You are lying in a hospital bed. A nurse comes in to take your blood. She tries your left arm, no veins. She stares at your left hand, holding it, turning it over and over, saying, You have some veins here. You hate those veins, you always have. They make you think of when you were younger, when you had to visit your old grandfather. Your mom would always force you to go to his bed and greet him because he was unable to walk. Give him a little kiss, she would say. You didn’t understand why but today you realize it was because he was dying. Yet, you don’t lower your head to his cheek to give him a kiss because you are selfish and scared, scared of his wrinkly skin and green veins that seem to outline the corners of his hands.
After the nurse takes your blood, she asks, Would you like something to eat? You wonder if she knows why you’re in the ER; you wonder if she knows you haven’t eaten in three days, despite your mother’s pleas at the dinner table. All you do is ask for green tea. Lots of it. It is the only thing you consume anymore, including grapes and an apple a day. She brings you only two tea bags. A psychologist comes. She asks you question after question: How many calories do you eat a day? 150 maximum. Do you use laxatives? No (lie). What was your highest weight ever? 126. Your lowest weight? 94. When did your eating disorder start? Two years ago. Do you self-harm? Yes. Where? On my thighs, hips. Have you passed out or experienced any seizures? No (second lie). What is your ideal weight? I’m not sure, 90 lbs seems pretty nice, really just any weight that would **** me. Do you want to get better? No comment. Then, suddenly, before she leaves, you confess: When I use a mirror, I can’t seem to look into my eyes anymore. You can’t bear it? She acts like she understands. It makes you mad. She leaves for a few seconds then comes back with a wheelchair.
You don’t want to attract any attention, so, as calmly as possible, you announce, I can walk perfectly fine, I don’t need a wheelchair. She stares at you with pity lurking in her eyes, We don’t want you burning any more calories, ***. Reluctantly, you fall into the chair, embarrassed as people stare wondering what your problem is. You arrive at the Eating Disorder Clinic. There is a young boy playing a video game. He has a feeding tube; he is the first one to greet you. You look around the room and think, they all look like normal people. While getting to know the other patients you will soon learn who is bulimic, who is anorexic, who has anxiety, who has depression, who wants to get healthy, who is faking their way out of it. You stare at each of their bodies: Are their thighs skinnier than mine? What about their wrists? Do their cheekbones protrude? How much weight have they gained since they’ve been here? Does their arm bone pop out when placing their hands on their hip? Yours does. You are disgustingly proud of it.
That evening, as a night nurse shows you to your room, she explains the rules: Bathroom and drawers must be locked before going to bed, there is a camera in the room, you will be watched at all times, always keep the bathroom door open, make sure to ask us to check your toilet before flushing (you rarely do), every morning you must be weighed in a hospital gown, no sharp objects allowed, the mirrors are made out of metal (in them you can’t see the size of your ****, thighs, stomach). You cry your fist night there. But I’m not skinny yet! you yell into the sheets without making a single noise and you, honest to God, believe that you don’t have a problem. Just give me some space and I’ll figure things out; really, I’m fine, just a bit confused.
      But still, like every other morning, you wake up and stare down at your thighs, collarbones, belly, and think, You pig, you fat *****, you have no control, pathetic *****. For the first few days you have to remind yourself, Feel your bones, embrace them, remember how light and delicate they are, soon they won’t be there anymore. You want to hide.

I do not remember what it’s like to eat a piece of food and not think twice about it. Can you tell me please? Take me back to when I was just born, to when bleeding hieroglyphs no longer sat on my thighs, to when my veins were already flushed of a need to ****. The lipstick on my mouth is made out of the blood I dissect from my body at night. Once I spilled a raindrop of cranberry juice onto a rosé journal and I cried. He pulled me in between houses. There he laid me down on the grass and I felt oh so very strange to be surrounded by my home, a place of love and kindness and security and welcoming food always ready on the table surrounded by smiling sisters. Yet no one came to save me that night. And so I still think about it today, long after he has moved away and I have still stayed sitting around that mendacious table of warm food I refuse to eat. My school shoes are the only shoes I own. I sleep with them on because I’m convinced that the idea of a happy young girl in long socks and short skirt and ******* that poke out just a little will enter the chloroplast of my cells and join the war against viruses that take me to that too familiar closet corner with the carpet stained with blood. Or is it cranberry juice? I cry.

