it’s the first day of a fresh new school year when
one of your teachers looks you dead in the eye and says,
“introduce yourself.”
your classmates,
familiar to you yet all somehow strangers,
scramble for some short snippet of a way to encompass everything they
have spent the past sixteen to eighteen years accumulating.
when it’s your turn and every eye turns upon you in anticipation for you to “introduce yourself,”
you taste iron in your gums and say,
“i’m not sure yet.”
and every last one of your peers agrees.
see, for the past three years every time someone asks me how old i am,
i start to tell them “fifteen”
and i don’t think that i’m the only one when it comes to this whole crisis of identity.
see, for the past three years i look back on who i used to be
and sneer at past versions of myself,
a babushka doll of self-loathing as i once saw it so eloquently put.
how am i supposed to introduce myself
if i’m going to hate what i see looking back in probably three months?

it’s some kind of family event or holiday when
one of your relatives, or friend of a parent, friend of a friend of a friend of a coworker,
looks you dead in the eye and asks,
“what are you doing with your life?”
your cousins are all too much older, family and yet strangers,
staring wide-eyed because they remember the horror of
getting asked this by every other adult in sight.
you take two short breaths and taste iron in your gums and you say,
“i’m not sure yet.”
and everyone rushes to assure you that it’s fine not to have decided yet,
as though anyone ever actually sticks to the career path they choose when they are just
eighteen, seventeen, sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, thirteen.
when i was thirteen, twelve, eleven, ten,
took every single interaction as an attack upon my person.
i was selfish and self-absorbed and, quite frankly,
one of the most problematic kids that i know.
not in the “scene kid who won’t stop talking about anime” kind of jokingly problematic
but the kind of problematic where i thought it was okay to
repeatedly ignore a gay friend’s request to stop throwing around the word “******.”
how am i supposed to tell you what i’m doing with my life
when less than a decade ago i was everything that i have now come to completely
and utterly hate?

it’s a social event full of friend-of-a-friends,
people who are complete and utter strangers,
meeting you for the first time so of course
they’ll look you dead in the eye and ask you,
“what’s your name?”
suddenly your heart is in your throat because there is power in names,
power that you will never shake,
and to be quite honest you have too many names to pick just one.
in a split second decision you have to assign this new person as a peer, an acquaintance,
figure out who you are mutually in contact with.
when the silence stretches a beat too long,
you taste iron in your gums and say,
“i’m not sure yet.”
maybe this time it’s not as appropriate of an answer,
and all your friends are looking at you strangely.
see, everyone i know has a different name to call me.
my best friend calls me ‘jack’ and my mother calls me ‘claire.’
my teachers struggle to figure out which one i prefer.
see, once upon a time i read an essay about how names have power.
you summon spirits by their names.
you control demons by knowing their names.
an angel’s song is its name.
i tried to divide myself into tiny pieces so that no one could ever have full control over me.
i have accepted a handful of aliases and nicknames that i respond to
sooner than the one on my birth certificate
so that no one may ever own me.

i write a lot of poetry about not knowing where i’m going.
the problem with dwelling on these things is that i am still going,
going,
going with still no destination determined.
how long can a train go in a straight line before it derails itself?
how far can a train go before it runs out of fuel?

hi, my name is jack. i like
outer space and poetry,
physics and creative writing.
hi, my name is jack. i am
not an earthling-- my home is in the stars,
somewhere far away for which i am still searching.
the marrow of my bones whispers for me to just go go go go go--
but i can’t drive on the highway without inducing anxiety,
and i don’t think i’m quite smart enough to become a rocket scientist.
i’ve just got to cross my fingers and pray
that somehow they’ll pick me to revisit the moon someday.

1995 saw the start of Generation Z,
the ‘iKids’ with a knack for this new-fangled technology,
Millennial 2.0,
caught in the limbo of the World Wide Web development and Rose Gold iPhones.
They say we’re adaptable,
but apparently we can’t make our own decisions about anything.
They say that we don’t care about anything
except for our tiny little screens,
but they forget who put them in our hands,
and they forget who they run to for help
when they forget how to troubleshoot.
They forget what kind of technology we need to keep sustaining life in the Information Age,
Caught in a crossfire because
Yeah, we’re 90s kids—but the 90s never really actually ended until 2006,
the only difference between two decades being
how much neon versus how much chrome,
and just how expensive accidentally opening the internet app on your mom’s blackberry phone was.
We’re nostalgic for all the things we can’t quite remember,
and half these high schoolers weren’t actually born until 2000 or 2001.
Most of us aren’t old enough to even remember 9/11, nothing outside of the news clips that our teachers show us in history class every single September.
I was born in the same year as the Columbine shootings.
The United States has not been at peace for a year of my life.
We are always fighting— fighting for everything.
Human equality,
posing arguments about micro aggressions and refugees, seeing the inhumanity in the past that we’re living.

None of us are older than 21,
under such hard scrutiny while Baby Boomers Wave 2 still run our country.
We inherited the Millenial’s exhaustion,
the generation before us spending our childhood fighting for all the things that we have never really believed in.
Fairytales.

Generation Z.
The ‘iKids’ who are going to one day be making leaps and bounds with technology,
the generation to nurse this dying planet back to health,
Millennials 2.0 who know how to learn from our forerunners’ mistakes,
who know how to adapt from Sidekicks to iPhone 6S Plus in less than a decade.
We’re the kids who have realized that fun is found in safe spaces rather than invading each other’s personal spaces.

They say we’re too sensitive,
but at the same time they claim that we’re desensitized.
And I thought we were the generation that couldn't make decisions.

I'm a Barbie Girl,
in a Barbie World.
Life's fantastic: I
feel like plastic,
aiming for an eighteen-inch waist because I can afford to throw my internal organs away.
I feel like plastic,
having to choose
between eating and breathing with not enough space for two tubes.
I feel like plastic,
a thirty-nine inch bust and three times the forehead.
I feel like plastic,
a size nine squeezed to a three, spending
three to nine avoiding mealtime because my weight loss book says
'Don't eat.'
I'm a Barbie Girl,
in a Barbie World.
Life's fantastic, but...
I'm not plastic.
I've sat here listening while you complain about society but I don't think you realize that
society is made by you.
You complain about masks but you're masked by your poetry and
trust me,
it's trendy:
Psychiatry.
A bottle of capsules captures your soul and your dreams,
fading
reality.
I cannot be defined because a definition leaves no room for change and I
am a flame,
ready to burn the cardboard box of priority you put over me.
All the cool kids are lesbians and thespians on about repressions
and I care,
I do,
I mean... I'm standing here among you.
But words are just air.
You can stand on this stage and tell me I'm beautiful, but
I am more than my face so
disregard my mild distaste for your
inspirational speech.
Now, this...
This isn't a call for help.
This is a call to arms.
This
is a battle cry because
I
am sick of waiting for a future that should've happened yesterday.
So use this air to live the words you say and
rally.
Do not soothe, because we've already been cocooned by soothed reality in
Shawnee,
Johnson County.
I'm a real girl,
in a real world.
Life's fantastic, and I
refuse to be plastic,
aiming for generic weight range based on content, not scale number.
I refuse to be plastic,
a neck moulded perfectly for both eating and breathing so I don't have to choose.
I refuse to be plastic,
a bust that you don't need to be sizing
when I've got eyes
a green not of romanticized meadows but of drunken
puke.
I refuse to be plastic,
a size nine foot in a size nine shoe,
spending three to nine
enjoying my meal times,
because my weight loss book is
chucked down the chute.
I'm a living girl
in a beautiful world.
Life's fantastic,
because I'm not plastic.

Icarus washes up on Miami Beach over the spring break of 2k16 and finds a world where the gods roam the streets,
where his wax wings burned themselves into trenches of scars down his back,
where we warn our children of the dangers of flying too high,
but forget the part about the riptides waiting if you fly too low.

He asks Siri how far away the sun is,
finds Apollo in the red rocks of New Mexico
off I-40 just outside of Albuquerque,
alone and basking in the heat.
The ice caps are melting.

The sun still hurts to touch,
burning Icarus's hands and leaving fingerprints in the feathers of his melted wings,
but Apollo is much kinder now,
soothing the skin cancer with freckles and soft touches.
It no longer feels like a damning.

This is what happens to the children of tragedies:
they flinch too much,
they fall too hard,
they're fragile as glass but immune to everything the world can throw at them.
Icarus flinches at the sound of the oceans.
He knows the wrath of Poseidon.

Icarus rises from the dead with his irises washed white
and his rips etched with Hades's name:
he should have been a child of Persephone,
spring in his hands and flowers in his hair.
He should have spent his days sprawled in the sun's caress.
He should have been infinite.

Icarus flinches too much.
That's what everyone keeps telling him.
He flinches too much at every lifted voice and crashing wave and
he flinches too much when he feels sunshine on his face.
Icarus is sorry for flinching too much.
Icarus is trying not to flinch too much.
Icarus is sorry that it's taking so long to just get over his trauma and stop flinching so much--
sorry.

