I wait for peace to find its way into my bones and hair ******* with bows
by the train tracks.

I throw stones
that skip over a river like
r-r-records;
Sublime,
Bradley Nowell, slurring out
the same line
over and over and over,
something about a corner store,
a collection of words that when I sing them,
taste like July.
1, 2, 3,
the rock disappears.

A train passes by,
engine huffing,
wheels churning out a steady rhythm of
"Please don't leave me, please don't leave me."
Dead reggae and dead love,
tangled in its underbelly,
rusted metal guts.

I look into the river to try to find the stone I skipped again.
I think I almost see it,
dead weight,
a speck under the surface.

(Do you believe in ghost trains? I hear something howl every night.)

Sink into the
softest bits of my
skin

Let me bottle
the scent of
your t-shirt
after you have
held onto me

Let me be the
gentle waves
that rock you to sleep

(A simple love)

In the smallest winter nights,
sailing in the eyes of Stan Lee,
Winona Rider,
Joseph Stalin,
the slightest cross unfolds, unfurls into a tree.
Jesus's face is written in the leaves.
Don't believe me?
Look into your mother's eyelashes.

I notice your absence like an open wound,
found stuck to my sheets after a rough
night's sleep.
I don't know how it got there,
and I'm wondering what you smoked that you didn't notice half your heart missing this morning.

You melted the Sistine chapel with your hydrochloric hands, and then turned to tears and rained only in the way that deflated balloons do.

I saw the tightrope wire of your tongue slip across your lips, the wings of cardinals. You whispered what I meant to you, feathers plucked and falling like dust in sunlight.

(Dirt. Dirt. Dirt.)

God left you in the undone, unrefined rough draft of his holy deliverance speech, his untold story of imperfection and righteousness that is not defined in angels or mistakes or choirs or deformed children.

I felt something snap, looked down, and saw my legs gone. I knew who found them, I only hoped you wouldn't trample the garden of Eden.

You wash the bubbles of your skin down the drain every night, scraping with a facecloth, hoping to cleanse the ugly from yourself; the putrid stench of your muscles beneath every mistake you've breathed or uttered into this Earth's air. You lick your wounds.
                                                     Bone fracture
You run your fingertips across the bridge of her nose, down to her chin, tip her head  up to meet your hungry eyes, good dog. Now, roll over, show me where your heart is. When she resists, when she bites, your hands don't work like human's do.
                                                    Loneliness
­                                                    without
     ­                                               overflow
Your brain meets another that you read to be feral. Fear, for a moment. Fear, buried under something like happiness. (Insanity) You lick your lips, starving. She can taste your teeth. She can taste the raw meat you have pulled from every past lover. The blood in your drool when you sleep, the sharpness in your stare, the way you mumble sweet nothings, she's known beasts like you.
                                                    Someone like
                                                    you, comfort for a
                                                    moment
You'­re just rough around the edges, you tell her. The world tells you to beat your mutt brain to death. You tell yourself that it's just the phase of the moon. The tides move your blood. The tides pull your ancient mind, tug on the sleeve of your consciousness.
                                                    Living like a car
                                                      accident
­You **** what you don't need. You don't eat what you ****. You don't know what you ****. You don't know where your hands have landed, which throats they have crushed. You will drag your claws across the cold skin, watch it wrinkle and rip, no blood moving; cold, congealed.
                                                    Dead kittens in  
                                                     the air vents
You share the rage of something forgotten by time. Something with blood boiling and eyes like hawks, wings of angels, burning brightly against the backdrop of night.
                                                    The smell of
                                                      strawberri­es
People try to care. They try to wrap their tongues around your ideas and around your ankles. They try to cry the same tears you do. They try to touch the sky and earth like you do. But they never will. No one gets you. No one can move you.
                                                    Your mother's
                                                     arthritis
Curled under the wheels of cars, spit out onto the side of the highway. Cooking in the sun, roadkill is no fun if you don't like to play with your food. The semi trucks barrel by. You feel the gentle shove towards their snouts, their mashing teeth, their twitching tongues, slick with the inside of your bones.
                                                    The way you
                                                     haven't cried in
                                                     years, you say
You meet a girl. You eat her whole. You meet a soulmate. You eat her whole. You shake in your mother's arms. You eat her whole. You look in the mirror. You eat her whole. You visit a therapist. You eat her whole. You see God. You eat her whole.
                                                    Holes in dry
                                                     wall
Your lips don't twist anymore. Your heart doesn't twitch anymore, dead animal. The wind doesn't call to you anymore. You wonder where your mind went, where you left it, in which forest, under which overpass.
                                                   Calling
You­ feel the world shift against you, all eyes on you, knowing what you've done. Where you've been. Who you are.
                                                        And calling
You saw off the barrels of guns.
                                                             *And calling

Can words ever really be enough?

