Teach your demons how
To speak, and let them write your
Poems for themselves.

I poison my own wells
And wonder why
The neighbors are still sick,
Even after I've given them
Some water.

My last name-
Because it is tied to people
Much greater than me &
That I refuse to let any man
Try to take it away from me.

My grey eyes
That no one will
Ever convince me are blue.

The fact that I somehow
Managed to walk away
From you.

That it's my number
That'll forever be
his emergency contact;
Even though I missed
The most important emergency.

That I AM good at math,
God ******.

That I write poems
About someone who
Isn't even real but
I know that you're here,
Right now,
Telling yourself
That this is about you.

We met in our freshman year gym class. That sounds like the making of a romantic comedy, right? We both know that that's not how this will end.

I'm watching a single broken thread
Of a spider web
Bellow in the sunlight
Of my bedroom.
The spider keeps crawling
Up his broken thread but
Keeps hopelessly
falling back to the bottom.
I named the spider Charles,
Cause it sounds like
One of your many nicknames for me.

I'm trying to make Charles' web into
A metaphor for you.
Are you broken like the string,
Are you doomed like Charles,
A modern day Sisyphus?
I have an English degree.
I can make anything a metaphor.

I've known you for 11 years now; how many of them have you been dead for? I'm tired of you being dead. Can't you just make fun of my hair again? Remember how good we were at algebra?

I miss you not being dead. I drove you to your best friend's funeral. I hardly knew that kid. My only sustaining image of him is the memory of him breaking down a door, drunk, because he wanted to **** one of my friends.

But the truth is is that I sobbed harder than anyone at his ******* hopeless funeral.
You told me you were gonna go out like him.
And because I looked down
into that cheap (bargain deal) coffin,
Which never should have been
An open casket, and
Into your friend's half-lid
Blue tinged eyes,
And suddenly,
it wasn't him.
It was you,
My sweet, old friend.

I never thought it wise
To wear my heart on my sleeve.
So for me,
My heart will lie
Encased in ice,
Anchored to the bottom
of some unknown lake,
unmoved by even
the gentle waves,
where nothing will ever
again be at stake.
Just another
forgotten
unmarked
grave.

Gather all appropriate materials:
Pen or pencil
Or Popov
Or needle,
Or knife,
Whatever sin
Most suits you.

Make a list of every *****
Who has ever hurt you.

***** your finger directly
Onto the page, or
Write directly to the *****
Who last left you.

Dream aloud about the
Brown-eyed *******
That Boston subway
Who got off two stops before you
(Who we both know would
Never have actually slept with you.)

Never tell yourself that
You're not as dark as you think.
Stop smiling and take
Another drink.

Yearn for the ones
You have lost.

Teach your demons
How to speak
And let them write your
Poems for you.

I was raised on The Beatles and
The Rolling Stones and all the Oldies
serenading me through the speakers
on long trips to Gram’s house,
And on dixie cups half-full of beer t
hat I sneaked downstairs
During the late-night news
during your nightly rituals.
I was raised on stockpiling
the pillow mints you saved me
From your many hotel nights
when you’ve been gone on fires
For what felt to me to be
several years at a time.
I lived for your homecomings,
with the smell of deep smoke
Still clinging to your work clothes
when you finally came home to us.
I lived for even your shortcomings,
which always feel to me to be
imperceptibly small.
I was raised on fishing trips
by the lakeshore
where you would
Let me reel in your fish so
that I could always get all the credit.
I was raised on Star Wars
and Star Trek and all the
Friday night Sci-fi movies that we could finally
watch weekly after you retired.
I was raised on our solitary Quincy trips
Where I saw you take better care of your mother
Than anyone else could.
I was raised on the trips you took
That you probably would have never taken
To Arizona and SoCal and Philly
and to a cafe on the side of the road outside of Redding,
after my car crashed into twisted mounds of
metal after I was ran off the road,
the day you thought I might have died.
Because you always knew when I need you.
You still always know when I need you,
Because I always do.