He doesn't know what to do now that he's touched the sun
and this time it didn't burn.
He wanted it to burn.
He wants to burn.
He wants to feel his bones breaking all over again because
that's the only time he doesn't feel like he needs to be in control.
Why is he chasing things that hurt?
Why does he feel
like he deserves to hurt?
He deserves to crash.

He finally touched the sun.
Icarus feels empty, and
he's still flinching.

You’re a Monday child, born on the first day of the week--
the weakest link--
You’re like the moon.
You’ve got nothing to give--
the sharp darkness of your crescent is someone else’s shadow,
and your light is nothing but the reflection of something bigger
and brighter than you.
You’re a disappointment child,
potential building like the Tower of Babel,
everyone telling you that if you had just tried hard enough,
then you could have touched God.
But you’re just a Monday child,
an extrovert who runs up the electricity bill by leaving on
all the lights when you’re home alone,
how even with your earbuds in you leave the TV on.
Pretending to be near people who are alive makes you feel a little less like you
already died a long time ago.
Darkness doesn’t take days off and
neither do your thoughts, so
wrap yourself in stars.
You want to find light in the constellations but
it’s hard to trace lines between dots behind fog.
Mondays are longer on Mars.
You were born with stress in your veins, heaping projects with no real due date,
in a constant state of waiting for Friday,
but weekends are for the weary,
and the taut line of your spine implies that you
don’t deserve a break.
The thing about Mondays is that they’re crushing,
filled with longing,
the way that you only feel homesick when you look up at the moon and her fraud light.
You wrap yourself in nebulae and galaxies to try to
keep the homesickness at bay while you sleep.
Nothing will ever be good enough.
You will never be good enough.
You are a Monday child, a bitter aftertaste of someone else’s loss,
like you’ve smiled too brightly at a stranger leaving a funeral home.
You dug your own grave a long time ago.
Your eyes are clouded with looking too far forward, stretching yourself backwards,
hanging onto the aftertaste of the weekend while living for the next.
You hang like laundry,
brittle in cold wind,
the step between that no one likes to linger on.
You were born on a Monday.
But your eighteenth birthday fell on a Wednesday,
your sixteenth on a Sunday,
and you are more than a desperate reach for empty space.
The Tower of Babel did not touch God.
You are not here for someone else to tell you to touch God.
You are not here for someone else.
You may be a disappointment child,
with your Monday fog eyes and shaking hands,
but sometimes you have to choose your own joy over someone else’s expectations--
because I was born on a Monday,
and poetry comes easier than physics but nothing
calms me down quite like solving differential equations.
I was born on a Monday,
and I’m used to looking at other people’s faces and seeing disappointment
because I don’t think I'm quite what any of us wanted me to be.
I cling to the past the way that Monday clings to Sunday,
but daydream about the future like it’s Saturday.
The problem is Tuesday through Friday, because
nothing quite makes me want to die like the concept of
planning out the rest of my life.
I think I’ll be alright, though,
because on Monday nights I look at the stars and think that
I might be figuring out how to feel alive,
like maybe home is in the constellations that I still don’t quite know.
Maybe home is in the Mondays,
or maybe it’s in the weary camaraderie of humanity’s ability to cling to weekdays.
Most days, I have to remind myself that this is just the beginning,
simultaneously relieving and daunting,
because I’m scared of the future and I’m scared of being disappointing.
I’m a Monday child, born under a full moon that feels like home
whether I’m looking at it from Jamaica or Germany or Kansas City.
Chaos comes with the start of the week,
and losing myself has always felt comforting:
that’s the only time when I have no one else to be.

you know how the song goes:
a stitch away from making it
and a scar away from falling apart.
holding on gets hard when
the light at the end of the tunnel
goes dark.

my friend told me he doesn’t purposely
befriend actively suicidal people anymore.
so when a 14-year old friend
was hospitalized for an attempt,
he was shocked.
I’m not fourteen
and i don’t go to the hospital for anything,
but when i was fifteen i
asked my mom to start taking me to therapy.
she told me,
sweetie,
you can just talk to me about anything.
so i started writing poetry instead.
but poems can’t diagnose me,
poems can’t prescribe me meds to
fix the chemical catastrophe in my head
poems can’t cure me.
but neither can people.

there was a boy that i used to call sunshine,
but he told me that he would
rather be the moon.

i deleted your number from my contacts
once you stopped using mine.
you don’t keep me up at night.
i’ve stopped losing sleep over you.

i haven’t broken the habit of checking
people’s wrists when they move
because of all the girls i knew in grade school.
i have a friend with the first letter of help
permanently scarred on his stomach.
we’ve never talked about it.
i don’t know if either of us know how to,
or if either of us really want to,
or if either of us really need to.

when my brother was 18, he was convinced
that he wanted to go into psychiatry.
i think the closest we’ve ever been
was when i had a mental break over
orange juice at one thirty in the morning,
watching him play GTA on his Xbox 360.
when my brother was 17, he was convinced
that his future was in professional photography.
i’m 17 and i don’t have a ******* clue.
I’m 17 and i don’t think I’ve ever felt so much
like I’m just constantly drowning.

they say a captain goes down with his ship
and I’ve set myself up for losing all my friends.

she’s got year-round summer skin
and winter has never been my friend.

i sleep seven hours a night
and i wake up exhausted.

my cat has all his claws
and when he crashes through my bedroom
when i’m on the brink of extinction
it leaves me haunted, hearing
breathing and footsteps that aren’t really there.
so i’ll put studs in all my jackets
and wrap myself in blankets.

i wish you were here,
i wish i was there.

the first rated R movie
that i saw when i turned 17
was that one that brought back ryan reynolds,
starring a moody teen with
the best superhero name ever,
a CGI man who acted as her mentor,
a pretty girl like a damsel in distress,
and the bad guy called himself ajax
but his real name was francis.
i cried
a lot.
i’m not sure why, really, but when the credits
started rolling and it was everything that i’d
been waiting for in a movie for the anti-hero
that I’ve been in love with since i was 13,
i sat in those velvet seats and started sobbing.

when i was six, my dad took my
9 year old brother and i
to see ‘revenge of the sith’ when it came out
in 2005.
the scene on mustafar, the volcanic planet,
the downfall of anakin skywalker
stuck with me until i was 12 and rewatched
all six of those old movies,
stuck with me until i was 16 and rewatched
all six of those old movies.
when i was a kid those scenes were scary,
now i see a mimic of Shakespearean tragedy.

i pick things apart until i know that they’ll scar,
but scars have always faded for me.
the first mark that ever lasted for
more than a month was when i
burned myself getting a cake out of the oven.
i remember my brother telling me
that he wouldn’t care about the burn
if i ******* up the cake.
we laughed about it because it was a joke.
i still think about it.

i still check to see if you
watch my Snapchat story.

i rip the hems out of all of my clothing
compulsively. I’m sorry.
i’ll pick up all the balled-up threads from
the carpet eventually.

i keep ticket stubs and scraps of notes
hazardously strewn across my bedroom,
because i’m too sentimental for my own good
but organization has never come naturally.

solar systems are borne from my fingertips.
supernovas power my lungs.
stardust glitters in my veins
(i tell myself these things in order to
keep thinking straight)

hey, look at the moon.
see how she reflects the sun for you?
it’s because she’s got nothing
of her own to give away willingly.
i gave you everything willingly
i spent too many nights
shredding notebook paper into pieces
of white birthday party confetti.

i swallowed six painkillers today.
I’m passive like aggressive,
letting my liver slip into uselessness.

it’s really hard to write poetry about bruises.

maybe the reason i always call myself icarus
is that the only person who never saw this coming
was me.
maybe the reason i always call myself icarus
is because my mother shook and cried as she
strapped wax wings on me and said,
“do not look at the stars”
because she knew childish wonder
would only **** me.
maybe the reason i always call myself icarus
is that i wish i had been that light, i wish i had
been able to see those stars and really
touch them.
maybe the reason i always call myself icarus
is because i’m a ******* tragedy but nobody
seems to realize it except me.
no one ever felt the fall quite like
me.
maybe the reason i always call myself icarus
is because the only person i’ve ever disappointed
is myself, my own ambition, my own dreams.
maybe the reason i always call myself icarus
is because i always feel like i’m
falling.

Don’t love me.
Please, don’t love me.
I know myself, we’re quite close actually, and let me tell you, you don’t want to fall for her,
you don’t want that girl, I hate her.
I hate her because I know her so well and I know how horrible the truth can smell.
Don’t love me, because even I know to hate myself,
the vanity that despite this loathing I might actually believe that someone could fall for me.
Don’t love me.
Don’t love me, because I met Heartbreak once and she left me gasping for air
and I will never meet her again.
I refuse, so if you love me, please be aware that when you do,
some day I am going to leave you, battered and bruised, because
twisted self-preservation has taught me all the tricks to keep myself afloat by drowning you.
Don’t love me.
Because as much as I will love you, I’m not friends with Commitment,
and whenever I see him on the horizon I set off running in the opposing direction.
I will treat you like there will be no oxygen unless I’m holding you,
but when you’re the one reaching for my hand I’ll become the wind.
Commitment is not my friend, I said, but no one listens.
Don’t love me, because I am a tornado, a storm to chase until I’ve taken everything from you.
Don’t love me.
Someday, you will be married and happy, and I will
whirl back into your life like the hurricane that has never been named after me, and
you will believe that all your scars
and your broken heart
have healed enough that you can run with me.
But I have razors between my fingers and wedged in my teeth,
and your scabbed over heartstrings will be powerless against me.
I am an expert at running, at hurting, at ‘maybe’s.
Don’t love me.
When you ask me for something more,
I will tell you that I am not ready, because I never will be.
Chances scare me, and trusting someone so much will always be risky.
I will tell you that I am not in the right place for your Commitment,
for your future Heartbreak,
and you will tell me that you understand but you’ll stick with me,
and fire will consume everything.
Don’t love me.
I can’t even go a few years with a friendship before
burning it all for at least a few evenings, but we’ll always rebuild the
rickety ashes of the bridges we’ve passed.
Don’t love me.
I’m only saying it for your safety.

