I have been a lot of things to a lot of people. I have been the friend. The crush. The savior.  The enemy. The surrogate mother to hope. I have been the makeshift medic, twice I have been the future wife. I have lived through experiences that make me broken and cracking, beautiful and shining all at the same ******* time and it is so hard to put it in perspective.

The fragile, the broken, the beautiful, the incomprehensible, the incredible: It is all mine and I am in love with all of it.

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.

Crack, across your cheek
I feel my bones strain and weep
Curdled like milk in the summer's heat
I rot into the earth
And myself again

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.)

Day 1: You're always shaking, you're like the grass under the whirring blades of a lawnmower. I laugh at that. You're so funny when you can't breathe. You're so funny with your scars, hidden beneath sleeves like white soldier grave stones, underneath a blanket of shaking grass, tall grass, dead grass, laughing grass, long forgotten names. Like, like, firing squad death row under sheets of blood- no- fallen brick walls. Civilians, awaiting rescue. You tug at your shirt awkwardly, I am staring.

Day 6: What are you asking me now? What? Them? No, they don't hate you. The stars with molars, canines, and needles out their sides don't at least. You're asking me about the fish? Scales, fins, aquatic? The star fish with self-esteem issues doesn't mind you. He's just selfish. The narcissistic parrot fish loves you as much as her own reflection. The high strung cat fish is kinda infatuated. He's something else. The shark? She thinks you're ****, but don't tell her I said that. You won't? You never do. I like that about you.

Day 23: You been okay? You haven't been asking much about me lately. Me? Funny you should ask. I'm not sick. Not now. Haven't tried to bash my skull in in a week, it's progress. You? Oh ****, that's too bad. I wish you'd stop opening up your forearms. I wish you'd just stop popping pills like after Chinese food dinner mints, bursting them in your stomach to spread like fog, milky white to drown out whatever your drawing from your wrists.

Day 72: You're drunk again? Jesus, what will it take for me to leave you? You've already bitten the hand that feeds too many times you sloppy wolf puppy you. I mean, sure I waved it in front of your face but don't you know your own teeth? *******, quit throwing up and get back to work, paint me a pretty picture pathetic *****. Put down the knife or broken glass or razor or whatever the ****, I don't want to do that anymore it stopped being interesting after like, the fifth time. Yeah I know I said I cared! I know I said I wouldn't stop caring, wouldn't leave you! But have you ******* seen yourself? Go ahead kid, count those scars, make some more, whatever you do in that basement of yours. I can't stand you! I can't stand your stupid brain, you're always crying what's up with that? How old are you now? Right. My point exactly. Jesus Christ, shut up for once.

Day 95: No wait- ****- sorry. I didn't realize. Hey, you know what sweetheart? Let's shake hands. Your end of the deal? I won't be the reason you **** yourself, you stop making your arms look like bulldog wrinkle jowls, or like, sliced bread, cracked sidewalk, blistered vein soup, running like drippy little kid noses, whatever- just make it stop. I won't tell you all the ways you fall short in 3 words or less. Deal? Deal.

Day 103: Just kid- keep breathing. I won't do it for you. See ya', have fun ******* yourself up and over.

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.

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?

I wake up this morning, it's been thirty days since we last spoke. My heart has aged more than that.

I turn to my right, sighing out slowly, feeling my ligaments creak and my bones moan, put on my glasses, and have to push away the thought of you a hundred times in those few seconds. I get up and wear something you'd hate. I cry in a way you'd hate. I love you in a way you'd hate.

I wonder where you are right now and if you care about where I am.

(In case you're wondering, I'm lost in the sea of you. I'm lost in every memory. I'm lost in laying by the gazebo, I'm lost in counting stars, I'm lost in paying for ice cream, I'm lost in now-burnt-down favorite pizza places. I'm lost in sunglasses. I'm lost in sweatshirts. I'm lost in it all.)