The compromised daylight still pours into the white Chevy where a rifle sits passenger- there will still be whisky on his lips when he walks into work.

Her body braces like she has rigor mortis to the sound of her morning alarm after a night of writhing to the bittersweet taste of ******* drips.

He seeks solace between arms and hips and lips and skin, which never satiates his ache for only her.



Time is a parasitic hangover, leaching from our highs and the small passing moment of brightness we seek all our lives.

Even if you cancel all your credit cards, make love to beautiful strangers, sleep in the streets, find yourself in Europe, lose yourself in your career, curse your parents for your own faults, write poetry to lovers you never had, seize every day every second every moment, join a cult in the backwoods of Northern California, donate your retirement to your church, torment your veins until they collapse into craters, visit your grandma religiously every Sunday, smoke ****** off of tinfoil, sleep eight hours a day and always take the stairs, drink Black Velvet you've hidden in the basement, bribe God to love you on Sundays and threaten him on Mondays. Even when we wait, even when we consent to waste away Time's a slow-creeping hangover already crawling up your spine and seeping into your brain. You won't have time to ask her why all she does is take. It's already too late.

They chased the dragon
instead of their dreams, and made
love at Rock Bottom.

Radio silence,
In an Indian Summer,
You found a new lover.

How much better to
drown, surrounded by water,
than to die of thirst.

You were just a boy,
Only a few years
younger than me.
I, too, was only a girl,
but one who wanted to be
a woman much too quickly.

Except we didn’t meet,
Because you found me
surrounded by sleep.
You had no need to shake my hand
Or learn my name. Just a body,
in the shape of your needs.

When I was a child,
younger of a child
Than when you came
Across me, I thought
Satan haunted me
and kept me from sleep.

That night, where you had
told others we'd met,
I thought Satan himself
had found me again.
Drunk on youth and whisky,
asleep in a stranger's bed,  

I realized that Satan's
only a child's fever dreams,
or, sometimes instead,

a teenage boy,

clinking his belt,

invading my sleep.

If you are what you eat,
my best friend is tortilla soup.
Warm and comforting;
a perfect companion for cold, bleak nights.

If you are what you smell,
my father is a California wildfire;
pungent and strong,
but a sweet warm oak like a
winter stove. A smell
strong enough to remain with you
even after many days since his absence.

If you are what you hear,
my grandma is the coos
of too many grandchildren,
who eventually grow to songs
of her praises,
louder than a preacher
who lives his weekdays only
for his Sunday sermons.

If you are what you see,
My sister is the wide eyes
That forget to meet your gaze
And misaligned smiles,
Of the children
That society too often
Forgets to love.

if you are what you touch,
my mother is the soft tufts
of translucent blonde hair,
And the heat of fevered-foreheads
of the babies she thought
she may never have.

If you are what you know,
I am love.

If you are what you eat,
my best friend is tortilla soup.
Warm and comforting
a perfect companion for cold, bleak nights.

If you are what you smell,
my father is a California wildfire;
pungent and strong,
but a sweet warm oak like a
winter stove.
A smell
strong enough to remain with you
even after many days since his absence.

If you are what you hear,
my grandma is the coos
of too many grandchildren,
which eventually grow to songs
of her praises,
louder than a preacher
who lives his weekdays only
for his Sunday sermons.

If you are what you see,
my mother is the shells
of little, pink snails
that she collected as pets,
until a woman,
who some would call a mother,
would salt them and
cast them on her roof;
a morbid decoration
like those that lined her soul.

If you are what you touch,
my sister is the soft tufts
of translucent blonde hair,
of the babies she thought
she may never have.

If you are what you know,
I am love.