A four-year-old was perched in front of
a boxy TV with eyes only open to
sugar-coated Cheerios and 80’s Transformer heroes
on the screen.
Fast forward to age
thirteen where she flipped through
dusty photography with
eyes searching
for substance
to prove reality from almost-forgotten dreams.
Scrapbook memories aren’t
all that she sees
because,
honestly,
she loses things.
Summer Saturdays and
Fall Fridays and
Winter weekdays spent too wrapped up in her
own head to notice, silently, spring rising
from its deathbed.
Honestly, she loses things.
She
loses
things that should be important
and real, but all she can feel is
the guilt of lost
and faded photography.
Scrapbook memories fabricate times of
color and scent and sound,
of spilled milk and Diet Coke,
of words too far gone to seep from
pen to page because
honestly,
she loses things.

Sugar and spice and everything nice,
Wolverine claws and a venomous bite,
Armed to the teeth for a ***** fight:
This is what teenage girls are made of.

Maybe I fall in love too easily,
But I’m just sixteen.
And I’m just sixteen but
When you cat call me and I pretend not to hear you,
You call me catty as if it’s surprising.
When you wolf whistle at me and I ignore you,
You call me names that aren’t PG.
I’m just sixteen but I’ve got news for you:
I’m a she-wolf, far from domesticated so
Whistling will do nothing for you.
I don’t answer the call of any man, because
I’m a lioness, and every time you catcall me
You forget who does the hunting.
You need reminding, to be put in your place.
You’re a predator but I’m not your prey-
No, you’re a predator but I’m much, much
Much higher up on the food chain.
Whistle and call all night long,
I’ll chew you up and spit you out
Like the kind of bubble gum that isn’t worth a trash can.
I’d call you a pig, but pigs usually have a
Higher IQ than you do.
My bones are made of titanium, of Adamantium, and
My rage came from the cosmos, and I control hurricanes with the water in my lungs.

I am catty,
And I am a *****,
But you are a nobody,
Food for the vultures and
A piece of furniture to sharpen my claws on.
You may be a knife, but my heart is a diamond.
I am a diamond, and you are made of fossil fuels.
We are both the product of years of pressure,
But I took my disasters and made myself beautiful.
You let yourself become ugly, nowhere to go
Except standing on corners late at night,
Pollution spilling from your mouth and your eyes.

Leave me alone.
That’s not me being ‘hard-to-get,’ no,
That’s my wolf howl and the growl of my inner lioness.
Leave me alone,
Or else.

TELL THE MOON SHE’S BEAUTIFUL every time you see her:
in the too-early mornings when the sun is starting to rise,
in the late afternoons when she’s settling in the clear sky.
Tell the moon she’s beautiful, that she’s more than just a reflection of the sun’s light.
Tell the moon she’s beautiful even when she is bathed
in the red bloodstone shine of starry brethren.
Tell her she is beautiful even when she hides herself in phases.
Notice when she’s gone.
Look at the constellations and tell her that you miss her. She’ll hear it anyway.
Pepper her with compliments to lure her back to her full glory.
Howl with the wolves in your adoration.
Has she made you nocturnal?
How late do you stay up staring?
Is she brighter than any star in your sky?
Tell the moon that she is beautiful—
tell her how she lights up your nightlife.
Tell the moon that she is beautiful.

Tell the earth that she deserves better—
that she and the moon are beautiful,
too beautiful for your ink-stained fingertips.
Tell the earth that she is stunning,
from her deepest oceans and across every mountain.
When you tell the moon that she’s beautiful, sign each love letter with Mother Nature’s signature.
Seal the envelope with kisses of sun rays,
and send your words up to the sky on the backs of meteors.
Tell the universe
that she
is beautiful.

I'm sad and alone and everything I touch turns to gold,
but that's the life,
amirite?
Money's the only matter that matters and some kids three worlds away are getting kidnapped and killed for quotas while these kids are worried about their quote of the day. And,
by kids,
I mean little girls at age three being sold on the streets and in between sheets in countries that aren't all that far away, and little boys whose coloring pages are filled with explosions and guns cause it's literal
war
they're waging. But down the way, parents are posting posters in their children's rooms prompting inspiration: it's something about peace and love-- I mean, that's what they all say.
Well, I've made my peace with the pieces of this prayer, a priest standing golden over me as I throw my diamond-encrusted hands to the air and scream, "Someone
save me."
But these people don't care.
I am a man of gold with a heart of stone and no one cares because, frankly,
Neither do I.
Statistically speaking, everyone in the States clings to the belief that if they just earned an extra fifteen percent wage annually,
then they could live happily.
But,
darling,
when everything you touch turns to gold, statistics don't
quite
fit
the diagnostics.
I
am the outlier, the outright liar, the purveyor of pride that cost me my life but
who cares? I mean,
I've got my money.
I've got my money in a capitalist country that feeds off circulation and circumstance that leads brains to short-circuit short-cut economic politics and slaughter chances, rather than enhancing the value of a life that money can't add up to.
Welcome to the slaughterhouse.
Welcome to the tolerance of intolerance of humanity. Welcome
to the closing scene, where we can be seen on the Globe, on William Shakespeare's pun-fully named stage cause that's what all the world is,
and so's
this gold.
It's a play,
cause some day the curtains will close and all my props will remain on the stage and I am sad and alone with my heart still fo stone but without any gold. I've
lost
my
touch, and
without this cash I'll be nothing but a ten second news flash announcing to the rest of these underpaid actors that I've been knocked off my throne.
I don't think I was ever a king to begin with,
just a man who could forge
fool's gold.

you can try to steal the show
but baby, remember your place
you're a sidekick, not a hero
maybe there's some grace in martyrdom
but that's not where you wanna go
step down, sit down
you're a sidekick, not a hero

are you collecting the old counts of how
they slaughtered your son and his power-hungry heart,
twenty three knives to the torso,
the killing blow delivered by a beloved friend?
or are those the scrolls that you wish
dust would settle over forever, relics and reliefs of
everything you see behind your closed eyelids.
a politician’s mother
must be all the more clever; her son will not
be going into battle to die with honor
but rather with deceit. give her-- you-- a laurel wreath,
the irony of the goddess nike standing
golden over the tomb of your son: emperor,
caesar. mother of summer, of boiling july,
are you not the sun? are you not the constellations
freckling burnt pale skin? are you not
the fiercest and brightest of warriors, quietly,
without warning?

I know how hard you’re trying:
caught between what’s good and what’s right,
triangulated by compliance to a routine that leaves you restless.
You’ve spent your childhood dreaming of ‘somewhere else’
but now that you’re here, you dream again:
of ‘somewhere new.’
You can’t pin down a pilot,
and you’re a high flyer
with a heart for danger and full of desire
from the stardust in your veins
and the galaxies mirrored in your eyes.
You’re no Harry Potter--
their attention drives you wild,
craving counteraction to the demons that
followed you from your home planet
and have tainted your every breath.

(he’s got stars in his smiles
that stretch like galaxies.
oh, god, you know what that means.)

Like I said, you can’t pin down a pilot,
and you don’t want to be found.
You’ll push and push until your heart gives out,
compensate and retaliate by breaking the hearts that beat for you.
If you’re going down,
they will too.
You’re a beautiful disaster creating
new paths for strength to rise out of,
a beautiful disaster caught between cliffs and a hard place.
You wanted to touch down on every planet in your system,
but you never planned
on your engines failing.
You can’t pin down a pilot,
not until he’s crashing.