Maybe, we're only pretty in context. Maybe this isn't what love is supposed to be. Maybe we were always all wrong.

But I don't care, I want your homemade haircuts and messed up spine and bony fingers, delicate like bluebird legs, and the way your eyes light up when you see me. I want to be where you are again, feel your arm around my shoulder again, feel your cheek pressed to mine again, feel your laughter shake me like a tiny animal in the jaws of you. I miss your chaos and disaster and starving and boy crying. I can't sleep at night knowing that you're not still wrapped in the letters you wrote me.

I'm trying to get over it, but I'm buried under the weight of it all.

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.

The part of my brain that absorbs every person I listen to  
(I stash your body in the microwave)
The hour of the night that I finally breathe
(Birds chirp the tune of your taped double homicide confession)
The perfect silence after a car crash
(Father smashes the last of your family portraits)
A lost dog with more fleas than teeth
(The birch in your grandmother's backyard calls you back to its roots)

Dear God,

I don't know if you know this but we're counting on you. I don't believe in you, none of your healing touch is true. There are no pearly gates, no wise men, no father, son, and no holy ghost. There's just *******'s trophy little girl swaddled swamp bottoms and dumb men, just a ******, a suicidal-wanderer-mothers-help-squanderer, and teething-on-baby's-flesh demon.

God, you haven't cured me, or my boyfriend, he's still bleeding on the occasion, and not over candle lit dinners either. God, can't you see we're seething? God are you even listening? God are your ears sewn shut? Did some shotgun blow them off? That reminds me, God, that's your job. Please take away the shotguns. I don't want them anywhere near anyone, especially certain someone's. I'm talking about cops and angry fathers and kids taking steps towards the edge. Our freeways are ***** enough God.

God, you've let me down. I'm screaming everything unholy your way God. You're pathetic. Where is the miracle I've been asking for? I'm not praying God, I'm on my knees and begging, like you told me to. Where's the saving? Where's the grace and goodness? All I'm seeing is terror God, all I'm seeing is your face, laughing and crying at the same time.

You're a disgrace.

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.

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 chase after you as I drift off,
waking up with my hand reaching towards empty space.
The only heaven worth wanting is your smile and
I see your face in my dreams every night like it's all a beautiful broken record.
It's skipping on the part where you say
you love me back.
And if fate means being asleep forever,
I'll close my eyes and stay right where I am,
waiting for you.

I am envious of birds and the way they never seem to be seen dead, how their thread thin porcelain bones break in silence and even sprayed and flayed, their wings still taper perfectly. When they are fallen angels with eyes rotten out of their skulls, they are still angels and I am just ash and cracked ribs. I am concrete break, I am gentle bearing of dead life, I am dulled claws, I am mothers weakness, I am fathers burden, I am small afraid, I am just earthly unworthy.

I am jealous of the albatross, her sleek flight and winged eyes. I am envious of the way she can cut through air and tear through broken clam shell seams, find flesh through rock. I am loathing of her pristine white body, her untouched and unbothered brain. I am looking right at her bold and light breast, the blackest parts of her towards the sun. The rime of her feet is nothing compared to that of mine, the mariner, floating face down in frozen waters that she finds delightful. She is simply angelic, simply heavenly, simply God herself.

Hummingbird tells me child, you are not light enough for flight. My dearest angel your wings are just clipped but oh? Who holds the scissors? He takes off in a gust of sweet summer wind, that I so often chase.

I hear the chickadee calling my name and telling me "Young goddess of pain and power and love, seek not the answer but answer fast to the call of difficulty."

The people she adores,
She cuts them all into pieces,
Skewered,
Slid neatly into her open mouth.

She runs out of food,
Chews on you,
Hates your bones,
And how they cut her cheeks.
Your spilling blood slick,
Smudging her face,
Like lipstick.

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.

Let's teach something that's empty, to be broken. Let's teach a ghost to bleed. Let's teach a kid to be dead.

