Jenny

Jenny Nov 2013

I fall asleep before 11 PM and dream that I am grazing graveyards with my fingerprints that I thought were my own when it turns out they are identical to yours. I wake up feeling soft and I wait for you to get up so that I can take over the warm spot your body left – it feels to me like the soft and butter-sunken center of a pancake stack and I like that. I like you enough to want you to come back but I do not love you enough to pay for your name to be on my license plate. I want hell to freeze over because that’s when you said we could be together and maybe afterwards we could go ice-skating there? I will lick your eyeballs with snowflakes on my tongue and fire underneath my feet. I think about you eating Fig Newtons and laughing at Wallace and Gromit, even though I’ve never seen you do either of those things. I feel like you’re wrong about most things but I would think the same way for you. I am trying to become a smaller part of the universe and less of a burden to you so that you can dangle me off of one pinky finger. I mouth-kiss you but it’s not the same as sleeping on your stomach. I mouth-kiss you and wish I hadn’t. I mouth-kiss you and wish you were a caramel apple. I mouth-kiss you in a futile attempt to remember what my fifteenth birthday was like. I mouth-kiss you period. I will wean off of you – eventually, and wane, and waste away.

Jenny Nov 2013

Description From One Witness to One Confused Sketch Artist

There's crescent moons under his eyes and sleepy hollows in his cheekbones. Nobody ever wore emaciated the way he did, skin hanging from his frame like 2014's furs. Forget Halloween parties - I was head underwater at his very throat, neck deep in Adam's apples. Peek-a-boo ribs playing dam to his darkly violent blood that flows in currents around my star-strickenness.
Newspapers have nothing on the editions of his expressions

and the dirt underneath those fingernails is sufficient for harvesting a future family of four.

A naked body mummified in yellow caution tape...

um, what's the word for people who are sexually invested in criminals?

I think I should leave now.

Jenny Nov 2013

In Which I Sleep Upside Down and Overcast

There's a turning point on my tongue when I realize who you really are.

You appear to me in macaroni art, in fingerpaintings, in cracked iPhone screens.

I dream you in refrigerator word magnets / I read you in my favorite novel from age 13 and cry about it.

Your self-portrait is etched in my bottom-bowl bulimia at 2:07 AM. And guess what?

(I'm not entirely convinced that you didn't come crafted from the sea, slimy and sultry and green trails or tails surfacing to hold hands and jigsaw your human form.)

At night, I see lines of caterpillars leading from your belly button to be your matter. Excuse me? I am going through your life with a fine-toothed comb and knitting an afghan out of your DNA.

Drumroll, please! / I've got it -

You are 47 Autumns. You Are exactly as You Were.

Jenny Nov 2013

Fall Fashion Tips

Start by caaaaarefully removing your outermost layer of flesh - lather generously; rinse passionately; re-evaluate your life with a fine-toothed comb and carefully remove the parasites of your predetermined partiality
- String them up with clothespins to wither and flake in a badly scorched sky

- Acquire an ice pick of high quality, frosted on memories of all your ex-lovers and their numbing tongues. Begin to chisel at your own very delicate bone structure. Cease action only when the jawbone resembles the claws you disregarded in your 3 AM awakening punctured with crrreeeeaks and hazy in a soft red fog

- Dust your eyelid with arsenic until they're heavy enough to crush a small child. Tell a good joke, or two - which part of a vegetable are you not supposed to eat again? Might as well eat all of it, him, her, them - but not the wheelchair. In retrospect, pull all of your eyelashes out as well - no sense in prolonging the sought-after blackness

- Tie your lover's ruptured spleen around your waist to add a few pounds - god forbid you get too twiggy and crackle and fall into an inevitable pit of self-loathing. Stick straws through puke green nostrils and **** maggots out of gaping eye sockets. Line your lips in borrowed blood.

- Embroider your initials onto my skin and never forget where you came from.