I'm an extrovert.
We aren't really romanticized in pop culture. Chances are,
your protagonist is a cute introverted girl who has
everyone secretly swooning over her,
but her best friend sidekick is outgoing and talkative.
We autorelate "extrovert" to red solo cups and heavy synthesized bass lines and...
well,
frat boys.
The unpleasant, obnoxious kind. (The ninety-nine percent.)
I guess it's understandable sometimes to see where you're coming from with this assumption, but
let's learn to revise.
Introverts recharge by being alone, but if I'm in a group and suddenly find myself faced with an empty home,
it's like all the oxygen has been ****** from my lungs and shattered my soul.
Being alone means thinking too much and we all know what thinking too much does (--so maybe extroverts need loud music and red solo cups--)
I don't get how someone finds it refreshing, silence and being stuck in your own head, but that's probably because I'm not an introvert and you're not an extrovert and I'd rather have a body than a body pillow next to me in my unmade bed. I like people.
When kids are wearing t-shirts proclaiming the opposite, I get it.
It's pop culture,
it's in to be out but being by myself is when I'm most out of it.
It's hard for me to consistently text you back but believe me when I feel like my brain is about to collapse I'd like to lessen the collateral damage.
After that, I'll start up ten different conversations with three different friends but all of them are introverts whose sleep schedules are inverted from mine, triple check the time, see it with your own eyes, life keeps tick
tick
ticking by and I feel stuck on the sidelines.
I forget to feed myself sometimes (most nights.)
I'm a people person dragged into my own mind that
I forget how to take care of myself.
I'm a people person who can't make friends last to save my life,
forget it if they're already acquainted.
All my friends think they're hated by all my other friends--
You two don't know each other, totally polar social circles, but I know each of you like pieces of my soul,
and I make Horcruxes not from ****** but from memories of late nights and falling asleep on the phone,
out of control
we need something to hold,
so we falsify lasting lovers to have some control over,
like empty stomachs that can't leave us until we say so,
like long showers that can't end until we decide it's us, not them, we should take a break from each other for a while,
like bed sheets that act as open arms holding us until we toss and turn into sleep and asking us to stay a little bit longer in the mornings.
I'm an extrovert.
I can't really explain exactly what that means to me specifically or simply,
it's just that being alone makes me feel lonely,
and nothing on the Internet will ever help me with that.

i’ve found that i do the most learning during second semester.

for example, second semester of freshman year i learned that losing friends is a lot like losing a life,
that losing friends kind of usually makes you really want to die,
that losing friends is like a comet blasting its way through your heart--
it sets you ablaze for a moment,
but then by the time you notice its absence it’s already circling another planet.
losing friends is always hard.
keep a death toll if you have to, but adding a tally mark for yourself isn’t worth it.
learn the art of letting go.
learn the art of getting by.
it’s hard, and it sometimes feels impossible,
but don’t expect too much from anything.
don’t expect too much from anyone,
but god forbid you let yourself lose all feeling.
yes, feeling hurts, yes, feeling is hard,
but going numb and cold leads to frostbite
and you'll just end up amputating the limbs that you have left.

the second semester of sophomore year,
i learned what it was like to never feel at home in your own bones.
you’re always drifting, interstate international interstellar intergalactic.
it’s all the same thing.
it’s okay to let yourself wander,
and it’s okay if you find yourself kneeling on foreign bathroom floors clutching porcelain like it’s your last lifeline.
learn that home is where your heart is.
don’t invest your heart into anything.
learn that there are teenage boys out there who will spin galaxies into your spine when they hold you close,
but learn that romance is stigmatized.
learn that relationships don’t have to be forever,
that nothing is ever really forever.
learn that friends will last longer than lovers,
and learn to tell the difference between friends and lovers.
make plans to travel the world with your soulmate,
and make sure your soulmate is someone who wants to travel the world with you.
the second semester of sophomore year,
i learned that losing friends is a lot like losing a life,
only this time it was worse because this time i was built out of scar tissue
and scar tissue is tougher to tear through but they did it anyway.
i’m still learning the art of letting go.
i’m learning that it’s okay to write as much angry, heart-broken poetry as you need to in order to get over it
because friendships wrap tighter around your heart than any other kind of relationship.
learn that the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.
but learn to be kind to your mother, because she is trying.

the second semester of junior year
i learned the names of every single person that i could pour my whole soul into,
and just because i don’t share everything with someone doesn’t mean we aren’t friends.
i’ve learned that i have friends.
just because we aren’t awake together at 3 a.m.
doesn’t mean that they don’t sit next to me in all the classes we’re both in,
it doesn’t mean that they don’t go driving with me at 3 p.m.
a friend doesn’t have to be someone you spend every waking moment with.
a friend can just be someone that you coexist with,
someone who makes you feel like you aren’t really all that alone.

the second semester of junior year i’ve learned that i am still learning.
i’m still figuring things out.
maybe by the second semester of senior year i’ll have learned something closer to, say, what i’m doing for the next four to six years,
or maybe i’ll finally master the art of letting go.

the second half of high school
i’ve learned that, yeah, scar tissue grows.
but scars fade.
and the concave space in your chest doesn’t have to keep on growing into a black hole,
that you can fill up your cracks and crevices with stardust and iron.
losing friends is like losing a life. but, god, when they come back--

it’s okay to feel things.
it’s okay to feel too much and all at once.
it’s okay to vent and rave and scream.
it’s okay to write bad poetry about sins that you’ve already forgiven and people you’ve already forgotten and places you’ve already left behind.
it’s okay.
it’s okay to hold onto your humanity.
make maps with your own freckles and follow your veins to your eyes.
make eye contact with your own reflection.
if you can’t teach yourself something,
then how is anyone else ever going to listen?

I’m a Barbie girl
in a Barbie world.
Life’s fantastic! I
feel like plastic,
aiming for an 18-inch waist
because I can afford to throw my internal organs away.
I feel like plastic,
a neck so slender I have to choose
between eating and breathing;
there’s not enough space for two tubes.
I feel like plastic,
a 38-inch bust and
3-times the average amount of forehead.
I feel like plastic,
a size nine shoe squeezed to a three,
spending three to nine avoiding meal time
because my weight-loss book says,
“Don’t eat.”

I’m a Barbie girl,
in a Barbie world.
Life’s fantastic, but I’m
not plastic.
Bile tastes all too organic,
its taste chasing after me
if I exceed my daily nutritional limit of
2,000 calories.
I’m skinny enough that people think I’m healthy.
I’m not skinny enough for people to think I’m unhealthy.
Anorexia is as familiar as the back of my hand,
poised like a gun to the back of my throat,
waiting and ready to blow.
I’m a sixteen-year-old suicide case,
product of the war of production,
wearing battle wounds in the form of uniform lines
across the tops of my thighs.
I’ve been rewriting this poem since its conception.
I feel like the rough draft: concision is key.
(Be smaller.)
I’m trying rewriting,
trying to leave out things that aren’t
important enough, like:
four of my ribs
and my esophagus
and my stomach
and my small intestine.
I’m testing the limits of realism.
But here’s the thing:
I’m a real girl
in a real world.
Life’s not always fantastic,
but I am not plastic.

I am not plastic.

I refuse to be plastic,
aiming for generic weight range
based on content, not scale number.
I refuse to be plastic,
eating and breathing
like both are vital aspects to living.
I refuse to be plastic,
an actual hip-to-bust ratio
for not a thirty-year-old but a teenager.
I refuse to be plastic,
shoe size nine in size nine shoes,
trying to start enjoying mealtimes
because my “weight-loss book”
has been chucked down the chute.
I’m a living girl
in a terrifying world,
trying to remind myself that “Life in Plastic!”
is not fantastic.

what’s your favorite kind of flower?
mine’s a forget-me-not,
a fear settled deep in my chest
that remembering me might
not be for the best,
a knot in my stomach formed
from your stormcloud eyes
like summer skies.
like forget-me-nots.
loyalty and long-lasting
and pleading to remember me, forgetting.
december makes me forget sunny weather.
i think i’m kind of
in love with the sound of your voice,
and your smile,
which is dangerous because smiles
are always going to be the
worst kind of weakness.
i hope they don’t forget me.
i hope you don’t forget me.
i’ll send you bouquets of words i never said
of texts i never sent:
yellow acacias and yellow tulips and blue forget-me-nots
(secret and hopeless and true loves);
angelica and amethyst and flowering almond
(inspiration and admiration and hope);
red columbine because you
leave me anxious, trembling;
white camellia japonica because
your loveliness
is perfected.
send me red carnations
(yes and yes and yes)
with unwritten handwritten answers
(yes and yes and yes).

the red moon makes me miss you

please
don't touch me, okay?
please
stand back at least 3 feet
in a perfect circle,
missile range.
please
keep your distance, okay?
please
don't attach yourself to
my brittle bones
and aching soul.
please
don't leave me, okay?
just
don't touch me
stand back at least 3 feet
keep your distance
(missile range)
and attempt to avoid attaching
to my brittle bones
and weary soul.

