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I rub my face with my hands like a blind man hugs walls with his fingertips, trying to find a comfortable position to cradle the weight of my skull in my open palm.

I think it’s heavy from exhaustion.

I scratch my head and with an exasperated “****...” I forget why else it could be heavyneverminditwasapathy.

That’s the first time I ever... ****...



That’sthefirsttime I’ve ever played with word breaks! Carson would be proud.

I wish my cheeks were made of clay. When I use my forearms as kickstands, godfuckingdamnitIneedtostoplosingmythoughts, (What the **** spell check, you tell me my word break play times are not words but “godfuckingdamnitIneedtostoplosingmythoughts” is a word?) my fists press my flesh like putty, it molds around my knuckles, but when I move them, gravity drags them back down.

Gravity’s a *****.

**** poetry.

I’m tired and I want my **** clay face so I have to put in the effort to make myself see correctly after smushing my cheek fat so far towards my forehead that my eyes look nearly shut.

I should stop doing that.

Oils from my hands and all that ya know? I don’t want any more pockmarks.

Woah spell check, it’s pockmarks?

Huh... pockmarks. I guess that does make more sense than potmarks.

Carson would probably know, she thinks in words. The last time I thought in words was for fifteen minutes a year ago last week while sitting next to Carson at a sloppily painted table with patchwork chairs.

I couldn’t write anything down though, she had my laptop.

My nose itches, but I should probably find something a bit more poetic to add to this stanza. Then again, Carson might think that this whole streamofconsciencething was cool, not my style, out there for me. So I’ll stick with it. Carson gets so proud when I start branching out.

Yayyyyyy.... branching out... I’m thinking “**** this apathy,” but I don’t care enough to do anything about it.

Not at 2:03 AM in one of the four lounge rooms on the third floor of West Fairchild, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. I should probably change the title now...




****.

I need to stop coughing. I need to get this phlegm thing figured out. I can feel the oils I’m leaving on my face...

It’s like a moist towelette just lifted away from my cheek, like a feather.

I don’t think Carson likes feathers. They seem too... ****... They seem too....

Ethereal! Yeah, ethereal. Ethereal sounds too scholarly.

It’s not worth the effort to think of something else.

Yeah, I’m not tired, it’s the apathy.

By morning it will just be exhaustion, I care too much about their...

This girl doesn’t eat, and she hates herself, so I play lifeguard and keep an eye on her as the day goes by, and I feel stupid for choosing to not respond to her text messages, and then for lying about not seeing them, but I’m too tired to care more.

Yeah, that’s it.

I’m too tired to care.

That’s not apathy right?
Rubber bracelets adorn her wrists like she just strolled out of a punk concert (like she just strolled out of middle school) , she picks the scabs of playground ostracism till they look as though they were ripped into her self esteem yesterday.

In her mind, they were.

I find her burying her face between her knees during an ice breaker activity.

The quadruple piercings on one her ear portend an imagined mosh pit, but she digs her own as she cradles herself against the wall.

Her arms are bowling alley bumpers, she throws them up around her head to protect them from the familiar miasma that pervades every inch of her whenever she is in a group of more than three.

Gutterball.

She let me in her room last night. She invited me to share in solitude w/ a good book. I brought a tattered poetry anthology. She said I could sit next to her in her bed; I took a seat at the head, she sat coiled in the far back corner against the wall, legs tucked in against her body.

She was an injured rabbit, her burrow of blankets and books only gave her so much shelter.

She eats alone at breakfast amongst the group.

She starves herself. Her blood fills her stomach as the ulcers feed her imploding hunger that half glasses of chocolate milk cannot

She was dared to eat five gummy bears, and I swear by my own scars that she was about to bawl, eyelids pulled back by the judgmental demons she sees every day in the mirror, they chastise her for the chocolate milk, but her desperate hunger wins this battle. Barely.

Her headphones are like sunglasses shielding her eyes from meeting gazes with another.

I’m sorry Sarah, no matter how hard you push your spine against the bricks you will not phase through them, you are stuck with us here for five weeks my dear, and it is only day one.

I’m sorry that all I know of you is that your name is Sarah and that your last name begins with an R, I think. I haven’t had the guts to look back at the group text message our counselors sent out to check your last name because that would be closer to stalking than I feel comfortable going.

I’m sorry that I notice how your wrists and ears contradict the smile you stitch across your face just before you hide it behind your hair, and that I notice the absolute terror in your eyes as you stare at the mass of your peers before you.

I’m sorry that noticing makes me believe that I know you at all.

I’m sorry for how they all gawk at how adorable you are when more than three people give you their attention. I can only imagine how flush your cheeks become.

But I would think that you stopped blushing years ago. The permanent outflow of blood from your aorta to your face coagulated long ago, leaving your face with a perpetual hue of dull purple. Your body doesn’t know what to do with all the excess embarrassment.

I think you compensate by blood letting.

The only bracelet you wear that suits you is of the Deathly Hallows. A tiny silver stencil on a blue piece of twine. It’s blue like the four A.M. sky.