He burnt the bed sheets. Finally.
His shoes
Smelt of marital blood
Afterwards.
On days like these,
He enjoys catching dust in his hands,
Likes to compare the flecks to the
Cuts on his palms
Until he can’t see the difference
Anymore.

Shrieks come from the tub,
Voltage pushing his legs to jump.
Now he watches the bath
Rumble the house with its tears

Plump.
          Plump.
                    Plump.

Rain covers tormented streets;
He too feels he must erupt from the sky.

Plump.
          Plump.
                    Plump.

A window
Replays the chaos of the world
From ten stories high.

Plump.

09/29/13
Define Happiness.
      Here I go: I do not believe I know the definition of Happiness. Not because I’ve never truly experienced it before, but because I think of it as a word with a great amount of meaning, such as the word “love”, but is overused and thrown around by mindless children. A boy once told me that he “loves” me. I explained to him that he is sixteen and does not know what love is and neither do I, so please don’t say that you love me. But because I am sure you will not accept an “I don’t know” as a response, I will try my best to define Happiness.
      My kind of Happiness comes in three different levels. First, the top level, the most superficial one of all, is the in between. I am a strange person and one of my strange qualities is that I am the happiest when I am in need of something. Let me explain: I hate being at home. I want to leave the overbearing side of my mother and my desolate home drenched in memories of my ****** past. In November of last year, I needed to clear my mind and visited my brother in Montreal. However, once I arrived in the pale city, I wanted to fly back home immediately. See the problem? I have since then realized that I am happiest when I am in between two worlds: travelling from a city that I hate but grew up in, to a city that I love but am lost in. Another example: there is a boy that I like; and when he leaves my side, I can’t help imagining the moment when he finally grips my hand firmly again. But once that moment comes, I want it to end. Immediately. I want to be on my own. Once again, I am happiest when I am left alone to imagine a scene of being with someone or something that I so dreadfully need but am disappointed when that opportunity comes.
      Second, the next and more profound level of my Happiness is comfort. Happiness here is all about talking about your secrets with people whom you do not truly know yet but share the same history with. You have just met these people and already you speak to them about the spots on your body where you like to cut the most and the amount of weight you lost in a month and the foods you so shamefully enjoy bingeing on and in what ways you’ve thought about killing yourself and the things you were so close to doing such as taking a hammer to your scale because you were fed up with it always admitting that you’re fat fat fat fat fat!!!! However, on this second level, Happiness is also proclaiming that you want Wendy’s because that is what your body is unfortunately craving, and then finishing a chicken sandwich and small fries and diet coke with no ice while sitting in a car, understanding that you will not be able to burn off the hundreds of calories you have just taken in because you are stuck on a five hour drive to visit your dear sister. On this second level, Happiness is putting ******* between your thighs and feeling them touch, pinching your double chin, and rubbing your bloated belly for four seconds then shrugging off your imperfections and driving to school without even thinking about them anymore.
      Finally, the third and most heartfelt level of my Happiness is associated with security. Happiness here is walking through a graveyard and knowing for a fact that you will die soon too so please don’t think you’re stuck like this forever. On this level, my Happiness is the thought shoved in the back of my mind reminding me that there is a blade hidden in a pretty shoe box in the corner of my closet, always accessible and always prepared to cure the pain I can’t seem to rip out from under my flesh. On this level, my Happiness is looking down at my thighs and caressing the scars that I try so hard to hide yet am so attached to because they keep me safe in times of desperation, reminding me that I bleed and feel pain (thank God). On this level, my Happiness is my mortality.