buy me on the black market like the instability I am.
watch me hurtle through negative space backwards,
the planet-wide catastrophe of a sun-sized storm in me.
Call me Carbon-14.
it’s the latest piece of my galaxy-sized identity, another chemical
small enough to wage nuclear war.
you’re witnessing my radioactive decay,
the deterioration of everything I used to be into
everything I might be,
a kind of reaction that happens when one of my ‘downs’
becomes an ‘up,’
no aces up my sleeves or full houses of face cards in spades,
but I’ve got straight sevens,
protons neutrons electrons, carbon to nitrogen.
beta decay, the mass production of passive procrastination;
second in command, sidekick sidetracking heroes.
Call me Nitrogen standard 14.
watch me decay into the air that you breathe,
seventh most common gas in the Milky Way galaxy,
keeping things fresh and stainless like my steel armor,
try and make me combust but I’m fireproof, bulletproof,
balanced and on my toes in a defensive position,
fists raised for the fight that you’re going to put up.
my axis is more stable than yours. step into the rings of saturn,
ring the bells to start the rounds, champion takes home the stars,
wraps orion’s belt around their waist and buckles it tight with nuclear waste.
everyone loves an underdog story, but only when they know,
positively, that the underdog will win.
with you and me, it’s a 50/50 on who exactly has the upper hand
and who exactly is going to win, but I’ll make bets with the elements around me,
the carbon that I used to be hashing out 20’s and oxygen
claiming she’s not one for gambling.
baby, you’re in my lungs, you’re in my corner of the ring.
she’ll slip in a 50 like my chances, and I’ll pretend that I don’t notice.
phosphorus is too fiery to root for me,
he’s more of a heavyweight believer than me.
Call me contagious
when my knuckles bloom across your jaw and knock away
all of your sensibility, stability, bruises like moons
as the mirror shatters every reflection of who I used to be.
Call me Carbon-14, but know that I am radioactive,
actively changing, reigning champion of breaking perceptions,
and you’re just the impression of the death that I’m carbon-dating.

for every copper piece of me,
you are gold.
for every rough stitch pulling me together,
you have been a flawless seam.
you are every proton
and every color
of a chemical reaction,
and i am just the steps in between.
you
are a catalyst,
the start of something,
a star to wish on
as it streaks across the sky.
for every dark,
you are my light.
you are the match setting
fire to my veins made of gasoline,
your body moves like
those flames, flickering,
and your coffee shop smile
keeps me warm
when the rest of my atoms
are nothing but cold.
you
are a catalyst,
and i am going to be here
for the beginning of everything.

Sometimes, I wish I had cameras in my eyes so we could look back on these moments and hold them and you could see how you made them golden.
Someone in the future could put my life on the screen,
cut scenes when I go to sleep, special behind-the-scenes of us making these memories
and I could just delete the ones I didn't want to keep.
I would never lose a second.
If my life was a piece of cinematic genius then I might try harder to keep this up:
I'd adjust my angles,
I'd check my volume,
I'd have the perfect songs to sing along to and everyone would buy the soundtrack CD,
if they were
just like me.

But you aren't.
See, I had a better opening verse but when my mind is made up of rhythm and rhyme, everything that isn't written down gets driven away in a ******* metaphorical hearse, the kind that you aren't allowed to ride in yet.
Your job isn't finished until mine is,
car crash collisions, underwater violence, silence, broken heart strings strung on a violin and a bass drum keeping us up to speed. See?
I'm a mash up of bad one-line poems and I'm not slowing down, not for anybody.
I've seen angels with broken halos and featherless wings, trying
so hard to fly but they're as successful as that extinct little kiwi,
who all died trying to fly but, hey, at least they went down swinging because we're
all
slaves
to gravity.
So these angels find spaces in their minds to curl up and sleep.
You've got your body on autopilot and don't you find it exhausting, to just stop trying?

Let's get back to the movie.
By then, we'll be living to infinity, like, for real, not just a symbol on the skin but a time to live.
Immortality.
So watching me breathe will be nothing in the wasteland of time that they will have to waste--
not currently, no, because currently our lives seem so short especially with empty promises of infinities and galaxies and light years away on another inhabited planet a kid like me is saying the exact same things because
there's no more originality,
not in this space,
not in the void of immortality.
And in My Life As A Movie, they'll see me:
standing in the street with you, holding hands and praising bands and feeling alive again,
because now we're aware--
of the angles,
of the volume,
of the sets and costumes,
of the film and the video rules
that I learned in high school.
Now that we know it's all a big production, we'll ruin the show.
Our voices will be whispers or shouts and the microphones will be too scratchy to catch what we're saying.
Our feet will fly like the angels once could, ruining any chance of an easy shoot.
My memories of you
are golden,
and I'd sell my mortality just to keep a good hold on them but I can't.
I don't want to.
Infinities are found throughout our galaxy,
but my only real infinity is you.
You, like a scratched DVD that sometimes slips off the screen because
we have our rough times, too.

I sometimes find myself wishing I had cameras in my eyes,
but then I think I'd rather be blind
so no one else sees you like I do.

The world isn't ready for that yet.

trust me dear
voice of silk
pressing for your
darkest secrets

get back here
voice of flame
pressing for your
complete obedience

i'm sorry dear
voice of virtue
pressing for your
permanent trust

what are your fears
voice of immortality
pressing for your
complete being

love me dear*
voice of purity
pressing for your
total compliance

i am your demon, my love
voice of true horrors
pressing for your
understanding of your situation
pressing for your
realization that you are in hell

over two thousand people have jumped off the Golden Gate bridge
and I don’t think a single one of them thought about how weak
hydrogen bonds are.
I don’t think a single one of those two thousand plus people
thought about the fact that it was water at the bottom of their drop.
to me, it seems common knowledge
that hydrogen bonds are the weakest link that elements can make.
people overestimate the strength of surface tension,
even from such a high place.
hydrogen bonds will always break,
just like me and you.
just like mentality
just like sentimentality
just like reality
just like knowing that i’ve only got a year left with you,
cause god knows we aren’t gonna stick it out after high school.
we’re a hydrogen bond in which
i am the hydrogen
because in every situation i find myself to be the weak link,
like everyone else is better off without me.
the problem is, i don’t know what other people are thinking
when they think of me,
because i’m no mind-reader and i’ve never been a good guesser,
so maybe some of those two thousand plus people who
jumped off the Golden Gate bridge actually did think about the weak link,
the lack of strength in hydrogen bonds, the possibility of water
giving out under their weight and their survival rate.
i read somewhere that no matter how you try, your body will do everything
it can to keep you alive. maybe it’s not just your body,
but also your mind manipulating situations to best advance your
survival probability.
because maybe, just maybe, no one really wants to die.
maybe, but it’s a big maybe, because i can’t read minds.

in 2028 we will have a space station circling mars
i have never felt something rattle me so deeply through my heart
my bones will not stop trembling when i look to the stars
i can not stop the twitching in my toes telling me to go
i always threw out “astronaut” as a dream of a dream
something there but always out of reach
but now i know that i can touch down before i’m in my mid-thirties
i see the full moon and i can’t stop the shaking
send me home
send me home
send me home
a teacher asked me if, given the opportunity
would i take a one-way ticket off-planet,
and never look back?
and i laughed
and i told him
mars is not far enough away from earth
send me to saturn and pluto and tie me to halley
i am ready to touch other stars
i love the sun but she is not my Sun
i love the moon but she is not my Moon
i have been sick of earth since i knew that i could be
send me on missions to put it all behind me
“what about your family”
what about anybody?
what about anybody?
i don’t want to be alone in the cold of space
i want to find something out there that might be companionable to the human race
i want to go home
i want to go home
i’m not sure how far that will take me
and i’m not sure how far past it will be from mars
but i know that getting up there will be the hardest part
lift-off
houston, we’ve got a problem
i don’t have enough rocket fuel to get out of this solar system
let’s use a gravitational slingshot to throw me out of orbit
i’ll love earth when she is the little blue dot on a map of the stars
andromeda holds my heart
send me to mars
send me to mars
let me return to the red of my heart

my hands smell like chemicals from developing film rolls and no matter how hard i scrub at them i can’t get you out from under my fingernails.
i had a dream about you the other night.
it was casual, fingers intertwined as we walked down twisting streets and we didn’t say anything— you just smiled at me,
that grin could heal broken bones and black eyes.
i wasn’t ever in love with you. i don’t know if you realize that. you were exciting and interesting and intoxicating, but the problem with talking to someone every single day means that at some point you’re not going to hear from them for 24 hours and that can **** you.
i don’t really miss you, not anymore, but sometimes things like dreams happen and i want to smile at you when i see you in the halls.
your hair as gotten long. it looks good on you.
i guess you just always knew how to keep things light and when everything always feels so heavy on my spine, that was a relief. you were easy to be around, until suddenly you weren’t.
i don’t think i’m ever going to forget you.
you’re going to be the first wound that ever scarred. i’m sure losing a lover is hard, but losing a friend can rip you apart. trust me, i’m an expert on it at this point, and i let all my weight rest on you to the point where when you suddenly weren’t there i couldn’t feel anything but falling.
for a long time, i romanticized my memories of you, trying to grasp onto you with rose-colored lenses that faded with age. i used to be angry at you, but the red eventually evaporated too. now i just.
see you.
you still make my hands shake and my stomach churn but mentally everything has stopped.
until i have another dream about you.

