Your room is always messy.
Cheerios crowding into the carpet
careful not to be crushed by your drunken feet.
I ask you why you never clean it.
You say this is what college is.

You haven't talked to me in three days.
I lay awake at night picturing you
in your dirtied room,
the clattering windows shades,
the TV you never turn off.

In my head I ask you why
you never clean it.
Maybe if you just moved a pair
of pants you'd find me shadowing underneath.
Maybe you'd know how to talk to me again.

I don't look for an answer.
Instead I watch my windows sway,
wait for you to call,
wait to forgive you.

©DelaneyMiller

My mom helps her best friend dump her mother's ashes in Lake Michigan.
She tells my mom how quickly this came.
How young she was.
When my mom gets home,
she tells me the air whipped the burnt body
takes a drag of her cigarette,
flicks the flame off her lips,
tells me she hopes to never get so old people are relieved when she dies.

I steal my mom's Reds.
Sit on the porch and pretend to be her.
It makes it easy that I have her nose.
I imagine dumping my mothers ashes into Lake Michigan when I am her age.
In my mind,
she is not burnt young, or hoping, or 54 years old,
her ashes tumble into the dark with the rest of the mothers
who's daughters sit on porches
taking their ashes and their stains with them.

One mile deep,
he says.
It could be 100 miles deep,
and I would still want to jump,
feel how rose rocks kiss ripped skin.
While my uncle suffers from vertigo,
we look over the edge,
and I must be the only one thinking
how god loves these ridges
and how he seems to ignore me.
I am trapped behind national park barriers
and the canyon stays untouched.
Falling as deep as it wants to.

We are fighting about religion.
You ask me when I lost my faith in God.
I see myself, ****** lipped and angry,
ask you why it should matter.
At this point, I shake to the corner of your bed,
and you are crying, your black hair leaking,
you never expected me to judge you for being a Mormon.
I tell you,
you are the first boy I ever loved who believes in God.
You grab my hands, twist them under your blankets,
ask me if I've ever felt God lean quietly the way you do every morning.
So I pray with you.
Leave your house.
Don't tell you I am trying to bend the crucifixes in your mind.

I was taught at a young age,
To watch what bridges I burn.
But something daddy didn't know,
Was that creating them can be just as destructive,
As setting them aflame.

Someone in a dream gave me a gun.
Five seconds, a dog, and a man.
Asked me to shoot either the man or the dog.
I shot the dog, paws nestling on my knees.

When I walk at night,
my mom tells me to watch for strange men.
Sometimes, I come across a dog,
paws wet with snow,
the man yielding it lurching back.
Men do not love easy like dogs do.
They have their standards, or their mothers,
but dogs only need five seconds.

There is a bat in my closet.
I can hear it rattle its ratted wings
whenever I think about last summer,
the dark and curling feelings.

I can still see its putrid paws hanging over me
in the bathroom that summer night I came home crying.
The alcohol spilt on my dress was streaming
the words my friend  said as he threw
the open beer can at me.
“I love you and you’re too much of a ***** to love me back.”
I don’t understand why I felt so bad.
Why the bat inside beckoned to me,
hissed at me to take the razor,  
to free it from my cyclic center.

I can still feel the first cut,  
me shattering on the bathroom sink,
the bat inside of me screeching
through my watery skin.
I still do not know how to forgive myself
for being so stupid.
I do not know how to forgive the bat in me.
Instead I hide it in my closet,
Lay in bed each night hoping
its wings wont rattle through the door.

©DelaneyMiller

I think your hair looks better now that you've grown it out.
Let the curls that come natural breeze down your neck.
It looks like you belong in it.
Not like last year.
The way your hair, cut and lopsided,
German like the rest of you.
Spending time with people you knew weren't worth the honey soak on your hair.
I look next to me on your couch,
sideways and drunk,
notice the way our hair curls in the same directions.
How your kaleidoscope lamp lets the blonde reach out of our tips.
How the guitar on your lap leans to the middle of us.

I cut my hair two weeks ago.
I said it got in the way of performance,
but really I wanted you to see the way my hair curls natural breeze on my shoulders.