Why don't you ever read my poetry?
You said you wanted to,
"grasp the concepts of my dimensions"
but you don't read my poetry.
Where I lay out a map of my dimensions,
and a key to my concepts,
for you alone to grasp,
but instead you stare at my surfaces
from your screen
and decide you know better.
Like your favorite cliche,
I lead you like a horse to water,
but you don't even bother.
You listen to songs that
only one of us likes
and say you heard me there.
You look at your own reflection
in the mirror and say you saw me there,
in the pools of your own eyes,
when I stand just behind your shoulder.

I can't pay my rent today.
I can't write poetry, either,
because I took a pill,
that I spent my rent money on,
and I can't write on this pill.
But this pill promised me
it would make me beautiful.

Imagine making a cocktail
with crushed glass
instead of ice.
It would **** you,
but it'd be so beautiful.
Blood would drip from your lips
like lipstick, deadly and red,
but it'd be so beautiful.

Imagine paying your rent with poetry.
You'd be back on the streets,
and strangers probably would think
that maybe, pretty white girl,
you're a self-inflicted martyr,
a heroine against the culture
or maybe just that
you just do ******,

but it'd be so beautiful.

How to Write a Poem:

***** your finger and bleed directly onto the page.
Buy a typewriter from a thrift store and poetically sit in a coffee
shop until your muse walks in.
Sleep with your professor and let her write your poems for you.
Hold private seances at the cemetery.
Read your high school yearbook
until your poems seethe with forgotten teenage angst.
Specifically berate your current lover
but then assure him the words aren’t about him.
Drink yourself into oblivion
but blame your inner artist for your demons.
List all the sins of your mother
and conveniently forget those of your father.
Clutch your pen until a stigmata appears in your hands.
Speak your truth,
but tell your friends
your poems aren’t from your own point-of-view.

I’m currently sitting in the coldest clinic,
Across from, probably,
the cheapest Mexican restaurant in Western Arizona.

The floors are sterile white,
And I giggle at the thought
of you
recognizing the irony
Of my emptiness.

The walls are also white and look slick with Lysol.
They radiate that dampness
that I swear that they smell
like loneliness,

We didn’t make love,
So much as **** in the dirt,
But the truth is
I’d rather wake up hot in the afternoon
on the dirt and the ground
(After you’ve already left)
Than wake up next to
The wrong person
in the wrong bed.

From earthy and raw
so quickly
to empty and white.

My youth was short and blurred.
I imagine it felt like the last few moments of Kurt Cobain’s life;
All light and no color.
Though I was born a winter baby,
Summers irrevocably held my heart.
They tasted like the sunscreen that dripped
onto my chlorine-damp lips
And smelled sweet like the honeysuckles
That strangled the Forget-Me-Nots,
Whose roots twisted between the cemeteries
Of our once-pets beneath.

They chased dragons
instead of their dreams
and made love
at rock bottom.

It's taking everything I’ve ever had,
not to crawl into the crevice between your arm and hip.
I want seep inside of you
and live with you,
like the parasite I am.

I’ve bribed to God to make you love me,
And bargained away my future sins.

I want to forget the golden retriever
You took on walks longer than our love-making,
And the way your body writhed beneath my touch
Like a body bracing for a car-crash,
And how with every kiss
I could feel your rigor mortis set in.

I want to read you poems about Kurt Cobain,
While we do ******* at midnight in Golden Gate Park.
And watch you have a visceral reaction
To the memories
Of the times you tasted someone else’s skin.

Instead I’ll
dye my hair black,
Cancel all my credit cards,
And run away to Chicago
to Cheapen myself
and reek of Popov
In a dive bar next to the railroad,
That no one’s heard of
so you can tell strangers
in the subway
and at the New Year’s party,
(at which you’ll meet  your wife)
how much I’ve always meant to you
and how
You will always wonder what happened to me
(Even though
 you won't.)

You put your hands around my neck

and I let you call it ***,

but I think, really,

you only wanted to hurt me.

Somewhere between your journey
To forgetting me
And finding you,
It became your fingers,
That, this time,
I slipped through.