Get closer to your dad's gun, than your dad. Inch the barrel to your teeth, saw off the end and the limbs you don't need to hold it. Burst your blood vessels like fireworks, New Year's Eve. This is the dawn of your abandonment of everything you love. Become attached? Find a flaw. **** them anyway. They make you feel alive? Make sure they know that they are the reason you wanted to die in the first place. You love them? **** yourself. Cut yourself. Find a way to make yourself bleed. You cannot win, you cannot let yourself win anything. No, not a single thread of anyone's heart, especially after you pull the strings taut and snap them until they foam from the mouth. You can see their eyes flip up back into their head, staring at their brain to see why they're still putting up with you. This, this is how you know you won in the only way you want to.

Let people know just how to break you. You go into the bathroom and flick on the light, look into the mirror as it illuminates your ugly sunken face. The smokes didn't take a couple years off your life, you'd say it added around 10 judging by the dark plum circles under your eyes and brittle nails. Your reflection blinks laboriously as say your name, 3 times, slowly, and she does not love you. You are still not enough for her. She is still not here. You are still scarred and addicted and hideous. You are alone and afraid and still just as ****** up. Even your own reflection turns its back to you.

The addictive pain keeps you [in]sane. Your friends are all nonexistent, those who know you, don't know you. You quit the pills for the girl next door but you're just spilling cleaner, safer blood now. Your wrist never thanked you for leaving it alone, but everyone else soon will. ******* is your other name. ******* is your philosophy. Love you or hate you, you still hate you so what does it matter?

But hey, I've stopped believing in God but I keep seeing him everywhere. I've seen him in every ******'s poor eyes and their rough, calloused, sliced open hands. I've seen Him in the footprints left by kids in the grass. He's in every word I write and breath I take. You think I haven't wanted to kiss the forehead of someone just like you? You think I haven't imagined myself telling you it's gonna be okay a thousand times? If you want your love confession you got it right here. Kid, you can call yourself a pacifist when you stop beating the **** out of yourself. You're gonna meet someone who makes you regret trying to **** yourself slowly. Just put down the knife/broken glass/razor/ lost lover/pills/cigarettes/absent seatbelt/self hatred/lighter/memory and look up to the sky, the sun is shining fool. I love you and every dumb thing you do.

Bow Tie Noose

I saw you die in mid-January. Your caramel eyes rolled back white like ****** hard candies when you hanged yourself with the bow and bell I tied around your neck. I want to lay you down in a coffin made for kittens, old shoebox turned grave. I'll wrap your wrists in silk, cover your eyes with your hands, let guilt leap out of your mouth with a quiet gaseous slipping pop, death swelling your stomach just above your jutting ribs. This is the fullest you've looked since eighth grade, you've been starving and your blood is all drained. I'll put you under the only living thing to weep for you, a sad old willow tree. She's on her last leg and I guess, so are we. It will be summer, fresh lemonade. Shooting rabbits from the back of a pick up truck, ******* the blood from a pin hole in the neck. Dad likes them dry by July.

I'll watch flowers grow in place of cardboard. I'll remember your tiny birdy bones in your hands and see them melting to the flesh of your eyelids, nature taking you back to melted wax figure. Your teeth are more recognizable than your face.

When winter comes again, you'll wash up in the spring and the police will wonder who did this. I'll pluck a bone from inside your eye socket where it fell to rest. I'll look at your clothes, the new skin over your bones, it's all the same. Your cheeks aren't so smiley now that you're not in there to scare yourself into happiness. At least you won't be lying while lying in a grave, I'll keep your bones in the drawer with your letters and the police dogs won't smell a thing.