So picture this:
Mother's perfume
Cannabis car seats
Lover's knuckles
Best friend's scars
Saddest sunset

Watch me as I turn every word into
My grandpa, gardening
My best friend, taking a selfie
Me, worrying if you hate me
A tree, rotting in its grave
The way the world is so quiet

The oriel breaks the spell of night to read me fairytales in languages only the stars understand.

I count my fingers every day like I count the trees in my backyard, checking to make sure nothing changed because change means growing up and my body tells me that growing up is nothing more than learning to give up on seeing with your eyes.

I let the beach be hell, sand like tiny reminders of growing smaller every day, growing less visible.

I let the lake be heaven, no waves and no war, no machine guns, no fascists, no animal testing, no mothers with knives, no fathers with voices.

I feel the cardinal ripen and rot off the branches of the poplar tree, begging to see the final season of the Sopranos, just like my friend did when his legs and mouth stopped running.

I see the tattoos of everywhere you said you hated, Paris, Michigan, Dakota, and England appear on the soles of my feet. I crush them every time I walk to your house.

The albatross speaks only three words, let it be. Let it be.

I feel myself falling asleep on the staircase we sat on when you told me for the first time, out loud, that you wanted to die. I can feel the dead breath of winter. I can feel the slow drifting of snow onto my trembling hands and the unforgiving stillness of the concrete beneath me. I can feel your shaking and nonexistent forgiveness towards your own knotting fingers.

I can feel myself dozing off on the carpet you opened your veins and popped the seams of your skin on. I can feel the warm wetness of iron that once flowed through your arteries envelop my eyelids. I can feel your knife saw through my untouched hair. I can feel the soft edge of your cheek turn salty with tears. I can feel the cloth you gag yourself fill my mouth with cotton and the grooves of my teeth with formaldehyde.

I can feel myself awakening in the pill bottle that used to be full. I can feel the milligrams come in doctors note waves. I can feel the ***** climb from the back of my throat. I can feel the dizzy relief of holding back poison. I can feel your sinking regret and all 25 pills of its predecessors wringing your brain out.

I can feel myself opening my eyes in your casket. It is not empty. I can feel the burden of your body beneath me. I can feel the tough leather of your rope burned neck and the dull heat of my skin desperately trying to awaken yours.

Gone is sometimes not an adjective. He is a noun. And he is haunting my dreams.

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.)

I toss rocks up at your window
that splatter like airborne blood clots.
My eyes are red from crying.
My tongue has been ripped to shreds.
You look at me once, go back to bed.

I. Talking like we haven't before, me on your bed you on the floor, I tell you I love you and you tell me how you took a dozen pills.

II. We kiss like its our last, rolling around in the grass, every inch of you aching in some way or another.

III. I know this isn't the end, but I also don't know when the end is. Its crawling in my spine like spiders spinning webs, they want to catch the life out of me.

IV. Your brother screams "He wants to **** himself!" As I walk up the stairs, going home, don't tell mum, she already knows and she's ******.

I feel the softly fluttering wings of my heart, like the singing birds of cold mornings where footsteps are as soft as ghostly snowfall. Your face buried in my shoulder, your breath turns my skin into warm velvet. Your hands bloom petals of warmth into mine where shaking stops and finds purpose in my arms.

I think "Okay, this is hopeless." just to find a new context to lie to myself in. I'll try to deny it for days, but it really becomes hours.

"Love is a neurochemical con-job," I think in intervals with your breaths. Your favorite song plays in the background, swept away into the wind and towards the moon smiling down on us saying, "I've seen this billions of times before. Just admit it."

I'll tell her to be quiet. I can't handle another heartbreak. She'll tell me this is different and I'll sigh out. Maybe. Just maybe.

Snow falls onto the frozen lakes of your glasses. I can't see your breath through the cloud of mine anymore. You're silent, but I can still feel your voice in my fingertips. Your hands verse worry into the folds of your jacket, clutched like a lifeline.