Jenny Oct 2013

Spoken words / punk Boys

Be with me in ****** footprints / in your mom's silverware sets / in stucco walls

I want to sleep on dark leather couches with you.

Tell me more about cable:
I want you to introduce me to damp grass on football fields that we skateboarded to underneath the stars that I was with when i was away from you

Hello, earthling!
Let's do normal Earth things together (I could be a person for you)
I fixed the thermostat so that my bedroom can be habitable for human beans such as yourself

Drink six Diet Cokes with me so we can put six dead ladie bugs inside the bottles and BlowThemUpWithFire

"Yes, I know about fire! I've seen it all before OK! And I want to pretend I haven't so that i can ooooh and aawwwhhh when you show me !!!!"

I want to be a person for you.

Spray paint my bones gold when you're done crafting my skin into a turban so that I know it's real - I made this for you

Jenny Oct 2013

An Evening With Edgar Allan Poe

"I'll let you in on a Secret - I don't know when I'm joking."

We go to a fancy-type restaurant. A nice sit-down place. My baby blues are bottled on dark wood shelves and this isn't a detail that you plan to miscount for. Waiters in black ties and the plates are already on the tables and I know that you are relentless in their shining reflections.

"Wine and Dine my Sensibility."

My seventeen-year-old skin does not belong here. Follicles producing my scent are premature, to say the least. Cultivated romance looms beyond a horizon of pale-brown clouds littered with mid-highway makeouts - I expect you to paint me a brand-spanking-new Southwestern sky.

"Let's talk about You" -
A past-prime Adam's Apple says to me. Gnarled birds' nests perch atop my faintly skin-encased splinters - I flex in hopes of a migration, but not too
Far
Down
S
   o
       u
          t
                h

"They're coming."

Barely flinching teeth rattle around my peripheral and then You Are Gone! - or perhaps I am. We drown quickly in dim red-lighting, brick-laid air swallows and belches out a humidified and much sweatier you and I - and I'm getting turned on.

"You look nice today,"
they chant. Spay-legged spiders tumble out of dank eyesockets and nest somewhere deeeeeeeep in my brain tissue.
"Yellow looks good on a jealous, jealous girl-"
You laugh and call them back home.
Lock eyes with me as I impale upon a salad fork.

"Talk ***** to me."

Third-World Countries have been delicately dropped into what I thought were love poems to you. Vines grow around your mouth, soggy with the meal that I think is over. They chase each other through your teeth and I want to strangle myself with their slim and tender necks - like you wish I had. Dark green darlings giggle in my direction - such a Naive Little Girl!

"Ha."

Six lines later and I'm reeling you in.

Jenny Oct 2013

Like a Two-Headed Girl Eating Soggy Pizza in the Great Depression

In an attempt to be rational it seems I've forgotten how to ration - stand back! 1,095 days and 1,096 nights worth of unbearable and mistakenly shared sadness pours out and stains your only white t-shirt that I picture readily in the cocoon you built inside my head, wrapped it in swaddling cloth and laid it out to be walked upon - tumble dry low

I'm mscuzzying around your bone structure.
I want to break things, I want to wail, I want to remind you that you're supposed to want to die
(Doesn't it sound so sweet, baby? Right next to each other - I promise your tattoos will still look cool in the moonlight of our masked and morbid menagerie, a mausoleum that I mailed you a hand-written invitation to)

Have I ever told you that you make me feel like macaroni art and that I know an earlier birth would have given me first place in the Contest That Is You?
Put me back in the box underneath your bed so I can feel like I have a home alongside your frame.

- In the midst of my cartoon confessionals and crumbling sense of worth I'd forgotten all about tonight's previously scheduled light show - like a solar eclipse of sorts, marred by the fact that my sun rests somewhere inside of you and a 'complete obscuring' doesn't entail half of how you've blinded me

A message flashes across every computer monitor in the great Midwest -

- I honestly love you.