A day in the life of an alley cat, struck dead on the least busy street in the smallest town in Nebraska.
1 am: Druggy, *** you money, ******, don't deserve love, not easy to tell mom. I think of you. Your lungs are begging for my scold. Control is the word you use when no other fits the sentence. You occupy my mind when I am restless, testing the limits of kindness and low voices.
4 am: Your smile, the warmest hot chocolate of your eyes, your knuckles, the baby fat that melted from you, it haunts me. It's like I caught of a glimpse of the wrong angel, the half rotten, beyond gone, but still glowing angel. I killed you with a .45 and a gallon of mouthwash. You dripped into the Earth as a puddle beneath my toes. Gracious Lord, do not forgive me. I know I don't.
8 am: Insomnia without poetry. Tired without body. Maggots without mouths. Catholic priest, without sympathy. God without mercy. Drug abuse, without the realization of undignified addiction. Suicide without the comfort of killing, certainty.
3 pm: Sentiment, true and real, above annoyance and protectiveness. I am now a ghost above a body, finally weightless, finally free of His hands.
6 pm: Joy breaks open like a candy, soft center.
10 pm: Life tears my fingers open, unwraps the flesh from bone like Christmas. I feel my tongue fall out. Dusty antique radios are cleaned, losing authenticity. Their songs scream, sounding a lot like Billy Joel, after the catgut snaps. I feel my mind crawl out of the china cabinet.
11 pm: Nothing. There's really nothing to say at all.

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.

The moon weeped
the color of your hair,
dripping onto the  
morning (mourning?) dew
stippled grass.
The color of your eyes
seeped
into the cracks
of every sidewalk
you melted
on.

Looking at you
Is hopeless;
Just like you and your
Chemical imbalance:
Pills.
Me and my chemistry
with your ****** up brain.

I want your touch.
I want your rejection.
I don't want a boyfriend,
I want a mess.

(This is all fantasy, your teeth are too straight for someone as crooked as me.)

White lines on the kitchen table.
Your head, C10H15N,
Altoids box under the keyboard.
Your heart, C21H23NO5,
Syringes up your sleeve. ***** on your chest.
Your veins, C18H21NO3,
Dropping acid like the Aztecs.
Your tongue, C20H25N3O,
What will it take to strip your blood down
to the salt and the rust?
5 more Klonopin, 5 more Xanax,
you're on the floor,
a boring story,
I've heard it before.
Keep it far from me.
(You're not close enough. Please.)

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?

Maybe I should be breaking
Finer, thinner angel wings
But your bones will do
And I won't set down my teeth
Until I've chewed through my tongue
At 4 am
********

I. I rest my ear to your chest and hear the thudding of foot steps down the stairs, Christmas morning. God is telling me to stop listening. He wants you to wait until 5 am to open the gift that is your rib cage. 5 am is when we bring out the box cutter.

II. I wipe the tears off your face. You clean up good, you look like sunshine, kid. You may be shaking but your bones are as steady and as sturdy as they've ever been. You don't tie something up and tug the strings without a little muscle.

III. I'm looking back, just through the telescope of a few months, and ****, do you ever stop shaking? It's not even winter anymore, maybe the reason your bones are so sturdy is because they're so ******* frozen. Wake that body up boy, it's 75 degrees out. You're not ******* cold anymore.

IV. This isolation you're feeling, it's just a feeling. You've never felt more alone, but here you are, sitting in a room full of people. Maybe you can't see them all, yeah, a lot of them are ghosts, but didn't they teach you something? Anything?

V. Can you offer me any hope at all? None? None?

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.

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.

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.

I turn my heart back to a time
when my silver nail polish
hadn't flaked off like
dandruff into the
rolling sea of my carpet.
My hand hangs over
the edge of my bed
as tears fall
down my cheeks.
I picture your face,
the gentle blue of your
gentle eyes and the gentle
curve of your nose, perfect
in my own mind.
I wonder how I ever
deserved to meet you.  
I think of your nervousness
and how I want to hold it,
arms thrown around its neck,
face buried selfishly in
it's shoulder.
How I want to press the anxiety
that fills your chest
into origami
cranes.
I cry and cry and think
maybe,
just maybe,
if I have cried
enough for the both of us,
that you will finally
smile for no reason at all.

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.

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.