Words don’t come to us, we are two people, breathing out our lives into a world so vacant, honeyed and infinite- we will perpetually feel that we are a few years and a universe away from not alone.

And I’ll recall nothing of the tragedy that beats infinitely behind the bones of your chest- our chests- so fallible, yet drumming its knuckles on its living casket, so fervently, you’d think it knew nothing of sadness or longing or death. I feel that to be true sometimes. I am now only traumatized by soft kisses on my cheekbones, and the sound of laughter inside parked cars.

And even here, now, no words will come to me. You are so close that the heat of your body melts the frost tingling along my forearms. I guess, if I’m guilty of anything, it’s thinking I can move the world, even just an inch closer, just so our elbows touch. Then, I know you’d flush with the terror of importance, knowing that your end is many more ends.

So I keep my distance as we lay with the cold to our backs, faces to the empty-not-empty sky, and let the snow cover our mistakes, dissipating our frail bodies into a million tiny oblivions.

How do I speak up for myself
when every man I meet
pulls out my teeth?

What do I say to the skeletons in the closet?
Their bones know no warmth, their bodies are long gone.
The only conversations I have with them are their ankles and fingers sighing forward against the door, only moved by the wind.

You speak to me,
want to bring me up tough,
but I'm a gentle, soft winged bird.
These songs aren't sung about war,
I only breathe about love and loving.

(I wish I could take myself to where the sun is always shining and skin is never blue, where the Earth is always quiet.)

Today, the Earth fell in reverse.

I watched a Western backwards, the blood seeping into the Vaquero's chest, his eyes roll forward, his challenger gripping his bleeding arm, the red spot on his jacket shrinking, putting his gun back into the holster. He climbed onto his anxious horse and rode backwards into the sunset, his intact body being washed over with shades of pink and orange.

I watched you trip in reverse, staring at nothing until you popped the shrooms out of your mouth, counted them and then shoved them back into your sweatshirt pocket. I listened to our phone call in reverse. I cried at first, you said something, shameful, then I reeled back, asked you what's the worst you've done, and you said you were okay. Ringing. Silence.

I watched myself in reverse. Laughing, looking at people I love, and all their wonderful dark circle shadowed eyes, messy hair, and dried tears. I watched myself stare at them from a distance, then I felt myself forget their names. I liked your tattoos and I liked your long blonde hair. I forgot about both of those things. I sat alone in my room, I cried, I took back everything I said. I shook off the sadness. I laughed again, fell into your [sober] arms, ran my fingers through your uncut hair. I forgot what your mothers name was, I forgot your favorite color, I forgot your bedtime. I forgot your name. I forgot I loved you.

I wanted to **** myself in reverse. I wanted to watch the bullet whip out of my skull, the bone fit together like puzzle pieces. The worm hole in my brain fills, my blood flows backwards.

My innocence is unfucked to me. My lips curl up. I am happy, I am smiling. My boyfriend takes his unscarred arms and wraps them around my waist. I watch his eyes frown upside down, he tells me he loves me.

I hit fast forward.

"You never cared."
A bird bath in California empties.
"Oh yeah? Remember Christmas Eve?"
A mountain in Greece chews through itself.
"**** that, what color do I match yellow with? Do you even remember?"
Everyone in Boston swallows Vicodin until they throw up and die.
"You don't even spell your name right."
Quincy's streets wish the water dry.
"You have a family. Do you know what I'd ******* give for that?"
All the colleges in New York shoot themselves up and down.
"Your mother isn't human. Shut up."
A small town in Massachusetts washes all its white skin off.
"This leaving, this is for good isn't it?"
A forest is consumed by the songs of an imaginary bird.
"It isn't as hard as I imagined it to be."
Every door shuts, all at once. We all go deaf. Deaf. Deaf. Echo.
"Where's my happy ending? Huh?"
Echo.

We were friends again.
Just friends.
We sat, every Sunday morning,
(I work Saturdays)
in a diner.
You leaned over
the black hole
of your coffee,
pouring milk,
creating a galaxy
of bitter sugar.
You looked up to me,
who was just watching,
and said something,
probably nothing.
The comfortable space
between us smelled like
leather booths and orange juice
and small family restaurants and
scrambled eggs.
We got in your car
littered with what made
you, well, you.
I rode shotgun.