i cant remember a word that you were saying
but i remember every single drop of venom
that fell from your fangs the night that you
infected me with death and decay and refractum,
refractus, broken up or open in a dead language
that still stings in hexes and wills the dead
to life. necromancy is your specialty, commanding
a skeletal army to all your evil bidding, all
collar bones and wrist bones and bony knees
scraped up from all the tripping you've been up to,
running through thickets away from the white lie
of an elephant that haunts your room, conjured
from when you dug up the graves of every single
name that i tried to lay to rest, every action and
reaction and dejection and rejection and destructive
tendency, tendencies, tending to distract from
the subject matter at hand, the rules bent and broken
as you spit your poisonous latin palaver,
empty talk to move the empty skulls of your pawns,
empty threats of empty memories that no longer
have any kind of meaning to me. i laid them to rest.
i held their funerals a long time ago, and there's
nothing you can hold over me besides the skeletons
you left in your closet, that you never bothered to bury.
the dead don't scare me, not anymore, and i've
developed an immunity to your toxicity so that
you don't scare me anymore, not anymore,
because you're just another passed-on memory.
i will never forget the venom that drips from your
lips, but i will not let it run through my veins anymore.
your dead words and dead memories are all uttered
in a dead language, not spoken anymore, not real,
a dead effect that cannot touch anything because
memories lack tangibility, dead regrets in a dead
language that got buried when i decided to stop
listening.

i kind of hate poetry, like,
i'm sick of flowery words to avoid straight-up honesty
i'm sick of the deception and the depression
and the predictable rhyme schemes.
i mean, there's that kind of poetry
and that's the kind that i kind of hate.
a lot.
i'm a poet, okay? i'm a poet who likes
flower words with flowery lines
used only to cover up lies about
how much dinner i ate last night
and sometimes i have to admit
that i do kinda dig talking in rhymes.

but i'm really sick of that kind of poetry.
i kind of hate it.

give me poems that speak past their words,
give me poems that fill the air,
give me poems that breath and decompose.
give me girls with dark marbled skin whose voices break out of the cages they're trapped in.
give me boys in high heels.
give me revolution and remaking.
give me poetry.
give me songs.
i'm sick of the romantic stuff.
give me poems pieced together with discontent,
give me poems picked apart by nervous hands,
give me poems that will shatter all former concepts of reality,
give me poems that declare platonic love to an old best friend.
give me poems that have meaning.
real, tangible meaning.
i'm sick of looking at perfectly-formatted pages
that have to use set-up and textual ranges in order to be considered proper poetry.
i'm sick of verses with well-measured lines,
because those are the ones that i can't whisper to myself at night because
i ramble the poems.
i ramble the words.
give me poems that i can fill a room with.

i kind of forgot my first line, but that's alright
see, i don't know where exactly i'm going with this but
that's just how it is.

so give me poems that aren't pre-conceived,
give me poems that aren't thought out for the sake of their beauty.
give me poems that will hurt me.
give me poems that will hit me.
give me poems that will **** me.

i kind of hate poetry,
but not all kinds of it.
just the kinds of poems
that don't seem to notice
their true ability,
cause i like the kind of poems
that have the power
to change a society

(or at least someone's mind about something).

nothing has ever given me a rush quite like leaving,
like sitting in an airport moments away from getting on a plane.
i’m a little scared of heights,
in the way that they make my heart go racing
and i don’t like feeling my pulse leave my chest,
but i’ve always loved leaning over the edge.
i’m scared of heights in the way that i’m scared of planes:
i love the concept and the purpose and the view,
but nothing scares me like going into airplane bathrooms,
when i haven’t slept in two hours too many
and the mirrors are like a funhouse from a scary movie.
airplane bathrooms are like a portal into the past,
except this time i can see every crack and fissure
and misplaced hair in the outline of who i’m trying to be.
i don’t like airplanes in the sense that time doesn’t exist,
that where you’re landing is different from where you were beginning,
that i can sleep for seven hours only to find out
that i’m two hours behind where i lifted off.
i’m scared of missing things, i guess.
i don’t like airplanes in the way that i’m scared of what lies ahead:
because i really like going,
and i really like getting there,
but landings make my ears hurt like hell and
takeoffs make my stomach churn.
i know where i am and i think i have a vague sense of where i want to be,
i know when i’m real and when i’m dreaming,
but it’s the in between that loses me.
i’m scared of the dark,
but differently than heights or flying,
because that’s just a loss of time.
i’m scared of the dark because it’s a loss of everything.
if you can’t see it then how can it exist until you’re
bumping your knees on coffee tables and stubbing your toes on walls
and the cat’s eyes are reflecting light from nowhere
and you’re waiting for the claws.
i’m scared of the dark because the dark is uncertainty
hiding all the truths that we want to believe,
because the dark is all the spots ahead of us that aren’t set in concrete,
because the dark is deep and suffocating,
because i don’t like not being able to see.

i’ve been photoshopping old memories in attempts to bring back color to over-faded, twice-forgotten black-and-whites
tried dodge and burn but that’s too close to what happened
you dodged so i burned like a stack of photographs and albums in a house fire started by christmas lights
maybe if i crop myself out you’ll turn bright again
until your whole face washes out and i can feel like you’re a stranger again
replace all your blues with harsh reds and sharpen all of my blurred edges
for a while things felt like polaroids,
instant results
but then i realized that i was just wasting film by taking one photo per roll at a time
i was ruining prints of thirty five other potential moments
we were never digital
but we were only ever digitalized,
conversations only spent on snapchat and half-second smiles in hallways
i’ll layer all of our photographs
because we sure as hell never had layers then
your smile is the same in every single one of them, but my expression is always off and my eyes are never quite the same level of jaded
somewhere along the line i’ve realized that no photographic evidence was ever taken of our life
i’m just looking at bad sketches with too many filters
i don’t even remember the sound of your voice
i’m writing poetry about strangers again,
people who have never existed outside of my head
maybe that’s just a bad coping mechanism, pretending that you’re just pretend
but i’ve been struggling with hallucinations lately
because photographs and light and sound is so **** easy to bend into whatever shapes you want memories to take
i haven’t trusted myself for three years now and i’m not about to start
overconfidence leads to the edges of cliffs
and i’m all too familiar with the steep drop of the ravine
when did photographs of you become a foreign language to me?
when did i stop recognizing either of us? why can’t i look myself in the eye anymore?
photoshop steals the life from my laptop battery
and reminiscing on things that may or may not have actually happened steals energy from me
so i’ll try to see if we can forcefully power down this crooked old machine
unplug me
i don’t want these memories saved anymore
delete everything
delete everything
unplug me
delete me
delete me

we are the essence of zero gravity.
you are the weightlessness in the marrow of my bones.
i can fly.
you are car rides with too many CDs and not enough miles.
you are lunar eclipses, ripped up jeans, and too-bright smiles.
pick me apart at my airtight seams to see yourself in the mirrors i set up inside of me.
i am a black hole and you are the answer to string theory,
smudged ink on fingertips while signing away the Earth for worlds our eyes can’t see.
you’re a mutant, baby,
evolved from the best of everything.

long hugs* like anchors to keep me steady out on turbulent seas
2. dance music that beats my heart to basslines injected with adrenaline
3. warm weather that holds me close with gentle breezes and sunshine kisses
4. bright colors like neon signs in dark rooms and old toys and cartoons
5. love songs for strangers with deep smiles across crowded rooms
6. stained glass windows of churches because God gave humans eyes for beauty
7. long drives with good music and good imagination for good thoughts/good talks
8. bath bombs that color me beautiful, perfumes and pinks and blues
9. tomato soup + grilled cheese that melt in mouths and keep cold hands toasty
10. heavy summer rain drenching everything without chilling bones to the marrow
11. reading for hours on end with the steady mantra "one more chapter, one more..."
12. slam poetry that reaches out to souls and empathy, connecting melodies to bodies
13. holding hands, fingers tucked between so skin sticks with affectionate friction
14. purring cats that keep away all the depressive episodes
15. round stones like lost dragon eggs waiting to be furnaced into new life
16. fresh laundry with warm hoodies and the simple motion of folding clothes
17. the moon and her pale smile, a reminder that the sun is still there
18. swing sets in any setting, ghosts of children of memories on worn ropes
19. fresh flowers that sit in grocery stores waiting to be the highlight of a day
20. hot leather car seats that stick to sweaty thighs on sweltering summer days

*21. one-line poems written in the belly of nighttime on too-hot summer nights, counting down the days and counting up the stars, crossing fingers in 'x's over slowly-beating hearts.

dear mom: (this is a poem)
     (this is typed so that you don’t have to struggle through my handwriting-- which is, like me, sloppy and a little difficult, but sometimes people tell me that it’s pretty and artsy. your handwriting is swirly and elegant and sometimes hard to read, but i love looking at it anyway.)
     psychologically speaking, children do not understand “good” and “bad” in terms of flaws until they are taught by observing, watching their elders discriminate peers based on skin and shape and size and little pieces of identity that seem to be unusual. children see moles and freckles as interesting marks. squishy tummies are good for laying on. good hugs are good hugs, whether you’re tall or short or gangly or round.
     psychologically speaking, a child’s insecurities will stem from their parents--
     when a girl sees her mother disliking something about herself, that girl is more likely to grow up and feel that way as well.
     people tell me that i look like you all the time. (i like to roll my eyes a little passively and act like i’m sick of hearing it (sometimes it does get tiring) but it has always been a compliment.) this is not me telling you that i have your insecurities (i know you don’t like your chin and your arms and sometimes you don’t like your tummy) but instead this is me telling you this:
     you and dad always like to tell me how beautiful i am.
     momma, i look like you. you’re beautiful too.
     you’re the perfect height for hugging because, if i want to, i can engulf you and pull my arms over yours and tuck my face into your shoulder. but you’re also the perfect height for hugging because if i need to, i can tuck myself under your arms and press my face against your collarbone and feel protected by you.
     your hands hurt a lot now but that doesn’t mean they can’t still make beautiful things. i love the way that your fingers compliment your wedding/engagement rings.
     your arms are good for lifting, picking up new projects and painting and framing and helping me carry things.
     (harry potter had his mother’s green eyes and so do i. lily potter didn’t have glasses but that just means that we’re beating them by just a smidge, then.)
     your hair is perfect for being played with, soft and easy to run my fingers through. (you endured countless Little League baseball games with me twisting your poor tresses into knots, didn’t you? and you’ve spent hours patiently playing with mine, because even though your hands get tired you know that it feels good.)
     dear mom: i know it kinda ***** to deal with moody teenagers (twice!) especially when you can’t really figure out what we’re upset about half the time, but you never get angry when i cry out of frustration. you listen to my dubiously-correct fun facts and watch silly videos of adorable cats and you buy me books and paint and all kinds of crafty things, and i know from experience how hard it can be to love yourself sometimes but mom, here’s the thing: *i love you.