I didn't even ask
To be your sun
Or your moon.

All I wanted
was to be
Your Sunday afternoons.

How many empty calendars spaces
I wasted,
Waiting for you.

I trace your tattoos,
Like rivers on skin.

I kiss your lips,
And taste ***** again.

When you told me you were leaving,
you said

Can't you see how different we are?

But the only difference I could ever see
is that my scars rise like flooding rivers,

And yours
sink and collapse like craters.

We lie awake in the shadow
We’ve molded into the bed.
I wrap your hair around my finger,
You smell like the sleep and sweat of a summer night.
You start to talk about death, again.
You tell me that when people get cremated,
They pop.

I remember the black balloons from my grandma’s funeral.
I watched them pop when I had expected them to float
Til the black faded into the blue.
They reached the atmosphere, but not heaven.

I tell you my grandma was cremated.
You don’t hear me.
You say you want back into the ground,
To nourish the earth with your body.
I say I want to be burned back to the earth.
I say “ashes to ashes” and “dust to dust”.
You don’t get it.

You say that sounds nice, actually.
You tell me to take your ashes and spread them over
The river we
Spent our first summer days together
Drowning in the sun,
And each other’s company

I try to picture you as ashes.
I’d rather be your black balloon.

I should have kissed you before you ****** on your smoke,
Before the fluorescent elevator lights illuminated the flaws
That danced and drifted along your skin.
The thick smoke mingled with your shadow,
A shadow of a man; no face, only a cigarette.
You breathed in smoke, but your lips were positioned for a kiss.

I don’t look like the other girls, the ones you used to kiss.
I can still picture your eyes, reddened by smoke,
And your lips as ashy as your cigarette.
And I hoped you, too, could forgive my flaws.
Like how my body casts too wide of a shadow,
And the sallowness of my ordinary skin.

Things that really shouldn’t remind me of your skin,
like old leather books with burnt paper that I bet taste like your kiss.
Such books I read in the shadow,
And hide, like the way you hid behind your smoke.
Because, like the way I love a bad book and its flaws,
I could love you and your cigarette.

I’ve held your hand, the one that holds your cigarette,
And I felt the sandpaper of your skin.
I smelt the airy cologne you use to cover the flaws.
It smelled light; you used just a kiss.
Now, I smell only smoke,
And the memory of your touch is a shadow.

In the hospital you were no longer a shadow,
But a body, surrounded by walls as white as your cigarettes.
Your voice cracked from the smoke,
While needles pulsed life into your skin.
Your lips were cracked with only blood to kiss.  
I saw you naked, and I saw your flaws.

Your favorite vice was your fatal flaw,
And the black fire of death became your shadow.
It followed you around, and it saw our first kiss,
Which was our last, because you chose your cigarette.
So a charcoaled monster brooded beneath your skin,
And your flesh succumbed to the white ghosts of smoke.

You died in smoke, from your flaws.
Your skin’s now dust, roaming with the shadows.
So I’ll smoke a cigarette, ‘cause it tastes just like your kiss.

Your name was the one I etched into the frosted glass of my dad’s F150
The day after the first Christmas you didn’t come home.

Your blood was the hot coffee I poured into my cup at 3 am
While I wrote essays about how you wrote Anna Karenina
In your previous life.

Your voice was the ghost that haunted my room as a little girl
Nine years before I met you.

You were every one of the five people I’ve slept with besides you.
You were the pink champagne I spilt on my white dress
The first time I got drunk alone.

You are my 11 p.m. dreams
And my morning showers,
And the blue-eyed strangers I make eye contact with in between.

You are the garden I’ll die in,
Or the car I’ll crash in,
Or the ghost I’ll follow into Eden.

The last time you slept in your own bed,
I was the blanket beside you
And the pillow that tasted your last breath.

When l reach for you on the left side of my bed,
you aren’t there.

You are the yellow roses I leave on your grave.
You are not dead. You live inside me.