I    go        out          for       coffee
                    with            my                        be­st                            
                                fr­iend        every
                                 evening
                         And see the thorns come out of
                    I  people In ways I wouldn't expect.
              D    One woman moves away from us. One
        R         boy calls her a terrorist. One man threate
    I           ns to have her deported Even though she w
N           as born in New Jersey.    America the free....?
K         I drink coffee with my parents in the morning, My
C          Dad's daily dose of poisons called  Fox and Friends
O     Hannity  The O'reilly Factor  Cause my ears to bleed.
    F   They say that while not all Muslims are terrorists All ter
      F   rorists are Muslim.    They use religion as a scapegoat
          E  What they don't know isThese radicals do the exact
             E same thing. I drink coffee by myself in the afterno
                 on. Somewhere, during that time Personality Ru
                  pert Murdoch blames all Muslims for terrorism.
                   He says they all must take responsibility for t
                     his "cancer". Then must I, as a Christian, tak
                      e responsibility for the KKK?  Must I, as a
                         member of your religion, Rupert, take
                           responsibility for your ignorance?  I
                             stand in solidarity with these Mus
                              lims who would never rip a hair
                                off my head or a bone from m
                                  y body.  We can do without
                                    people like you, who mak
                                        my coffee taste bitter.

When I was nine
I saw a punk rock band preform for the first time
On American Idol.
I asked my mom,
"Why do they hold the microphones so close to their mouths?"
She smiled simply sighing
"It's their style. They're not trying to sound good."
She kissed the crown of my head goodnight
And that was that.

When I was ten,
I asked my mom how she met my father.
She told me of their late night chats
Tangled up in phone lines
Currents of love flowing through the receiver
Currents of his whimsical charm
And her shy glow.
Something seemed wrong with the fact that they met
Talking through hard plastic
Not matching faces
But I didn't ask
And that was that.

When I was thirteen,
I asked my mom why all the boys picked on me
Why they strung my emotions across they're tongues
Like popcorn on a wilted Christmas tree
Or why they played connect-the-dots with my face
Using it to spell the word
"Ugly"
Why they teased me so much
I came home with acid tears corroding my cheeks
My mother had told me one other time
When I was about five
And a boy hurt me
Pulled my hair like he was gutting intestines from fresh meat
Her answer:
"It's just because he likes you."
And that was that.

Confession:
I wanted to fill your mouth with red roses
I wanted to string daisies and words through your golden hair
We were princesses growing up
Or at least, we pretended we were
The forest behind our house was the only palace we knew
It was the only place we could feel pretty.

Confession:
I never hated you like I said I did
When we got into our big fights
After you told everyone I drained my body of it's red wine
Into the bathtub by the means of a blade.
You may have been malicious in your intentions
Or you may have been a kid who had no idea what to do
I will always choose the latter.

Confession:
Overdose felt like that razor was dancing across my forearm
Once again.
They could have been the same
When the news cut through my eardrum
I didn't feel anything
I didn't cry at first
But I drove for hours
Occasionally screaming that this couldn't be real
A feeling only an experienced cutter would know
Like a familiar old friend.

Confession:
I peaked when
Mom told me not to look at you
As your body lie face up in that wooden bed
With ***** marks from the witch's needle
Covering your arm like black and blue paint.
She said you looked sick
She said you didn't look like yourself
Because you weren't.
But you were still the same kind of beautiful
You had always been
Even in your illness
Even in your addiction
Even in your silence.

You and I
Are like fire and gasoline
You continue to spew sparks
Into my gas tank
And expect me not to explode.

When you start on a turbulent trail
With your anti-Muslim slurs
As your speech begins to slur when you've had too much to drink
I prefer your intoxication to your ignorance any day
And your "facts" from Fox News
I try my best to cup my hands over my ears
As if I am closing floodgates
But you keep pushing me over the edge.

Floodgates are what you open
When hate spills out of your waterfall mouth
The waves ebb and flow violently
Crashing into me
Crashing into my best friend
A follower of Islam
Who would never hurt a soul
But the flood she faces on the daily
Makes her believe that she will be a casualty
Of the war the water wages.

When a father has to lie to keep his job
The one he has rightfully earned
Just because of his religion
America no longer seems like the land of the free
You complain about persecution of Christians in
The workplace and mainstream media
You don't know what persecution is.

Your acid tongue is volatile.
It spits venom into my cuts
That have yet to heal
You think you are saving me
But you just make the wound more painful.