Like a mad-driven star
You swept me into a cacophony
Of broken strings hoping
To mend themselves.
And Hell is another word for Home
Drenched in Midol to hush
The screeches of sanity gone wrong;
How did it come to this?
You dipped me into unwashed coffee-cups
Leaving me to drown in you morning
Unhappiness. To whom did you mourn when you left?
You broke me in the shoe-store across Middleton Road when
I confessed I only believe in God
In times of need. Selfish, you named me.
How dare you insult me with slash-full tongues?
How dare you wash me out of your hair with Clorox and swear
To never speak my name again?
God, I need you.

you are a stampede in the hollow parts of my bones,
a chance to open the chambers of my heart. quite literally.
my plans for this body are to be wrapped around the intensities of yours.
keep you still.
I look into a velvet mix and hope someone’s there.
instead I hear God yell, who made me?
the bruises you left on my shoulders tell
the story of an orange tree stuck in the wrong garden
but still persisting it is at home.
you are the exothermic reactions happening in my veins.
hardly do you notice them shimmer.
I smoke the left over cigarettes
found between my nails.
they exhale your name when the air is cold
and frost becomes my sole companion.
you walked away when I gave you my hand
and all you felt were tears drip from my pores.
a sponge used to dry my eyes.
is this what it’s like to be in love?
hardly do you notice them shimmer.

You hated my coral bracelet
Filled with the same rosé carbons
Over and over and over.
I have noticed that every time you try
To whisper a genuine
I love you,
You look down on that bracelet
Given to me by a boy who once loved me but
Whom I never loved. Were you jealous?
You hated my coral bracelet.

I made you cry when I confessed
You are only real to me
When my hands are clasped around
The brittle cheekbones your skin fails to hide.
Inside of me, inside of me,
You are inside of me. Yet once I turn away,
I forget that atoms, like mine, constitute your vivacity
Of movements, that you, like I, occupy reserved space.
I forget.
Do you love, do you love?
Do you love, love, love me?

Because I am trapped in my own cells,
Blistered by the sun
Of your kindle presence.

Yes, I blame you.
I blame you
For the roaches in my car
And that time you made me bleed into my wine.
I blame you for all the toast you burnt
And the way you watch sunsets with
Such impatience.

If you asked,
I wouldn’t go back with you.
My heart is already capable of
Telling such tremendous tales.

I need none of yours.
Get – be gone.
Once a lover, but forever a wanderer.

Remember curiosity,
The reek of home,
Sleeping with a
Mouthful of fevers.

Remember gold,
Roasted muscles,
The shackles in your thighs.

Remember me,
When you discovered
Hearts of past lovers
Live in your fingernails.

Remember you,
A mad-driven star,
Biting waves with such
Honeydew eyes.

Remember patience,
Threaded into your skin with
Pear tree splinters.

Remember:
Even God knows limits.

(1)
We cross seas with our wrists
And drown in rivers too minute
To keep our muscle afloat.
I once heard there was a time
When the moon
Bled tears of recognition for our hearts;
Now my last name soughs the story
Of women who wept
In lieu of pursuing their second beings,
Dominated by passionate blows of vulnerability.

(2)
Still today my skin
sheds your light
Only to leave me with estranged metal bonds
Whose conductivity has
burnt into dust.

(3)
Pain-stricken, I clasp you
With the contractions you send to my broken legs.
You inform me: This is Home;
I carefully murmur within,
This is a rotten home; this is Loneliness.
Yet I strangely feel glimmers of radiant energy
Shine through these windows,
Only to pass into my own holes.

(4)
I stay.