If you're so broken, why don't you find the bottle opener, cupcake?
Why don't you lick the frosting off the bottom of the bowl, stoner?
When you say you're just pitiful, I see rain puddles drooling from the pockmarks of your cheeks.
I wish you'd realize that the sun isn't just shining out of my broken skin knuckles.

Quit quitting.

Mr. Brick Through Window
Mr. Holes Through Stomach
Mr. Foot Through Windshield
Mr. Knife Through Arm
Mr. Gun Through Jawbone
Mr. Teeth Through Heart

You are running away to a hell
That does not want you.

Go home.

I. He Will Refuse To Find a Way Up
A fifth hole in the wall this week opens and I crawl inside it while your knuckles are still freshly bleeding. I will find myself grasping at straws to justify your rage. You reflect it back onto me, an uneasy mirror that makes me want to tear open my own cathartic hands and find what made me so angry so long ago. I shake my head. I have loved you. I have helped you grow. I have been the soil you have stretched roots in and the fields of lavender you have scorched. I let myself let you go before I crawl into another drywall void.

II. She Will Not Be What You Remember
I can hear the echo of my voice reverberate where I thought your heart was. Your soft hair that ran through my fingers smells like burning hair. Oh, these things cannot be taken back, I know, I know. I will watch you turn to sand in the hourglass on my nightstand, next to rose petals, bottle caps, and other sentimentally valued found objects. You will trickle to the bottom grain by grain and be unstuck. It will mean nothing. I will watch it as time passes and try to break it no more.

III. You Will Have to Let him Go
We did it, like I promised: we laid with the cold to our backs, faces to the empty-not-empty sky, and let the snow cover our mistakes, dissipating our frail bodies into a million tiny oblivions. You fell apart, your ashes blown across several states, thousands of miles. I caught your dust between my teeth and when I flicked it off my tongue, it spelled poems and threats and manifestos in languages I could never understand. You're dragged by your heels into the hospital, cursing my name as my heart breaks. I'm sorry, my baby, my little brother, I'm sorry to the child I tried to raise like my own. Schizophrenia is a hard word to learn in every language, and understand in yours. I did not want to lose you. But sometimes, you weigh your sins, and the heaviest of all is the one that's easiest to utter into the world.

IV: How It Will Go
I've wanted to talk to you for a while.
> I know.
So...
> So?
So, I can't tell if I've missed you or not.
> ...
What I mean is, how do we know this is right?
> It is. We're no good for each other.
We're new people, well- maybe not new, but much different. I don't know if me now will like you now, but me now is longing for you then.
> You're not making any sense.
I know. I just want to say I'm sorry. I don't even know how to begin to say it.
> Sure.
I am.
> Alright.
Some part of me still loves you. She is biting her tongue because she doesn't want your name to roll oh so comfortably off of it ever again.
> Stop.
I'm sorry. I don't want to make this complicated again. I don't know why I'm doing this. I'm stupid I'm-
> Just shut up, okay?
Okay.

That night, I will claw into my throat and release the shrieks of grief snowpacked in it. I will congratulate myself on allowing the sun to set on the most golden thing I've ever been given the chance to hold.

My lungs will still take in air and send it back into the sky for you to return to me. It won't be the same. It won't be comforting. It'll sting and needle at my soft insides, sending all the words you ever spoke to me into my blood in tangles until it clogs my veins and makes its way to my brain. I will be left with half my face permanently lopsided, stuck in a frown, while trying to remember what did it in the first place.

V: Ideally, as if In a Dream*
The sun is dripping down your hair. It steams in golden runnels down your forehead and it casts a halo in your eyes, sainting you.
I am blessing all the uneaten meals, broken skin, and chewed up fingernails. I will bless how I raised hell and then settled it back into the dirt so I could bring down heaven for you and I, and it's warm, bright caress. The sweet, sticky clouds- they smell like marshmallow and clean laundry and kisses on the forehead.
I will be able again to think of your thin hands as being prom-queen-gown-silk swaddling blue jay bones: fragile and masculine and hollow and splintered all in one. I will run my fingers over your knuckles- as soft and as familiar as my baby blankets.
You will breathe in deeply, and I will too, just for the sake of doing it together.
I will say, "I've been waiting for this."
And you will say, "For what?"
And I will say, "this," just looking around.

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.