You do not know the consequences of your words
Of the things you blindly support
The casualties are not
Dollar figures
Your right to speak freely
No matter who it hurts.
The calamities of these sentences
These mindless broadcasts
Are people.

When I forget your name
like foreign venom from a foreign tongue
spit into my ear
smushed into a cut
Will it become familiar
once again?

It seems as though
the day you died
every memory of my childhood
died too
So now your name seems strange
like a different note
played from the same trumpet
like a different word
written in the same ink
like something vaguely familiar
but completely lost

In my head
you will always be Snow White
rather than the poison apple
as some have made you out to be
(ironically enough,
all the kids who made you hate yourself
who called you ****, *****, *****
they all still wept when you left us)
I do not mean that you were perfect
but you were my friend
as a little girl
as a child
and that is all I remember
your ghost looks like a nine year-old

I can't remember things the way I used to
My father will bring up times we played together
as if you're still around
I never understood how that works
how we can talk about you like you're still here
how it seems like your fate has been forgotten

I see pictures of you
when your mother posts them online
and I never know what to do.
My half-assed "likes" are my condolences
My comments are my sympathy
"I'm so sorry" has never emerged easily
from underneath my tongue
from the letters hidden in my saliva
sticky with regret

When I forget your name
I will not forget your face
Your memories are etched into my bones
your words are scars upon my skin
your breath is fog inside my mind
that makes the glass cloudy
I never want this fog to clear
I hope the weather never changes
the way we have.

Things that turn purple:
Feet, when exposed to the cold
Food, when exposed to oxygen
My face, when exposed to fear
To my habits
To my past.
The mention of tying a noose brings pictures to my mind
Of how I used to plan my own death
While paging through a magazine in a waiting room
Ready for the doctors to see me
To tell me I wasn't that sick
Because they didn't know the things I did to myself
I covered up the sliced layers of my skin quite nicely
With different grades of fabric
The belts tied in the shape of my neck
Hung like skeletons in my closet
People kept telling me it was his fault I was so distraught
But that did not make me feel any better
They would constantly tell me there were support groups for the molested
That I was not alone
But there is never any solace in being a statistic
Numbers burn across my skin like matches
Each additional time I heard them
The skin would bubble and blister
Forming a new wound for me to later pick the scab off
If the world did not do that first.
Through therapy, I learned that
When I try to carry the pieces of me
That are bigger than my hands can hold
That are sharper than my flesh can take
That are wider than my unwieldy body
Even though I didn't think that was possible
I crumble like the walls of Jericho
When an army came rushing the city limits.
My past is an armada that rushes full speed through my chest
Piercing me with swords and muskets and bullets
Causing me to bleed and rot from the inside out
Causing me to fall away like petal from stem
Causing me to implode silently
And maybe a sign of this disaster
A symptom of this sickness
Is discoloration.
Things turn purple
As a result of prolonged exposure
To their personal kryptonite.

Advice on falling in love with an assault survivor
The first time you look at them
They will do one of two things.
They will either not look you in the eye
Out of fear that your passion will burn them
After all,
The last time another's eye stared through their paper skin
They caught on fire.
Or this person may stare straight back into your pupil
As though they are staring death straight in the face
There is no in between with a survivor
They will either move too fast or not at all
But their trust is the petal of a daisy in the desert
Withered and delicate as you touch them for the first time
You cannot expect warmth from something so broken
For survivors train themselves to ignore the ghost in their heads
But that demon will always show up
And when they finally let you undress them
You undress their monster as well
As you remove articles of clothing
Their body begins to freeze over
And the spirit they could once hide and stow away
Is now at the forefront of everything.
They train themselves to have *** with the lights off
Because should a fleck of brightness reveal an eye
A nose
A mouth
The face of their abuser will fill in the rest
They do not want you to see their body
For the scars leave train tracks of the places they've been
Crawling in fields of thorns
Wrapping themselves in knives
Swallowing perceived sanity in the form of a pill
They will not always be okay
Because in their mind they are constantly at war
With an enemy ship that retreated long ago.
To everyone around them, they are a martyr
They have won the battle
But in their mind
They are a fallen soldier
Who can't stop hearing their own gunshots fire
Into the chest of their opponent.
Falling in love with an assault survivor
Is agreeing to watch parts of them
Go up in flames
Over and over again
And picking up the ashes they leave behind.