Talking to yourself in the mirror is more of a religious experience than getting on your knees and whimpering to the sky.

Today, 6:36 am, I got up and said "Good morning, Green Eyes, let's forget."

Getting home, 2:36, I wiped the blood from my front teeth and said "Good going *****, crying in class? What are you made of?" Sticks and stones, I thought. Sticks and stones.

A droning sound.

A year ago, you swallowed pills and opened your thighs, air crawling into places that air should never have the privilege (read: incredible misfortune) of touching, holding. I laid in bed, shined a laser pointer at my door for hours with "Goodbye Cruel World" on rickety repeat.

Goodbye cruel world, I'm leaving you today. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

A year ago, you took pictures of your snapped veins, wishbone fingers still gripping a razor, you smiling. I threw up.

Goodbye all you people.

My friend is going through what I did, caring. Caring a lot. Caring into the school guidance department and caring into crying the whole day. Caring until she can't sleep. Caring until the morning to repeat the cycle. Caring, slowly bleeding out/dying/wishing you were God, same thing.

There's nothing you can say.

I feel bad, I feel bad that your wrist split open. I want to butterfly stitch it for you, hold you, brush your hair back, and back, and back.

To make me change my mind.

What's the point in killing yourself anyway? Right. So I'll do it for you.

*Goodbye.

Chloroform rag between my teeth,
just to get me to shut up,
"I miss you."
Feels a lot like cotton mouth, huh?
Feels a lot like scared kid,
like bruised back, shoulder blades,
like walking 10 miles for acid,
just so you can see things like
you're not supposed to.
But that's over.
Sweet like honey dew melon,
like honey drizzled so gently on toast, gold, it's all gold:
gold sunsets, gold hair, gold eyes, gold teeth, shining like the gold ring dad "lost" down the drain. Gold, stay gold, nothing gold can stay, gold.
Nothing gold can stay.
That's what I told myself.
And then the sunset came,
and came again,
and came 30 times
before I saw your face again.
Gold sticks to my hands like cellophane.
I watch my hair melt into a gold puddle,
waiting to freeze underneath your feet.
Hey, nothing gold can stay but
can you try?

This is a poem about honesty. I cannot lie to you about how pretty this all isn't. I'm gonna do what I'm good at, loving people so indirectly it breaks me in two.

If there is any testament to my big and dumb heart, it's the true sentiment of anything I can say about the people I have met. Here's a few-

Dearest girl who flayed open her arm like salmon that I wish I could heal/dearest girl who I cannot describe her beauty in something as ugly as a poem/dearest girl who I love to love and love to want to give bandaids and butterfly stitches, I hope you're happy. I hope this day is shining brightly upon you. Otherwise I swear, I will speak to the sun Herself. I will tell her that her light is in the wrong corner of Eden. This place should not be a prison. You will make it out alive, and I will live to see the day that it happens too. I'll be there for you.

Dearest best friend with hair that faded to oil slick rainbow, I only got/get sad because I feel like I'm speaking right through you. I've felt the way you do. I wish I could raise your head from the clouds it rests in. I will just say, my beautiful best friend, your size isn't a negative imprint upon this world. The fit of those jeans isn't the confines of your worth. Think about all the time I've drawn you just how you are, your body is a masterpiece. Cheesy might describe me, but **** right definitely does.

Dear boy with tattoos and a **** good taste in music that I love to pretend to insult but can't even imagine hating, everyone loves you and I hope you know it. Sorry I don't Have Mercy (hehe get it) on you when it comes to the horrible jokes, but just know I can't find a single bad thing about you, believe it or not. Ask anyone who's ever asked me. And your dog, he's a plus. ****, I love your dog. Tell him I say hello.

Dearest least PC person I know and favorite infidel, by God I love you *****. Our terrible honesty is horribly inspiring and I don't know how I'd get by without your awful existence. You're a queen, and I hope in your kingdom the words "trigger warning" are never paired together for your own sake. Agree to never disagree, you're the cutest most ****** up person I've ever met and I wouldn't change a thing. Thanks for listening to me whine all the time and not calling the cops.