The fragile space between each rib, with skin draped over it like a table cloth.
The fragile space between scars, between your eyes, between our hearts when you're in my arms. The fragile space between almost and never.
Why is it that so much in life is fragile?
I will look at each face I pass and memorize the number of freckles on the right cheek, the left.
I will throw my graduation cap in the air, and my first born child will be in my arms when I look down. My best friend married, another dead.
I will see my college essay turn into dissertation into report on fifth ****** this week, downtown D.C. Yup, it's serial.
I will leap into the arms of my childhood friend, into the arms of my mother, into the grave-
and it'll all seem so very fragile, as delicate and as beautiful as a bird's wing.

Fingers like crayons,
melting over flames,
dripping on your eyelids.
You have your
technicolor world
without the ecstasy.
You told me it wasn't possible.
You told me it wasn't possible
to get drunk without your dad.
You told me it was Pepsi,
it was Diet Coke.
You told me it was love.
It was something like
decay,
in fall,
in the brush,
the words your mother
swept under the rug.

I'm learning how limited forever is in the space between two hearts.

You, I feel my heart swell when I hear your name. You're like my one night stand with happiness. You make me forget how completely cold it is. You remind me what beauty is and what hope feels like, soft and tangible, floating through the air like ribbon. You show me what it means to be alive, survive, swallow difficulty whole. I can feel your palms against my soul.

You, the illegitimate child of sadness and cigarette ashes, the tasteless poison that falls beneath my teeth. I can feel my heart sinking into the soft soil of you, planting itself in the wasteland where the bones of tiny things rest uneasy.  

Please, just let me sleep in peace for once.

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?

I push a pin through the thin film of silence and listen to your thoughts hiss out with the air behind it. I wonder how many things people don't say. Because I know I don't say that I love you, and that I've never been more in love with anything than your laugh, or that I miss you always, or that I still know all your favorite candies, or that I don't exactly want to get over you. I know what you think and don't say doesn't match up to that exactly but that's okay. I can keep admiring the soft curve of your nose and lips when you're smiling. You won't know that I think of it whenever the sun comes out.

You, you're like the sun coming out. I know you'd argue against that, but up close the sun is as hostile as it gets, nothing can touch it. But from afar it's so beautiful and want and bright- and what I'm saying is you're not as bad as you think you are. And I need you. Just like every rose on this earth needs the light.

Maybe it's all cliché. But ****'s cliché for a reason, you know? Love is a very collective feeling. It's different for everyone, but so collective. I'm sure I've been on the receiving end of the way I look at you, but I wasn't looking in that direction.

And you're not necessarily looking in mine either. So what I'm saying is you wouldn't know love if it stared you in the face. Because it is, it has been. But it's okay, it's better to burn out than fade away, and I've been looking at the sun too long to know if it's looking back anyway.

I'm a chemist too, Walter. Don't believe me? Just take a look at my blood. This iron, albuterol sulfate, acetaminophen, all this? I did it.

Don't force my hand, sweetheart.
Don't bite the poet that feeds.
Don't lick the flames that keep that rage you have going, you'll lose your identity.
Don't make your mother scream if you don't want to count bruises.
Don't be too soft, child.
Don't be too ugly, boy/girl/parasite.

Your God's a lion, recently fed, drowsy.*

I wish you'd believe me when I say I'm sick, Dad. My tongue's falling out.

Forget about all the things you know about yourself and imagine this instead

I. I touch the soft tufts of your hair along your neck and wish three times during that instant that I could take back every bruise that you have ever been given.

II. I feel my shoulder against yours, warmth beneath chaos, lying low in the gardens in our hometown. I know in that moment you will shatter every belief I have ever had about love and replace it with framed pictures of me kissing your cheek.

III. I feel your arm around my shoulder and know that this is safety. I have not been afraid in what feels like ages when I hug you, count each rib, watch your face bury in my shoulder.

IV. I love you is bottled in every stare I cast at you. I wonder where I left my mind.

I'm starting to wonder if I fall for every pair of eyes that go googly when locked with mine
I wonder how much I'm searching for a way out of not knowing and into heaven
which really, sounds a lot like certainty
I don't know how much my heart can bend under the weight of all the lives I hold in my delicate and numb fingertips before it breaks
I just want to be safe
I just want to be loved
I don't wanna be a trophy wife
I don't wanna be anything but happy

More often than not, I feel like a head case taking up space.
I mean, maybe it's less often than not? Who knows? I can't keep track of the hours, the days, the months, the friends, the loss, the love, and the dreams.
The dreams. I reach for them and feel them soak into my skin like smoke.
Are they there? Are they gone? Are they with me? Without?
Are you there?
...