You’re not allowed to step into the house.
You’re not allowed to open your mouth too widely,
your ugly teeth bared and gnashing. You aren’t allowed to be that close,
so close your mouth and sip your tea through the window,
where expensive and matching dining chairs circle around a table
set for nothing, for no one,
because you can’t touch that silverware. You can’t wash those plates.
You can’t fit, your neck so long that your head is in the clouds,
your not-quite-bony legs serving as a reminder that your feet are still on the ground.
Can you feel your heart in your throat?
The way that it pulses every time you rest your chin on the roof or
the way it pounds when you’re at the doorway, much too close to this house
that you bought and built and you aren’t allowed inside. Why won’t they let you inside?
Why won’t you let yourself inside?
Invite yourself in; maybe your head will come down from the clouds and
your heart won’t beat quite so obnoxiously loud and you can
smile in a mirror while flashing all your ugly teeth.
You can’t build a house without thinking about how you’ll fit into it:
that’s basic architecture, basic design, basic
everything that you never bothered to learn,
bent on keeping your head so much higher than the ceiling.
Asymmetric, sloping,
like your shoulders and the alignment of your eyes
and your crooked smiles and ******* tongue,
like white lies and broken foundations
and a doorknob that doesn’t work,
doesn’t turn,
won’t let me in
despite the fact that I built this place with my bare hands.
It doesn’t recognize me anymore, a fantasy
so tangled up with reality
that all the nightmares and anxiety ruin even my cloudiest positivity.
I built myself a world and a future
in which I myself am not allowed to enter.
Maybe I should brush up on my knowledge of basic architecture,
because God, I’m horrible at interior design
and mapping things out ahead of time.
I’ve tried just living without but the winter gets chilly and weakens my bones
and it really sets in without the warmth of a home.

i collect snapstreaks like monopoly properties, hoarding them to their fullest, raking in the numbers like they are the thing keeping me floating. a drop in number means a decrease in value, as if my friendships have numerical value. it’s all about putting myself on other people’s VIP lists and keeping them off my own. i never realized how great a desire i have for control until i got a sick sort of happy seeing that emoji telling me, “you’re on their top eight best friends list, and they’re not on yours.” what is this, myspace? i play it like it’s a public social media page but in reality what makes it so sweet is the fact that only i get to see it.
or maybe i just like knowing i’m important, at least to somebody. maybe if they see my contact name at the top of the list every time, then they’ll want to talk to me. maybe it’s less like chess pieces, piling up pawns, and more like sitting on the corner singing old sad love songs with a hat out to catch pennies. these interactions add up to pennies. we’re still playing monopoly, i think, but why is all this property not adding up for me? why am i still losing money when i should be, by all accounts, winning? maybe i just need to start another streak.

what’s the good institution
when evil is institutionalized
what’s the good teacher
when the student is criminalized

instill in us some morals, sure
but what are morals in a
“more or less” world?

bite the hand that feeds
it’s only poison you’re eating
bite the hand that feeds
these aren’t the toxins you need

cats out of their bags
lions in their cages
eat it raw eat it raw eat it
red and soaked in blood

bite the hand that feeds
it’s only poison you’re eating
bite the hand that feeds
these aren’t the toxins you need

bite the hand that feeds
bite the hand that feeds
eat it raw eat it raw eat it red
bite the hand that feeds
it’s poison it’s poison it’s
toxic waste toxic time toxic
valentines with pretty lies

bite the hand that feeds
it’s only poison you’re eating
bite the hand that feeds
these aren’t the toxins you need

these aren’t the toxins you need
not the toxins
not the toxins
not the toxins you need

I can’t really say whether or not you have stars in your eyes, but I would like to formally inform you that galaxies reside in your smiles. Yeah, I know, pupils create parallels to black holes and irises of all hues can, when looked deeply upon, create constellations and similarities to stars long since dead, but
I don’t really think much about your eyes, their shade or their size, because I’m too busy basking in the sunshine that is your ever-present smile. You’re happy. You’re a child of light, and the sun can only ever be swallowed by eyes so you must stare-- how else could you ingest enough electromagnetic waves to radiate more than our residential system star? You’re a flower, synthesizing and using outer space to create the kind of sugar that must somehow be contagious, ‘cause here I am, feeling sickeningly, disgustingly sweet.
I find myself a kindred spirit of the ocean, because we are both called by the motion of the moon, but you are called by the stars. I’m a moonbeam to your sunshine, just a reflection of your spectrum but at least you’re helping me shine.
I didn’t intend to write poetry about you, but you’re so set on resetting my negative mindsetting sun that I can’t find the energy to get angry about the twelve million tangible social issues that currently control this century life. I’m a creature of night yet somehow I’ve started to look forward to long days of sunshine, and it might have something to do with the nickname I’ve given you, Sunshine.
So, yeah, you have galaxies in your smiles-- but those galaxies have stars that flood up to your eyes, because there are universes in your lungs and black holes in your brain swallowing up the negative space, which is a paradox to say but you’re full of those, aren’t you? Your veins are made of stardust that came from wishes prayed up to ***** of gases and energy that are actually too many light years away for the words to ever reach. We watch the stars silently because it’s just a funeral procession, a speck in space that once had possession over life and creation but is now dead. The stars are all dead. We’re looking into the past, the real tangible past, because that star right there, 42 light years away, is a reflection not of today but rather 1973. That star right there, 42 light years away, has since changed and is living in a future that we will never quite see.
I’m never going to read this to you, okay? Because for all I know, in 42 days I will be writing poetry while picturing a different face and people are less like the sun and more like the phases of the moon, just a circle of change. We will never see what all those stars look like currently, because we will never be able to see more than a few seconds into what is seconds away from being history. I mean, the sun that we see when we leave this building is already 8.3 light minutes behind its appearance presently. We will never see it die because we will always be 8.3 minutes behind, and that terrifies me.
It’s the fear that you’re trying to shine out of me, though, so just promise me that you’ll keep smiling.

IT WAS 1712 IN THE PEAK OF JULY HEAT AND I WAS VOMITING INTO YOUR KITCHEN SINK THE BLOOD OF A SINGLE MOTHER. YOU LAUGHED LIKE I SHOULD HAVE ALREADY LEARNED ALL THE ROPES THAT YOU NEVER BOTHERED TO SHOW ME. “I THOUGHT YOU SAID IT WOULDN’T HURT,” I SAID. YOU LOOKED ME IN THE EYE AND ANSWERED, “WELL YOU’RE NOT IN ANY PHYSICAL PAIN.” AS IF IT’S SOMEHOW ANY DIFFERENT THAN THE CATASTROPHE BUBBLING AND BREWING IN MY DECONSTRUCTED BRAIN.

IT WAS DECEMBER OF 1827 AND I  HELD YOU IN SHATTERED HANDS AS I SNAPPED YOUR NECK AS IF IT WOULD MAKE A DIFFERENCE. I WASN’T THE ONE WHO KILLED YOU BUT I WISH I HAD BEEN. YOU WERE WORTHLESS TO ME.

IT WAS THE FIRST REAL DAY OF SPRING IN 1922 AND YOU WERE EVERYTHING TO ME.

IT WAS 2016 WITH SUN-KISSED SEPTEMBER SKIN AND I WAS SWALLOWING BUGS IN OCTOBER PRETENDING LIKE I COULD POISON MYSELF WITH SPIDER LEGS AND MOTHS. YOU’VE BEEN DEAD FOR TWO CENTURIES BUT YOUR GHOST STILL HAUNTS ME. I’M WAITING FOR YOU TO BE REBORN AGAIN.