Dearest girl with beautiful hair, dearest girl who cares into crying in bathrooms and offices and in classes and in bedrooms, I know. I know how it feels to worry the bottom of your heart straight to the bottom of your stomach. I have felt the nausea of the impact of the word "hospital". I used to frantically pick up the phone on the first ring because I was afraid I'd miss the call again, telling me he's gone again and now we can't talk again and I'm sitting up all night again, crying myself into every dark corner of the school again. It ends. They come home, it ends. Love the way you love, because not many people can do what you do. There will be few times you feel this helpless, trust me, I've seen **** and then some. I'll be right here if you need me.

Dearest best friend with the unkept dyed blonde hair, scoliosis, and an unwavering love for me that I cannot even begin to fathom, I'm sorry I forgot that you were at your mother's house two weeks ago. I hope you were okay. I hope nothing like her ever happens to you again and I hope Cali treats you well and I hope the drugs don't **** you (I still cry every time I think about it) and I am still losing sleep over you and your stupid decisions and wonderful brain and perfectly imperfect heart. You brown eyed crooked back fool, I love you and all your dumb antics, cheers to you never growing up, just don't smoke or trip yourself out of the beautiful life you deserve.

Dear future star who I secretly call Wolverine who is not so secretly very gay and lights up every room he's ever been in, let's go to chilis.

Dearest two best friends that are only my recent buddies with the best eyeliner that can both drive (poorly sometimes, but nonetheless) and both make me laugh to the ends of the Earth, God bless your taste in memes and music.

To everyone and everything I have ever had the incredible pleasure or misfortune of meeting: When I say I hate you, every time I mean I love you. I care about you more than I care about finding out why I'm alive. I care about you more than living. I care about you more than I care about not losing you. I will care about you until you leave and then I will wonder how you are. I will say you ****** me up and I will mean it but I'm choking back that I still can't stop loving you. I still can't stop fighting the urge to stitch your wounds. I still want to play your favorite records. I still want to smooth back your hair with the palm of my hand. I still want to be there every time you cry. I still want to fall asleep with you.  I will pretend to be anything but in love with every human being on this planet, but I will be lying to myself and everything that matters to me. It will slip through my veins in endless hand written letters signed with my name. I'm shouting I love you to everyone, silently in the corner of class, smiling when you look at me.

Dearest Unreal and Unforgiving God,

It's three weeks to the day an old friend killed himself and I'm counting the ways I've changed.

My world is still upside down, even though I've stopped crying now I can't stop reimagining life in ways to make it tender again.

I swear, I've held my hand out to everyone I've ever wanted to and it's not enough. I can still feel myself falling so incredibly short.

How do you explain to someone how softly you felt for them while they shivered in your arms, how all their scars seemed to run through your heart, tugging your sleeve towards the direction of "I want to love you more and more until you love yourself."? How do you tell them you wanted to rewrite every suicide note, resign it with "never mind"? I can't began to find the words for "I want you to be happy so bad it keeps me up at night."

And hey God, would it **** you to make a miracle happen every once in a while?

I have wanted to spread the incredible, bursting compassion I felt when he died, that terrible, uncontainable empathy, but how is it that words fall short on everyone except I'm sorry?

I'm trying to touch lives in a way that November 27 will again just be a date. I'm trying to make it all right. I'm trying to be the light that could've lit up the dark and made the world turn again.

As you were taking your last breath I hope you felt this.

She is beautiful.
Her dress is soft over her body like prom queen thigh silk,
her hair running down her back like God  never gave up his gold.
I could see her smile across a room,
and even if it wasn't real,
(I don't know)
it was beautiful:
her hairpin curved lips and blue eyes that don't read
"Drink me",
they will not make you smaller
or bigger.
They will, however, leave you sitting under the hot sun,
1:43 pm,
simmering at the thoughts of speaking to someone with fingers so much more dainty than yours,
And a voice so much more like the dew on leaves.
You don't even know her.