My dear, I assure you, this was not my deed. No, my dear, I am innocent. I awoke this morning from a genius dream to darkness, as my windows were covered with grayed curtains from my mother’s gold childhood. I stepped out onto the terrace without notice of the body. Perhaps it was not there yet. However, doctors soon established the lady had been dead for more than thirteen hours. I was not aware of her presence the entire time I took eloquent drags from my cigarette, only noticing the smell of the pollen-filled wind and, now I know, mistaking the sound of her blood hitting the concrete tiles as a mild shower from the south. Had I been aware of her presence, I’d have saved her, separated the handle from the clench of her body, and called the authorities. I’d have cried if only I remembered how. I’d have made love to her while I was still alone. Let her rest in ecstasy.
          Do you understand now, my dear? Do you understand the good that lies within me? I am not a man of killing; perhaps somewhere, a man like me is, but not I, dear friend, not I. Do you believe me? My God, if only the officers believed me. Instead they tied my hands behind my back and forced my lips shut so that I can not even yell of my innocence, all while dragging me into a cellar that now I must call my home because of an action I did not commit. That I did not commit! That I would never dare to commit! Atrocious, they call me. Atrocious, I call them for engraving lies into my brain, fragile to dementia but not to crime. No, never to crime.
         My dear, please note, they say I am who I am not. Devils! They paint pictures of a filthy man unrecognizable and insist it is me. *******! I have felt my skin tingle in manners unimaginable and a sensation of a new body rise within me, a new body whose deeds I have no control over. I am not the producer of this crime. I am innocent. This was my only confession to the officers who came into my apartment due to the neighbors’ complaints of screams unlike those of ******* coming from somewhere near my establishment. Indeed, I found, along with my new workmates, a bloodied woman looking down to the floor, lipstick mouth and tired eyes, impaled. Horrific! Was written on the notepad of the chief of police. Now I am strained on electrical mattresses, obliged to believe what I never would have dared to believe, obliged to reminisce my last taste of self-government: as I stood in the doorway of my terrace along with five police officers realizing they were not prepared for this grotesque imagery, I became aware of a fragile young woman, perhaps in her early 20s, hanging upside down with a rotten handle sticking from her mouth. Indeed, around her disentangled body were the satin sheets of my bed, drenched in her brown substance that shimmered in the snug afternoon sunlight. The officers hurriedly disregarded this fact and focused on the removal of the woman’s body from the handle, only to have her legs detach and fall onto the wet concrete. An officer yelled. Another grimaced. I giggled, watched, focused, determined. Upon further distant inspection, I observed that the handle had been ferociously inserted into her soft, delicate genital, forced through her dry ******, passing along the large and small intestines, only to finally pierce her stomach and come back up through her mouth. The beauty of the crime was terrifying.
          The beauty of the crime is terrifying. It is a blissful poem written by finesse, workmanship, delicacy. There is no manner for this legendary craft to be produced by me: I am a sufferer of mediocrity and its dreadful boredom. The father of the crime was a genius, the one I have always dreamt of being. Now, my friend, since my last day of freedom, I have no beauty to witness anymore. Confined, I befriend insects whose exoskeletons allow for strength and resistance to remain a part of them. I am incompatible to these powers; I am innocent. At many times, I howl for a touch at night; I awake with cut nails and scars between my thighs. Guards insist on restraining me. They sabotage me until I see Hell. Then, I am finally able to stay calm. No more do I sporadically feel my skin tear from my bones as if it were attempting to evaporate from me as a slight sting overcomes these unfamiliar ligaments. They ask me how? They ask me why? I remain silent fore I do not recall how or why. I remain silent fore I desire to know how or why. I desire the brilliance of the unspeakable act. Unspeakable in its grandeur; unspeakable in its cruelty. The filthy man the officers paint now becomes attributed to the crime’s brilliance to me. I see him more everyday. He wanders in mirrors and speaks to me when I am not aware of time and presence.
        However, disappointed, I remain with no explanation for the officers but that sunsets are composed of separations of wavelengths that shine differently onto each ray of existence than onto any other globular star. And, as this occurs, the identical wavelengths spray themselves among the individuals who are most vulnerable to hysteria in order to reflect themselves in unsuitable manners. That is how my mother explained to me the illness her womb inflicted onto my sacred hemisphere. That is how I began to call the foul insects who dared to climb into my cellar, my sole companions.

Eyes on fire, sweating into sunken sheets.
You begin from the hair,
Lighting me like a candle.

I stare.

What are these morphing molecules of madness
Annihilating my arteries with their acid?
Now you surround me with sun-bright gasoline;
Set bedroom walls into stars.

I am the center.

Ingredients
For a cure:
A match,
A cry,
And a crow
For after, to screech and crawl into the holes
Of my cindered body.

Let the rest disintegrate into the dirt that
From the foundations of our home, has
Drunken our despair and disgrace for far too long.

You told me that you believed equilibrium splits
Good and evil,
Keeping the weight of Earth constant.
But if I showed you that there are more scars
Softened into my veins than space on my back
For you to caress,
And if I told you that when they opened me,
Surgeons found my heart was a metaphor for Hell
And my thoughts penetrate it with gasoline,
Would you still believe that charisma comes from experiences
And not from the mistakes of our parents?
I was tired and unprepared,
Couldn’t seem to balance your tears with mine,
Look here where he touched me,
Will you touch me there too?
I was walking for home but only found myself
Again and again and again
When will my tragedy end?

