it, the world.

     And so you choose to feel the bite of an exacto knife.

Reliable, that.
Pleasurable, that.
Guilty, guilty pleasure.
Shameful pleasure.

     We were supposed to be grown up, glowed up. Above this.

                                                  **** this.

     When did it become so hard to love yourself?

i.
To catch a boy in the wake of summer
Leave out a cup
Brimming with melon-colored milk tea and tapioca
Make sure to capture his smile
When he spills some on the counter

When it is still warm on the cheeks
And independence has yet to be fully realized
You catch a boy by offering him the futon
Night after night after night after night
You don’t think to ask your mom and
He doesn’t seem to mind the basement stench
But you overcompensate with your words anyway
You’re good at that

Kesha plays like a hymn in the cathedral
Of his boyfriend’s second car
But you catch a boy with the menthol sound
Of Cavetown at dusk in your hole of a bedroom
And he sits on the bed and watches you paint
As his notifications are piling up with passive-aggressive texts
Summer tastes like lemon and cough drops

ii.
You are in the living room at dusk
Haphazard towers of moving boxes rise around you
The furniture has been dismantled and
You divert your gaze to the underwhelming formation
Of cardboard and tape
As your mother screams and throws the cat across the room

In retrospect, it reminds you of an album cover
For some emo basement band
A collage of childhood in hues of brown
Or a glimpse of red flannel
Cardboard castles, a little boy
Holding a paper sword
Taken on a disposable camera in 2004
And reappropriated for it’s nostalgia in 2014

The boy you caught is not amongst your rescue party
You veil your disappointment poorly as you climb into the passenger seat
And it filters through the holes in the cloth like grey light
You blame the fatigue on your mother alone
Though it isn’t entirely her own