Have you ever met someone
that makes you want to grab their
hand, turn it over, and
gently press your lips
into the soft part
of their wrist,
tenderly scarred and
rich in its
flowing deltas of blue veins,
beautifully alive.
Someone who you want
to hold, hold
their shaking existence,  
through the rain,
clicking on the windows
of their ribcage,
through the silent
light of spring,
hard dark
of winter.
You would give
your head and your heart,
to see the sun shine on
the easy curve of their cheeks,
lips parted in a smile
like the dissolution
of ice.

Hey great-grandma,
You haven't written in 7 years. My heart is hissing, what does that mean? Why won't it stop going so fast? It's beating the **** out of me, grandma. I can't keep up with it.

Dearest great-aunt,
Hey, where've you been? I've been stuck throwing up my lungs the last few weeks. Coffin shopping is a lot harder than it looks aunty.

Dear uncle,
You haven't even asked about my hospital trip. Nerve pain. Yeah, I'm okay, but I don't want to say "I love you" to my boyfriend tomorrow. No, he didn't do anything wrong. He just forces me to swallow antacids until my eyes roll back and I die. How long? A year and a half, we started dating February tenth. It snowed.

Hello me,
You haven't shown up in a while. Please call.

Love,
No Body

I miss your absence like curdled milk misses it's white. I miss the sourness of your hair running through my fingers.

I miss your absence like an anorexic misses their bones. They go searching for them, ripping up flesh and drinking water in place of anything, filling the hole in their mind that can't be filled with cake. The sweetest of chocolate cake, frosting topped grave marker. It can't be filled. Cannot be filled.

I miss your absence like winter misses her green. She covers it up, buries it beneath such a heaviness. It sits upon her chest like white elephants.

You hold yourself like a hairpin turn. You are sore, aching from sleeping on your stomach too long. You are swaddling your hunger in loneliness. You are the weight of every divorce paper filed in Massachusetts. You are Greece's longing for her peace. You are finding yours in the light, dark suffocates your water balloon lungs. Your wiry, 6 foot frame is suffocated by 120 pounds. You are suffocated by me. I am filling my lungs with water, holding my head under what is blue and the waves crash over my spine like clockwork. I count to 3, I pass out and see your face in front of me, pale and gasping. I am hungover on Windex. I make bleach cocktails like mother makes her with anything she can find before she kisses her knuckles.

I don't wait for winter to come, I dig into the earth and find her, beg her to cover me in what will not melt. I beg for a grave as infinite as the fear that shakes me. I wish I could be alone, dear nature, why does responsibility choke me? Why does terror and trauma push its teeth into me like a wolf into sheep? Why can't I sleep without awaking? Why?

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.

You are afraid
That you won't know
Until he takes you into his room
And shows you the lines
He carved into his thighs
With a kitchen knife and
He says he didn't want to die
The night he unzipped his veins
And cracked 12 pills wide open

You still are hoping he stops
But you know
He will not
So you go home and throw up
On your clothes
Just to take them off
Pretend its okay
And worry for another day

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.

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.

I pick apart your bones

just to see if there's any flesh left.

I'm looking for the last of your cologne.

I am looking through your clothes, trying to find one strand of your thread-bare hair.
(Was it ash blonde or ***** blonde? I swear it was more ashy.)

I don't know where I lost you, where I left you, maybe it was in the soft cradle of my bed as you waited for me to turn over the record.

I don't know. I don't know what the curves of the bird bones in your hands look like anymore, and I can say the same about the size of your eyes, watching me always.

But I can tell you I miss you, I miss your head resting on my shoulder. You're so much taller than me, and I can feel myself lowering what I had felt into the ground, and I swear, if you weren't so high, you would have noticed.

(Everyone I love falls asleep.)

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.

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.