I dream of you often.

At the start, it was always me yelling. I’d run up to you, teary-eyed, (not for the first time) and asked if you knew how you’d hurt me. Your face would be blank, your lips slightly parted.  I felt like a rabid dog, muzzled by the scraps left of my humanity, but ready to lunge off to administer rough justice. My teeth gnashed and chipped when caught by each other. I felt my hands twist into fists, my eyes the hollow barrels of a sawed-off shotgun.

Sometimes you’d come to me, haloed by the morning light in my bedroom. Sometimes you’d apologize, or just be there. Things would seem fine. The hint of tension in my chest was nearly imperceptible in the face of the the rapture I felt, the face of you. I’d trace your knuckles, staring down at the half moons of your nails, cut to the quick. I cannot remember your expression, but I remember your warm breath. I’d wake up and say I didn’t like it, as I try to drift off and dream again.

Lately it’s me chasing you, never quite close enough. I see you right there, right in front of me, looking just as you had when I left. But the truth?

You are one thousand suns away, in a corner of the universe darker than the centers of your eyes.

I'm so tired of writing about how you broke my heart.
I'm tired of herding lambs into the ocean, watching them entangle and fade into the sea foam.
I listen to their cries, how it sounds like the great barrier reef dying, the coral dissipating and the sharks shedding their fins.
I guess the number of tabs it takes for your brain to think in color.
I guess the number of bowls you've smoked trying to unlearn my name.
I guess the number of days until you're running the track marks up your arm.
I ***** my eyes shut and say, "stop thinking about him."
I watch as your face morphs into a rose, spreading petals across my ribs like tumbleweeds.
My heart strings braid themselves to keep from snapping.
This isn't happening.

10 miles. My current distance from the first time I noticed you cared. You were smoking ****. You blew the smoke away from my face. You knew I was allergic. You wanted to hold my lungs like cherry pits in the palms of your kitten's milk bowl hands, china dish. I wanted to thank you, I wanted to hand my heart over.

8 miles. The distance between me and you. The distance I tried to fill with footsteps, with begging rides from father, with bus, with FaceTime calls, with long texts. The distance that burned its way into my curtains, floated to my ceiling and stuck, burrowed its way into the night and sighed.

.8 miles. The distance between you and the person I replaced you with. The distance between a Red Dwarf and the moonlight that filled my heart up with Lindt chocolate and new yelling mother and darker messy hair and lower too loud laughs. I wash your favorite red plaid shirt from my hands and my Rolling Stones tank top, your cheek from mine, your jokes from my sheets.

0 miles. My current distance from the first time I noticed you stopped caring. I told you to stop flirting with addiction. You dragged your fingers up my arm, tied the tourniquet, choked out my blood, found the vein, breathed out hard, and then replaced me with all the drugs you could ever want and all the empty you could ever hold.

I guess some old habits never really die, only the people sick enough to try to stop them.

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 wrap my head around
the softness I feel for the
curve of your shoulders
covered by a blanket-
my comforter.
I think of your thin fingers
around a mug
of hot chocolate.
You're humming to the tune
of something we both recognize.
Snow falls like angel wing feathers,
drifting light to the earth
like I always imagined it.
Just like I always imagined it.

I don't need no arms around me.
I pretend I love anyone. I pretend to drool honey onto the paper-thin skin of things that barely breathe through their own lungs that they've smoked black and blue and filled with water and soot and ****. I pretend to care for a moment, lighting a match on my teeth.

I don't need no drugs to calm me.
I pretend you don't make me sick. I pretend this isn't some kicked puppy ****. I stare at a weakness that swallows itself whole and then swallows itself again in the eyes, sizing it up, and erasing it with 3 grams of ****. Sedate yourself in your closet for a few hours, hide beneath six layers of clothes and clean fingernails and I love you's and pretend you're ever there for me. *******, how dare you be a normal ******* teenage when I'm sitting here rotting into the floorboards? My eyes are just puddles and my hands are still wrapped around your ankles. You don't need me. You don't need anything. You'll **** yourself slowly all on your own until you're someone entirely different, someone entirely yourself and you.

