i remember you as the boy who drew mazes next to me-
endless kubrikian structures with #2 pencils,
always leaned a little too close,
crooked on your elbow, making jokes until i laughed
my ugly girl chortle

you might remember me as the girl you did call ugly-
in front of your friends, my only few friends,
i didn't laugh when i was the joke that day
but i blamed my ambitious pigtails, and the metal grinding against my teeth
hopeful for future beauty
i couldn't blame you

i couldn't even blame you a few years later when i grew *******,
and we rode bicycles to the track
where you put your maze-making hands in my back-to-school-sale jeans
i said stop
you said it's okay
so i said it's okay

i still don't know if it was but i do know you called later that day
i sat nervous and twirling the thick cord around my fingers, my chest, my neck

you made me so many things at once,
things that i could not yet name

i remember you saying sorry
and me saying it's okay

a dialogue that,
to this day, i have not escaped.

you tell me i am a bleeding heart in place of
an insult, a slap, a swift shove into a bathroom counter
say it like it's easy, too easy
to be this way, like i
crawled out of my mother's belly
begging for my veins to turn into highways that travel through the cities of
hard-working men and women hardly making it work
your freedom for greed comes at the greatest cost, and we are all
paying for it
the children hiding under classroom tables are
paying for it
the one choosing opiates over antibiotics because the
pain is intolerable and it is cheaper to die than to stay alive is
paying for it

and yes, we write so much about dying,
we serenade the dark side with guitar riffs and cannabis
call me a bleeding heart because i want to scoop all of us up like fragile eggs
in an abandoned bird's nest
and whisper softly
i know, i know it hurts to live
like this but we have to keep going
we have to keep trying

intent is nothing to a gun in the mouth a shove off a cliff nobody
meant to be power hungry and carnivorous but
the chips have fallen the angels are falling
our halos our ego spotlights
look at me look at us how bright
like high beams in the mirror

nobody can see each other
anymore

weeks were spent prying you open with a crowbar, with a scalpel

wire hangers in all your doors  
when i finally got inside
the car wouldn't even start

take me nowhere cowboy we have already come so far

in the coldest months i let the hair grow like ivy up the sides of an old house,
my old house of a body
let the blemishes form, i invited the oils into my pores and the dirt under my fingernails

i wanted to be ugly- (but not too much so)
i wanted eyes to not rest on me for long
i wanted to dissipate into the background

a chameleon girl,
a blurry figure at the edge of the movie screen
a girl just walking by
with no plotline or context
when she opens her mouth only ravens fly out
she wanted to erase all the places she had been hurt
but she could not reach far enough
so she became invisible, instead.

this year i am letting silence speak for itself
i spent too much time bulldozing over its insinuations,
the clear echo of hurt, the ringing of your nothings

they say when you die you hear a buzzing
i heard it when i pressed my ear against the shower wall
‎everything else was far away

maybe my soul is already leaving my body
maybe i already died and continued to somehow live

you asked me who would hurt a face like that
then you spent the next two years showing me the answer:
a boy who does not like women, who has to put them in their rightful place
as cherry trees only to be picked from when men are hungry, (and they are always hungry)

someone who would hurt a face like this doesn't speak carefully,
is an entire thesaurus for cruelty
they hurt so they won't get hurt
even though they are never the ones who end up leaving
the burden is on me, it always has been
there are trenches in my neck from holding us together
i have the back of a thousand year old witch
still casting curses in my garden
to all those someones itching to pick my fruit
chanting
stay away stay away