Eyes on fire, skipping through swarming streets
(I’m not scared).
The cacophony makes me breathe
Out the dust from my lungs.
What are these morphing molecules of madness
Annihilating my arteries with their acid?
You surrounded me with red-hot gasoline,
Lit candles on fire to make a star of me
Before making love.
Said the demons will pass on
To you,
To children,
If you entered me.
I set the rest of me on fire
(Did you a favor).
Placed my ashes between the balmy bricks of your home.
Turned my ashes into ashes.

And I can only read one poem
Per day, per month, per year, at a time,
Or else its eternity of letters will replace the oxygen I breathe
And cause me to release phrases of love and trust,
Of infidelity and mysteries, of insecurities,
And scars along my throat that never seemed to be

Deep enough.
But mostly I can only read
One poem per day, per month, per year,
At a time, because those were the words you wrote
To me while drinking your cold
Dark coffee that Tuesday morning when I hadn’t come
Back from the bathroom yet. I said I’d just be
A minute but with a minute I meant
An eternity, an eternity of blood along my left wrist,
Dripping from my pale white night-gown. I said I’d just be
A minute and you said okay and continued
Writing about the torture you’d feel having to wake up
And come home to silence,
While sipping from your cold dark coffee.

Eyes shine bright like streetlights against
The brisk air of October;
She is the caryatid of the night.
But the veins of the city have long been abandoned,
No more circulation to revive the stillborn pigments of her skin.
And so she cries a brittle tear immediately
Frosted by the breath of the night,
Staining her granite skin,
Can’t seem to lift her beaten anchor
And sink it into the cornucopia of being,
Lavished with daisies prepared to drain her salted rain.

There was the way he touched me: his hands, tender and beaten from the oh so many bar fights, would glide across the goose bumps of my spine, warming my blood; his breath would blow towards my naked neck, coming in as empty waves that cooled the third degree burns his whispers left; the surface of his lips, dry from the lack of chap stick and sore from consistently shaping the sounds of his voice, would barely brush my stomach, only meeting with the miniscule blonde hairs that tried to hide my sacred body.
        I was afraid of him though. I was afraid of the way he moved, suddenly and without caution, his legs and arms barely keeping up with the shock of his movements. Sometimes in the morning, before stumbling out from his side of the bed, he would grab my limp body and embrace my chest, pressing my ******* against the bottom of his belly, making my body absorb the heat waves of his own that had slept underneath his skin all night long.
         Slowly, as the afternoons grew longer and the mornings grew shorter, our bodies no longer came into contact. Not even our voices collided anymore during pathetic wasted nights when we drank the same amount of wine as the amount of our tears. We were drunk by 8 pm. Eventually, all we did was lean across balcony railings, facing each other, not knowing anymore how to communicate what we so deeply wanted. I wanted to hold him. He wanted to leave me. And only one night later he did.
        He left the night of my birthday; I was long broken by then: my blood stained with alcohol, my heart throbbing between my ribcage, my eyes begging for guidance. As I fell through the front door of his apartment, struggling to hold on to his sleeve, I smelt of ***** and ***. He laid me one the covers of his bed, the ones we bought together the day I moved in, and lightly ran his fingertips down my feet, removing my only Prada heels. Through the dim light, I stared down into his starry eyes, trying to read the words strung together in his mind.
       I failed expectedly; and so, because *** was the only remainder of our relationship, I softly sang into his ear:
                             I would swim the seas a thousand times
                                 for the constellations of your skin
                                 to brush against the earth of mine
        And so that night, he breathed heavily into the scars across my neck, his moans erupting like sudden volcanoes from the bottom of his throat, destroying the empty sound that had been planted in his room since the first time I cried into his sheets. And when he was done, he tiptoed into the bathroom while I remained numb and motionless. He came back only twenty minutes later, silently perched against my right shoulder, delicately removed the greasy hair from my face, and faintly murmured: “I’m leaving you”.

And I have long since
Forgotten
The way your voice bakes
My heart
And burns the edges
Just enough
To turn me bitter again
When you have left