we the daughters of sliced sunbeams
and those who chase gales in between
the pasture gates and barbed fences behind
the silo--

who think there's nothing softer than the way
honey sounds drizzled on toast or daisy petals at the supermarket
the women of ferocious silences, standing before
dozens with trimmed smiles and deafening inner beauty

squeezing our fingers down barley stalks and sewing
the roots into our dresses, we've tried six ways to sunday
the rules, the book on being wanted, before realizing that anything
born out of self-indulgence wilts away
all the work we did to grow and plait our hair with vanilla,
dipped in sweet almond oil we had no idea
that pretending
could only get us
so


far.

I can't sleep
without you crawling
into my mind
and under my skin

Afterlife, oh my god, what an awful word.

Tired of a life of crying off all my mascara, crying off the fragile wrapping paper of my eyelids, tired of my brain wringing itself for answers in the small hours of the morning.

No, you don't care. I look to the empty spot on my bed where you'd sit, head resting on my shoulder, laptop playing The Doors Movie in front of us. Our lost laughter floats through the air and gets tangled in my ceiling fan. The spot where you told me you loved me is covered by a trash can now. You don't bat an eye at where I used to sleep on your floor, throw my backpack. My twenty page birthday card to you is no longer propped up against all the robots you built as a kid. You don't sleep with the blanket I bought you for Christmas anymore.

I can hear your voice now, calling me "*****" and "buzzkill" in the smoke heavy air to your smoke heavy friends. I can feel your tongue erasing the muscle memory it needs to form my name.

I can feel my cheeks become wet again. I can feel my eyes blurring as you add me to the blocked callers list on your new phone, without a heart next to my name.

You're in a car, listening to music you hate, with your grandparents. I'm here, trying to forget what you do and don't love.

When love is gone
Where does it go?
And where do we go?

Life in the shape of gummy bears, Jell-O shots, foldable chairs, and Xanax.

Bending palm tree leaves into pillow cases, codeine mirrors only show you the faces of everyone who's scared of you.

Watch the pink drip from my lips onto the floor, coating the the tile in what it means to be truly lost.

(Hide me away for another day, I beg of you, the sun sets in the wrong direction these days.)

A locked box has the bodies of three different birds, all blue, all lyricists, all beautiful and stuffed with Xanax and newspaper. I paid my childhood best friend's brother to taxidermy them, stitch up their stomachs once and for all.

My closet only has memories. A bracelet with a feather on it that smells like fear, looks like betrayal, **** dealer, track pants, self-proclaimed whiny *****. A painting I made when I was six. All the pills I stole from my boyfriend, thirty-seven. All the pills that would've knocked my world out cold, skin cold, heart still, pulse still, veins finally at rest. A knife a psychopath gave me. Yes, he was a romantic, and yes, he did ruin my life, so in essence, still just a romantic. A fox hat I bought standing next to one of my under appreciated best friends, recovered anorexic. He's at college right now, falling in something close to love, probably another early grave. A too big teddy bear from someone I thought was the formula for the speed of light once. He's trying to force feed pills and slip **** into all my friend turned surrogate son's sentences. I am wishing I could lay a curse on his name. His mother already did it for me.

A drawer beside my bed, packed full of ****. Candy wrappers, gum, crumbs, marks of my self-proclaimed obesity, all 120 pounds of me feeling like the weight of the world and everyone's eyes. My inhaler, because these lungs don't want me to run. Pictures and letters from the ones I love, because I'm a romantic. Plastic dinosaurs, dried flowers, pennies, dimes, lotion, Neosporin, a deck of Tarot cards.

I'm just a vessel for all the things I can't fit inside my mouth. I can't tell into you what I've seen, I can only pull out the receipts. I can give you the ****** tissues my boyfriend handed me. Tell me how your stomach retches. I can give you the poem a crazy person wrote me. Tell me how you feel his void. I can give you my heart. Tell me how heavy it all is.