IT’S 3275 AND FOR THE SECOND TIME YOU’RE THE LAST THING I SEE BEFORE I DIE, AN OLD SOUL IN A NEW BODY, ALL THE MORE DEADLY. YOU WERE WORTH THE MILLENNIUM AND A HALF OF WAITING. I’LL KISS YOUR KNUCKLES BEFORE YOU BASH MY TEETH IN, AND THEN I’LL SAY THANK YOU. MY BLOOD HAS ALWAYS TASTED BETTER THAN ANYONE ELSE’S ANYWAY.

you are more than the second child
you are more than your mother's eyes
you are more than your self-prophesied
self-inflicted demise
you are more than your downfalls and your doubts
wind in your wings under the sun's collapse
can you feel the scorch on your back?
the burns don't scar but leave phantom marks
from where the wax has melted.
apollo always smiled too bright,
so warm that it burned out your retinas
and washed the color from your irises.
the ocean will sooth the memories,
aloe vera for old haunts and past loves,
broken families and falling, falling,
falling

i found out the meaning of home somewhere along the broken highways of new mexico, red sands chock full of iron and cars carrying tumbleweeds on the underside of their exhaust pipes. i found life out in the desert, spinning off road and out of control until the crash, totalled, broken bones and putting the pieces together again. sometimes it’s hard to love someone when you’re always with them, like how looking at the same side of the moon never gets old because it hides in the daylight, like how eleven-hour car rides can turn into tense late hotel nights.

i found out the meaning of home in a kaleidoscope, neon street signs in a language i’ve never been able to speak, looking for eyes looking for me. there’s something unnerving about the dead of night in kansas city, like a piece of me that no one else has ever been supposed to see, old marks and places where bones were forced to regrow, old sunburns that just live under the skin instead of on display again. i keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, but i’m not sure when the first one fell in the first place, like i’ve been waiting to figure out if i’ve ever belonged in a single solitary place, like how every single star that i’ve ever seen sounds like it could hold a home in its heart for me.

i found out the meaning of home in the decay, the falling apart at the seams, plucked out by a compulsive need, snapping loose strings from the sleeves of hoodies until there’s nothing left of me except for the unravelling. the southwest is scattered with the rubble of long-abandoned twice-owned properties, old lots where children never played because the tar has always been melting, liquidating, capitalizing on the collapse of what used to be.

i found the meaning of home but i lost the memory. every word i’ve ever spoken is rotten poetry because i can’t remember what i’ve said or who i’ve claimed to be. i feel most at home when i’m lost, when i’m wandering, and now i’ve been far enough to know that the twisting highways of the midwest will never be confusing again for me. i need to go further, farther away from the mess of puzzle pieces that i’ve been handing out to anyone who wants a part of me. i’ve always been disjointed, like since july i’ve been popping my jaw into place every time i have something to say because it doesn’t want to stay the way that it should be, like i don’t want to stay the way that i am but i have to because it’s expected of me.

i lose myself every time someone asks me who i want to be: lost until i know everything, then pushing and going and moving and never ever staying, making a home in the bones of the sun before she ejects me, evicting me from the ghost town of what her heart used to be. why has everything become arizona to me? like the edge of the grand canyon promising something better than a downfall, a mile down of feeling like flying, like standing on the edge gets my heart racing. maybe the only reason i ever wanted to be dead was because everyone stopped listening, and i’ve always been a performer before anything.

i wish i could find answers from highway signs, in the songs my friends sing in my car as we speed, five ten fifteen eighty, integrity. i wish i had more words after eighteen years of spewing things that don’t have meanings. i wish things were easy, like the rocky mountain breeze coming down from the north and infecting the humidity in a way that makes the sky feel more free. i wish that i could find something that made me feel that free, something besides the seconds before the fall, the anticipation of the drop, the sensation of weightlessness that only comes with being bound or released from gravity. maybe someday i’ll grow wings, fly faster than this toyota ever drove me. maybe home is in the shapes of the clouds, a castle in the sky blinded by the sunrise. maybe home is in the memories, and maybe that’s why i always feel like i’m chasing things.

that one unfinished bird metaphor
     Wear me like a birdskull necklace.
     Grind my hollow bones into sugar for your coffee.
     Pluck my feathers plume by plume to make pens for your washed-out poetry.


math note lines
     1. I SWALLOWED EVERY PIECE OF GLASS THAT REMAINED FROM YOUR SHATTERED REFLECTION. *******.
     2. WEDGE RAZOR BLADES BETWEEN YOUR TEETH AND SINK THEM INTO ME. TAKE EVERY LAST BREATH FROM ME. COLLAPSE MY LUNGS AND RIP OUT MY TONGUE. LEAVE ME WHERE YOU FOUND ME, VOMITING INTO THE KITCHEN SINK LIKE IT’S NOTHING, SHOULDERS HEAVING. I’VE BEEN PUTTING OFF THIS 3RD PARTY SUICIDE BUT IT ALL COMES CRASHING DOWN TONIGHT. KISS MY HEART GOODBYE.
     3. BREAK YOUR JAW BITING BULLETS LIKE YOU’RE TRIGGER HAPPY. I NEVER ASKED FOR ANY OF THIS BUT HERE WE ARE, STANDING ON THE CLIFF WITH NO COMMON GROUND BETWEEN US. IS THAT WHY YOU JUMPED SHIP? YOU COULDN’T HANDLE IT? I WASN’T BULLETPROOF ENOUGH FOR YOU, AND YOU WERE JUST TOO MUCH.

blinker
     my mom uses her turn signal like an afterthought
     it’s pointless at that point but that’s conditioning
     and her train of thought has always been linear


ugh
     when i was 15 i asked my mom to start taking me to therapy
     she said baby why pay a stranger when you can just talk to me about anything
     and i smiled like i wasn’t dying inside and started writing poetry.
     funerals cost less than student loans
     at this rate when i graduate i won’t be able to afford myself a home
     the american dream has been dead for a century
     a degree is worthless and it’s not likely i’ll make much of a salary
     have you even imagined yourself outside of high school yet?
     i’ve never thought about my life past my graduation date

thinking about someone
     sing serenades through silent car radios like static
     through sleepy stormcloud eyes that could swallow you whole
     he’s got a smile with more stars than yours ever did
     wishbone collarbones and long eyelashes
     stringing together dreams in constellations
     piecing together fractured calculus equations

i’ve been reading pete wentz’s old livejournal posts again*
     you’re apocalyptic chemistry, a candycane of all the things i never was and never could be to keep you stable. i’m a broken spine and you’re fading. love is hard to quantify so i’ll just keep counting and catching fireflies.

i guess maybe the problem lies in the fact that my
memories are so falibile,
dizzying. i guess maybe the problem is that i’ve
beaten this dead horse a million
times already. i guess maybe the problem of finding an individual memory
stems from the fact that you
have always been sunshine
to me. i can taste grape and feel like i’m choking, six pieces of gum and
nothing but
overwhelming
laughing
laughing
laughing.

i can feel the texture of letter tiles as we
spell out nonsense,
inside jokes inside our own bubble
of comfort. there are stitches in my sides: you have always
been my favorite, you know?
“every day feels like summer with you,” stitches
stitches in my sides, falling apart at the seams
in the best way i’ve ever known. everything good is with you; every sunshine, warmth
upon my skin, cloudless skies, they’re all
you,
laughing
laughing
laughing.

i can hear the buzzing in my skin, the beehive sound of a tattoo gun inking
your laughter into my
collarbone. it’s sunny, red, a desert landscape that feels like
home.
i can taste apple soda out of a glass bottle, and it brings me to the cemetery
across the street from the grocery store, feeling
edgy in our private-school uniforms
sitting on tombstones.
other people, other friends. they’re there too, but right now
all i can see is you:
laughing,
sunny,
haloed.

i can see the pedestal that you
get put upon-- by me by me by me--
and then i open the door
to your black kia soul
and i can hear myself complaining about
all the trash i have to move.
you’re no helios,
you’re not
apollo.
you’re just
the memory
of home,
breathlessly grinning.

God bless America,
Land of irony
Because nothing is ever actually free—
Not when our economy is fueled by tragedy,
Not when we keep armies in the East just to keep gas prices cheap.
If you take the top eight military
budgets of the world,
over 50% of that sum is the United States, so
God bless America.
As rivers of blood flood the streets in Syria,
God bless America.
Land of the religiously free,
Land where "God bless America" could refer to any one of the gods acknowledged
by its inhabitants.

God bless America,
Where Muslims of all races have to apologize for ISIS but white Christians don’t have to apologize for the KKK.
When the **** party tried to destroy an entire race in Germany, it became illegal to ever speak favorably of them,
But, hey, here you can execute your right to ‘freedom of speech.’
The First Amendment protects you from being silenced by the government,
But it doesn’t protect you from backlash of the people you’ve offended, the people you’ve appropriated, the people who are sick of having to put up with this.

God bless America,
Where segregation apparently ended in the 60s,
Where women apparently achieved equality in the 20s,
Where the LGBTQ community is seen as trendy simply because you can no longer be arrested for being out and proud.
God bless America,
Where the majority of kids on the streets are queer teens and where
It’s still seen as acceptable to wave the flag of the Confederacy.

God bless America,
But God forsake everyone else.

God bless America, for every single unwarranted and unjustified arrest.
God bless America for false information and standardized tests.
God bless America
For every flaw we refuse to fix.

And as we destroy our planet without thought
of the fact that it’s currently the only feasible place for us to live,
I make one last request:
May the future generations be blessed,
Because God knows they'll need it.