Its 11:30 at night. You, lovely you, talking about killing yourself while all I picture are your loose fitting shirts and dimples.

If dying was simple, everybody would have done it.

Nobody talks about the truth of overdosing. You'll be on the floor, puddle of ***** underneath your cheek, the last meal you ever ate stuck to your face, you'll never have felt so weak in your life, even when downing a bottle of downers. Hallucinate until you suffocate on bile. Or your heart stops beating. Or your lungs breathe themselves backwards, inside out. Your brain will be alive for 3 minutes, just enough time to regret it, 100 times, outside your own cold, twitching body. Mom will find you, fall to her knees, call dad from downstairs, and black out in grief.

It's not pretty. Your funeral will be messy. People you barely remember (a girl who had a crush on you in kindergarten, the person you told you were depressed that couldn't bring themselves to listen, didn't want to believe it, the girl who taught you to cut your wrists like that) will cry over your body like it was their own. They'll feel tears soak shirt, after shirt, after skin, after shirt. They'll feel your voice on the back of their neck in cold spells and hot flashes for years. Mom will wake up from nightmares, call dad, he's drinking.

And here you are, thinking it wouldn't matter.

I picture your loose shirts and dimples and how simple it would have been to say nothing, never let you brand my heart with anything but a weeks worth of deep regret in a month or two, maybe three, however much longer you can stand heartbreak. But it's not like that, I'm stronger than that. And you are too, you are too.

No more of those beautiful boys.*

**** beautiful boys and how they
make my wrists glow blue in the nights they're pressed against the sheets, 1:00 am. Thinking of those glowing blue eyes, glowing perfectly straight teeth, their glowing blue souls, glowing blue halos, I glow into the night and keep the blue blue blue owls awake.

Angelic hoodlums and holy ones.

**** their gorgeous noses and the way the roses they give me don't melt in the moonlight like my fingertips on their gorgeous skin. I play the strings of their heart like a harp, gorgeous and gory and plucked clean like doves feathers on the gorgeous graveyard ground of my ribcage.

All those beautiful boys, tattoos of ships and tattoos of tears.

The quiet giggle I allow myself to make, the quiet way my eyes roll back at your breath, the quiet and killing way I can't see past it.

I thought I was over this last October

*No more of those beautiful boys.

I taste the pills on my tongue like Marilyn did, so pretty in life, so much prettier in death. I watch everyone around me offer up their love in homemade hashtags, I'm the next trend, pretty and dead.

Come one, come all, local girl kills herself! Actually does it! Come see, covered in her own ***** and Xanax, regret filling her lungs like balloon animals, right after the bearded lady, before the strong man, come one come all!

I think of all the people around me, inches from becoming local commodities. I think of their dimples, their veiny arms, the way they walk with their hands straight by their sides, the way they always know how to make me laugh, the way they are so alive, full veins, brain firing snap after snap, cheeks still flush and warm. I think of that gone and I cry cold tears, wipe them with cold hands, grow cold to the cold reality of "it's a part of life".

I think of something worse than heartbreak.

*& so to tenderness I add my action.

Ode to "I knew him enough to know he's a cool guy."

When a child dies, everyone feels the ripple. But, I wonder if the dog in his Instagram profile picture will miss him. I wonder if he will run to whichever monotone voice calls him again.

How life rattles on, moonlight just barely bursting through cold winter mornings, sunlight touching grass like mother's hug, flowers blushing like first grade first date, favorite songs eaten and reeaten like taffy, how laughter bubbles and pops through gapped teeth, life moves before it sinks into the ground, under the calla lilies. Everything goes quiet under the red sun. It moves silently like ghost footprint. It is gone like bone chips in fingertips.  

Cherokee rose, tell me what you know. Will he be buried with a cast on his wrist just like I remember him?

You open your jaws, wide as bone allows.
From the spaces between your teeth
people fall like blood-heavy snowflakes.
Grandmother, brother, mother, daughter,
all made up of paper-mache.
Everyone in front of you sways,
backs arched, lips curled,
curdled like milk in the summer’s heat.
They protect the fragility flying over them.
Wishing cracked and broken things whole.
They fold and tear like origami. Your
brain illuminates itself, paper lantern.
Brightening the thin walls before you.
The weightless, the worldly and the writhing.
They breathe easy.
They peer into our lungs, divulging our restlessness,
our dreaming. Only their synapses
remain, blood slick;
they bind and unbind to yours.
Consciousness ends and consciousness begins.
Consciousness ends and blood begins.
We are unholy Goddesses.
We are unholy goodness.
We are unholy and unbroken and good and God.
This is the only form of song, the pitch from our neurons,
the blood beneath our fingernails, the swaying, the swaying,
these minds and minds
and the never-ending
mindfulness. These crawling, floating,
grieving, forgiving minds.

Hey, grandpa. Well, technically, great grandpa but who has time for that many words? My hearts runnin' on empty, you see, and you know a thing or two about hearts. Do you know what time it is? If Marguerite heard me on the phone, she'd have my head. Well, let me just tell you, I haven't heard from my best friend in a month. I'm starting to think ill never be able to feel my fingers again. I'm really starting to think that I'll never be able to tell pink from gray again. I'm starting to see ghosts, grandpa. They're these big, melting wax figure, mummified soldier, lighthouse-eyed things. They smack the air with the scent of carrion and roll in the smashed jaws of a mother opossum, snaggle-toothed roadkill no one mourns. Their eyes drip puddles on the floor. You'd know something about this, right? 1943, does it ring a bell? Hey, no. You can't hang up. You're the only one who's seen this type of ghoul. If you heard the way their voices overlap and churn like the great belly of the ocean, you'd see where the twang of my heartstrings echoes. You need light, candelabras, great fire places, the first four light bulbs Edison ever spoke into existence. The sun will rise and set again, but UV light only can reach so deep under our apostate skin. Watch as the universe burns itself into place, and keeps you in the eye of all of it. I felt the subtle ghost of my hands plunge deep into my chest, and find my heart a new home.

My friend wants to **** himself. Who do I tell?

I've come to believe all life is precious. I watch each person, each interaction, each laugh and smile and sneer with such absent curiosity, I feel my brain and 7 names fall through my dry palms. I snap my gum. A girl snickers, covering her mouth, her friend grinning along.

****, he's the one with abusive parents, sometimes homeless, right?

I feel my mouth go dry, my tongue swells, balloons to the roof of my mouth, my teeth sweat and my throat rolls over. My stomach and heart switch places. Words are only sounds; they mean nothing without pattern, without memory, without culture, without hearing. Why are the things with the most power in this whole **** world so inaccessible?

Don't tell anyone. A call from the school could get him killed.

6 hours later, I look to my right, my best friend resting in my arms- asleep, tranquil, clean of bruises and the same abuses. My skin radiates warmth and worry and relief and everything that's entailed in loving someone that's always so close to the edge.

Give him my number. Good luck. Keep me updated.

Close to the edge of what? I would say God only knows, but He doesn't know everything. He has no plan. I'm the only one with a plan. I'm the only person I can trust.

6 hours later, I worry myself into my sheets and below my mattress, through the floor and foundation, cradling my head in the soft soil beneath my comfortable, quiet family home.*

Sometimes, when hope is all you have to hold onto, you find yourself holding your own hand.