I have seen the writing on the wall.
I pretend like I don't think that me running a bullet through my hot, tired brain is an inevitable thing. I pretend like I won't lose my mind down the shower drain and unzip all my veins like a child's jacket, watching the blood trickle down me like rain on a window pane. I pretend like anything anyone says is really true, that I'm *really capable of living, that I'm really not too sick to ever be normal. I watch myself fall under the tar, sink into the roadkill, mold into the fluid marks under a raccoon, it's mask ripped off and teeth poking through its nose, carrion smacking the air with rolling guts in the summer breeze. I cook myself in the sun, let the deer's belly swell around me, I make my home in its smashed ribs. I pretend like it won't end like this.

Don't think I need anything at all.
I take a razor to my stomach, watch the fat peel open and burst like canyons. I tear it out with my bare hands, thick, tepid, organic. I lay it across the floor and throw up all the pills in order. I count them out, and lay each with a separate suicide note and not in any of them, do I say my name.

No don't think I'll need anything at all.
Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.

All in all it was all just bricks in the wall.
This isn't right anymore. I won't say anything anymore.

*All in all you were just bricks in the wall.

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

Why is it that I can never write about myself? Why am I a hollowed, wilted wallflower? Why is it that I tell the stories from the viewpoint of someone I love? Your mother, she was a cruel and twisted woman, your mother she force fed medicine down your fragile swollen throat, tired of screaming. He ran in circles, she picked apart her wrists, fingers tripping over scabs like a minefield. She wrote a song and faded away, chopped vegetables for skinny soup then held the knife to her belly, swaddled in lost lover grief, cookie crumb hangover, swallowing sadness like dessert until she throws up and dies. Boy tells her she is ugly. She is suddenly on two diets, one where she sheds tears and one where she sheds pounds. Your hair is long. Your grandfather says over my shoulder, ghost that doesn't like the confines of a grave, he tells me "Wiffle. He needs a wiffle." Your hair covers your eyes, acne, you love to watch it fly. You watched yourself fly, maybe a foot down, from a noose. You hung and then the rope cracked and the air had to let you go, concrete caught you. You told this story and I thought maybe God is concrete and he just takes us back. She has no mother, no lady to clap on her wedding day, well maybe a step mother, but who loves her anyway. She had long hair but it died and her dreams flew away in October as she cried, she didn't **** herself, she was **** sure. And him, he who touched me and then kept his hands to himself, smiling to the memory of me crying, looking up, afraid of what I have to touch. I am still afraid. I have been torn up dozens of times, my insides spill out, but of all the things I spat I cannot spit out abuse. Forgive me, mom. I can feel bile crawl up my throat like sour milk, forgive me God.

I see myself in you all, but I can't bring myself above boring. I toss pills between hands but they never land in my mouth, it's too full of stumbling apologizes and sacrifice. Of course, I'll take care of you. I am happy, so happy until I am sad and then I am as good as dead.

I love my boyfriend. I love him and his spotty skin. I love my best friend, all 5 of them. I love my mother, father, my young, impressionable and thoughtless sister. I love myself at her age, so tender and sore, broken and cracked open in places young girls shouldn't be. I had my heart broken at 13 when the boy I liked said I was ugly. I had it broken again when the boy I was in love with touched me. I had it broken at 14 when the boy I loved dumped me, even though I wanted to leave him, let's just be friends, I said. And we did but then I was 15, and I had my heart broken when my boyfriend tried to silence the ringings of my I love you's with pills. The story doesn't end, sunshine does not go through scar tissue it rests on top and burns, my heart is bleeding red. I bang my head on the wall to spill it on the ground, I stand tall when I say that I am alright, I do not need to stay overnight at the hospital I am not going to **** myself I just like the idea of my nose bleeding and mind receding and then my heart stops beating, I'm good. And I am happy, I am just sunshine, but when will this love that keeps me going become a burden? When will I grow tired and crumble beneath the weight, the crown of a queen weighting too heavy on my bruised mind. Love thy neighbor, and I do. We are all one in the same, and I do know it'll all be alright.

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?

If you don't think anyone understands you, open your ******* mouth
Because someone needs to unknot your thoughts
You can't

Call me humming bird:
Flitting like time
Feathers like skipping stones
Beak like protest
Wings like home

Stars fall from the black canopy tops of the forest I used to trespass in as a child, finding the definition of apparition and swamp and UFO.

Coyotes break the sound barrier over the water of the river that I used to fall in, pick bugs out of.