I think it gives you strength.

Sarah, your arms are not an invisibility cloak. While your hair may hide your face and your bracelets your scars, the world will see you.

It’s ironic that the very things you use to protect yourself bear your self-loathing like a family crest.

Class time. She darts to the back corner desk like a painted swordtail to a coral shoal, she curses her opaque scarlet hue, she thinks it ugly but the reef can still see her beauty behind the jagged outcroppings of her fragmented self-esteem. It shines through and refracts off the water, viscous like teenage judgment, and we see the spectrum of her beauty.

She’s a cognitive science major. She looks for a road map through her own thoughts in the curriculum, turn left at her fear of eating in front of others, bear right at her boyfriend of four months. She tries to make herself two dimensional at the lunch table, arms strapped to her sides like a straight jacket.

She jokingly told me to stop whistling about dreamt dreams and the French Revolution, she said it would make her cry. So I stopped.

I’ve never read Les Miserables, but I’ve sung enough about dreamt dreams to know that Life can fill your lungs like a zeppelin and can resonate through your mouth like Notre Dame just before Sunday mass if you only let it.

Let Life build a cathedral inside of you Sarah. The bricks are yours for the taking, and we are all standing here beside you with mortar at the ready.
A twitch
repeating erratically
somewhere in the recesses of my lower abdomen.

shifting waistband doesn't help

Did I put on weight this month?
Are my **** getting bigger?
(No, no they're not, you vain little peacock.)

I don't feel bad
or heavy
or strange.

And I've been good about the pill.

It must just be gas.

**Thump.
*******
Go away
No one ever liked you
No, not even me
I don't know why I put up with you for so long.

Don't pretend you didn't see this coming
I never mattered to you, either
Just a safe place to hide
From the cold
You didn't even ask to be let in.

I should have listened to my friends
When they said you were no good
But I was too proud
And too dumb
And too trusting.

So I let things slide
And I hoped that you'd get better
That if I was patient
And kind
Things would resolve themselves.

I was only a kid.

I remember that night,
The light by my bedstand
When I finally had enough
And tried to make you leave
And found it hurt too much.

I was ashamed
Of myself
Of you
Of the pain
So I hid it, pretended it didn't matter.

And you dug your ******* heels in
******* that you are
Wheedling your way into my life
And my body
Like it's a thing you already own

No more of this *******.

I will boil you in acid
And I will drag you out by force
I'll cut you down
And throw you out
With the rest of the morning garbage

And it will hurt,
I know it hurts
And this hole you leave in me
May never, ever heal
I just have to hope it will.

Because I'd rather spend my life
Walking around
With a ******* hole in my foot
Than spend one more minute
With you.
Caffeine, sugar, dairy fat
Chemicals made in a vat
Hold the threat of sleep at bay
Keep me sane for one more day
But it's as if you’re ****** into the page on which you sit so precariously. You realize his eyes have become weird again, throbbing to the beat of your love. He looks away, leaning back on his hands, arms taught. And you sit as if alone, watching him tear a piece off your history and craft a paper airplane from your devotion, fingers gently folding and creasing, lovingly shaping, his head turning, focusing, admiring. And when he is satisfied, he throws it with a flick of his pale wrist. It sails beautifully through the air, buoyed by affection and adoration, leaping through the gusts with pride. You reach out a hand willing it to come to you, wanting something so tender for yourself, for your gasping heart. But as you lean in, poised with glory, a thief melts from a burning tree, morphs from the shadows, an ugly, beaten creature, scaly and peeling. It slinks foreword catching the plane in its mottled claws, pinching it slightly as your lover lets out a small gasp, eyes widening. The creature places it inside the steel bars over its heart and suddenly the thing changes and becomes lovely, blooming and whole, an infection of grace and slender frame. Fragrance floats back to you as you cower and your lover looks at the lovely figure descending upon him and you scream and scream, seizing and foaming, something mad, unwanted, hidden from sight. But he is no more than smoke; naked body drooling, jagged blades protruding from his back; and where his heart should have been, there are only iron bars. He turns and howls, an alien sound, unreal, lips curling back, twisting and forcing his screeching notes into your chest smothering your mind. But finally you have had enough; finally you understand, finally you find strength to pull apart the stitching and release yourself and you fall.
You still have not released me
Though it was many years ago

Lips swollen from kissing
Stuttered as hate began to grow

Rusted hands pried open
Salty twilight spotted cracks

And yet you still flicker warmly
Above my chipping eyelid’s clotted wax

A bump from a gentle stranger
Sends me spinning from the train

But those that beat me hollow
I filter through my veins

My hands scream for passion
My heart for pulpy gore

My legs tire from tensing
But my mind still wants more

It would prefer so mightily
I danced overgrown with spines

Pursuing eyes of Persian blue
Golden hair, unleashed jungle vines

It would rather have me wounded
Bashed in until I bled

Over and over again, no truce
My mind, it wants me dead


--Lily
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