To watch,
Blood run through your veins and know,
You can stop it, quick or slow.
The lack of complications with which you could potentially be the murderer of your own breath.
And for what?
To prove to the world that you as many others have become vulnerable of your own mind?
Victimized by tragedies or scenarios of twisted "what if"s.
Of love found and lost,
Love from birth and ripped away from your heart like a knife to a steak.
To prove to yourself that you no longer must live in pain or fear.
Fear that consumes your every breath and thought that crosses your condemned mind.
You feel as though it will not get better than sitting in denial in a room full of voices begging for peace in a world that is not our own, voices crawling from no lips only from your own self inflicted insecurities.
But I,
I, am not here to let this monster of a thought consume you.
I, for one, am a stranger.
A stranger to you but not to this monster.
I too have battled the war between peace or life.
I too have swam accross the vast oceans of thoughts screaming to fulfill their wishes.
But I won this battle.
And I will be the knight to stand by your side when it is time to make the decision.
Between life, or a commitment of suicide.
I am the real you I am the one who lives the one who wants to make you smile and find love that will not betray you but for that you must trust me.
You must trust that there is in fact a light at the end of the tunnel as cliché as it may sound.
So listen to this last phrase for it will **** the voices of torture.

You are worth every breath and every tear, you are worth it all and more, be the knight and fight the battle, you will win, because we all believe in you.

-Kathia Mariana Landeros

If she gathers enough sticks,
she'll be able to get the fire going real nice;
enough to see her hand
in front of her face for a change.

She's been scratching around in the dark,
wide-eyed and ravenous,
feeling the ground for wood
for what seems like hours.

Her fingers start to blister and sting
from the friction and the grinding
of her begging and pleading
for just one measly spark.

It's been like this since that day
when everything was still pretty nice
in her podunk town where she
was known as the black sheep.

That day, that day, in late April,
when she raised her hand up
stuck out her thumb and
blotted out the sun.

She woke up with dirt under her nails
and pulled a lock of hair out
that was starting to mat.
She went to sleep with dirt under her nails.

She went to sleep hungry
and now she chews on anything that moves
in the umbra that couldn't be too far
from where she used to live.

Dead leaf blankets-
"Are the trees still alive?
What did the forest smell like,
sound like, at high noon?"

"What were colors?
Light-lovers and their shrieking tears
filled with nostalgic longing for
magical, pretty un-black; privileges".

Sanctum in the murk.
She walks tonight, but not far.
"I am the mother of the moth,
and the sudden ritenuto".


) o ( ●

She sat in the waiting room
Scared as can be
She felt like a little girl
Even though she was thirty-three

Does she want to do this?
Does she really have a choice?
Then she heard this little voice

“Yes you have a choice”, said the voice in her head
But isn’t it too late now, once it’s over, the baby is dead

She ran from room, dark and dingy was the place
She ran and ran at a very fast pace

She couldn’t get away fast enough
She decided to have the baby
No matter how tough

I think I loved you most the winter your heating was broken
And we’d stay inside all morning
Pretending to complain that we couldn’t get out of bed
Our clothes becoming little islands on the floor,
Ones that we could not quite find the courage to visit

Your hand stayed glued to my hip,
Your breath warming my shoulder
Like a long drag of whiskey
That kind that had a home so far away,
In a glass bottle on top of your refrigerator.
The one that would not be opened
Until that fateful day in February,
When everything went wrong

And on that unbearable night
When you joked that you’d freeze to death if I left you
There was a long silence
Like it might be true.

Now it’s warm enough
That I show too much skin when sitting in bars
And you avoid me like the plague,
Whispering in any girl’s ear that’s near to you
Every time you see me watching out of the corner of your eye

We should have stayed inside when the ice began to melt
Because I think
When those doors opened and we finally ventured outside
The world had changed,
And so had you and I.

Sometimes on the way out of Giant,
I’ll spend time freeing change
from the receipt paper
bindle in my coat pocket
for one two-twist mystery prize
from a Folz machine.

Two quarters:
just enough for a plastic, sapphire ring and a cheap
laugh while I juggle coffee cream cartons in both arms.

I strap them in the passenger seat,
sharing it as my sister
and I had just to sit up straight
and marvel at the maple branches
washing the windshield in green,
leaving helicopters and dew trails.

We watched slug trails glisten
like Berger Lake water
beneath the incandescent streetlight.
Bright like the last cigarette my grandma snuffed out
in a smokeless ash tray.
Bright like the first halogen headlights that stung my retinas.
Bright like the quarter my grandpa gave me for the Folz machine
in the Sylvania.
And bright like the plastic, emerald ring I showed him.

Who are we to at folly jest
when folly is at our behest
seek we humour at anothers expense
whilst all the while we sit on a fence
grass being greener on some other side
now folly in us shall reside