I find myself lying awake in the small hours of the morning, thorns pushing into my back and jail birds clanging the chains around the branches of the trees above me, the sky shaking to the tune of their wails and wings flapping desperately, cracks of heat lightening rattling them alive.

Night is the loudest color. I find this through broken flashlights. I find this through "Do Not Enter" signs. Hear me. Hear me. Hear me.

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.

Weakness makes me
spit bile into the softly sliced sunburned bruises
of bony arms
and I lock
sympathy in the basement,
it seems to me.

I'm chewed up and spit out, gum in the mouth of you.

I am riddled with the soft impressions left by molars on my back and stomach, I am gnawed and shaken like a bone in the jaws of everyone I love.

I am hollowed out by turpentine stomach acid, stripping me of my insides. I purge what is left of my rag doll body into the sink every morning after looking in the mirror and seeing nothing but bones.

What used to be eyes are just holes.

2 a.m. The most rotten noise you can imagine.

I'm sick of you, baby.

Yeah? So, I know, God. God, what a name to have in this household. You're the only one with wings, the only one heaven sings for. It must be nice to look like something worth saving and brushing off and eating whole. It must be real tough to be so magnificent, always having to figure out who left which lipstick print on your shoes.

That's beside the point. Here, we're watching the movie of the life you could've lived. The one without guilt pin pricking your fingertips when you close your eyes. The one without whiskey bottle music combo, glass break handshake with death, mother without tear streaked face, father without closed fist, family without empty, love without "please don't leave", what a show, kid. What a way to be.

Father's sneer.

**** yourself.

Find sister's Oxy. Weakness.

Off topic.

I bathe myself in crystal ****, shimmering, lovely shades of nothing. I eat myself out of my walls. I tie my limbs into knots, look at my palms and see someone's blood, I can't taste who's, I spend the rest of the night obsessed. I have a dream about my boyfriend, he has no scars, he has no body, he is just eyelashes and whimpering. I can still see him. I swat a dozen flies until my grandmother reincarnated falls to the ground, telling me it's alright.

Tell me, what's the secret to being so light? Is it dropping all your insides at Love's front door? Tell me, how do I get over the rainbow from here?

How holy the night looks, dressed in its crushed velvet gown, folding in all the delicate and beautiful places.

I tuck my grief into bed beside me and as I feel it's cold heat, its head careening onto my shoulder, I wish I could have your thin fingers lapping over my wrist, your delicate and blue beauty settling into the space next to me, left by my own two careless eyes. I want to feel your body curled up beside mine, safe and righteous in its temple of quilts and comforters, safely lullabied by a 10 episode Netflix binge, popcorn strewn on the carpet like exploded snowflakes from when I tried to throw it in your mouth, missing because I shook with butterfly laughter.

I want to take your sadness and whisper it to a memory. I want to kiss the fading and cooling parts of the sun back to life. I want to taste what every word you've ever spoken sounds like, feels like, lips on biography on lips on pearl's surface. I want to hold your heart like the wildly beating wings of a tiny bird. I want to love you so much, so beautifully, so genuinely, so big and wide and lovely as the ocean, so that love is spoken back into existence.

Sometimes, I wonder if you miss me. I think of you whenever I try to fall asleep.
At night, the drugs give you back rubs where my hand used to be, you shaking from the echoes of your mothers screams.
You walk across the street without me on your arm, holding onto you like a lifeline.
You've let me drift, far, far out to sea.

The night wraps it's dripping rime hands around my neck, catching sweat on Python fingers, their tongues flicking the flyaway hairs. It's nails creep up the soft cape of flesh of my throat, dragging their way up to my eyes. They peel my lids open again and again, jagged cliff edge knife pulling at thinly veiled corners. I can feel the vessels pop within my eyes, a New York New Years firework show of running red.

Dead silence is swept away by the whirring waves of a fan. I am awake and rolling in routine malaise. Guilt tugs at my heart and disappears in the instant I try to pin it down. It is frightful and flightful and with its fleeting nature, leaves and then emanates a trace of soreness in its place. There are no alarms and no time taking place. Everything is frozen under the fingernails of a great beast.

A dull tapping at my windows tells me dear fear wants to braid my hair and whisper gently in my ear. I toss and turn a few times more, trying to shake the animal off of me. It's nails rap again at my eyelids and they blister, hot tears spilling and I look up, staring death in the face and seething from something that I can't quite see, nor feel.