Leah Rae

Leah Rae Sep 2016

This morning there was blood on the pavement.

There are men with teeth where hand should be.
With gapping wound and rot, as humiliation.
Ones who will turn pelvic bones into a shrine,
a good enough trophy. They will collect fingernails
like seashells from place called body. They will pry
open. They will bite and ****. A bruise for a mouth.
They will turn place called home into place called body.

This morning there were birds in the front yard pulling tiny rubber bands from the Earth.

They will turn knees into figures meant for bending.
Do not bend. With bravery a wronged honor. A
never deserved. An always hurt. Crawl backwards,
make birth a survival tactic. A promise. You will
shed skin off this skeleton. You will be a tremulous

placed called body.
You will not bend.

Leah Rae Jun 2016

A Violent Tired

This terrible beating, a soundless roar that I
wear like worry. Caught in lace and sequin,
you stupid pretty thing.
Heart, you are so
devilishly ugly.

You make me awful and needful.
A trouble, an aching break that
never healed right.
Pitchfork and shrapnel jacket, a barbed wire
beauty.

I am disastrous and made of weeds. A hungry throat that
only knows
swallow.

Go on sky,
pour. The art of breath and walk,
of continue,
of live.
Of lust for better.
Awake a sugar glass
soul made tender.

I am great care, building scaffoldings between fistfight and belonging.

#war #peace #life #heart #pain #social #beauty #justice

Leah Rae Sep 2015

Rigamortis Twice Removed

Permanency can go **** itself.
Remember when you were fifteen
When you were all yellow teeth and bad poetry.
You were in love with death back then.
Thought she was some beauty -
Some backless dress
Some lipstick stain

Now she's stretched in front of you like a black, endless void.
All broken fingers.
All self blame.
All midnight drives to ditches only deep enough to call shallow graves.

She's like walking across a dried up lake bed.
Moments before the water returns.
Drown.

He's never going to see me get married

Sometimes I think about suffocating myself.
Thumb to index finger
Crushing larynx
Straddling my own chest.
Break it open.
Imagine me carcass roadside
Ribs crushed, pulled apart, what kind of cage doesn't know how to hold things together.
There will be blood on the sidewalk.

He's never going to meet my children.

Now you're nineteen
And you are all bad spelling and coffee stains
When the body experiences trauma sometimes all it needs to process is to shake hard enough -
enough though.
What is. Enough.

Just endless vibrating.
Breath in throat.
I can't.
I can't.

Breathe.

Tomorrow they are pulling his plug at 1 o clock.
Like plans for brunch.

Expect to not be able to keep this meal down.
You will return to it.
Over and over.
Like a dog to its own *****.

Leah Rae Apr 2015

*****

This poem is for the *******.
The ice princesses.

Solid and frozen.
Hearts carved from arctic stone.
Jaw lines so sharp they could *cut you.
Girls so bitter, *they bite.

Leave your mouth aching.

This is for the evil stepsisters,
The Ursulas,
The Queens of Broken Hearts -

I’ll tell you.
They are deadly beautiful.

They are the bossy, and the terribly too honest.
Mouths on fire,
jaws snapping,
man eaters,
sirens of the sea,
they will swallow you whole.

When the boys ask -
Tell them, no, I don’t need saving.

**** being a princess.
Be the dragon.

Be fire breathing, and pmsing.
Be angry, girl.

Cause you got **** to be angry about.

Every cat call –
Every glass ceiling you will shatter with your bare hands –
Every time you say the word no and mean it –
Every time they make you feel like you anything less than powerful.

You tell them –
You are eternal.

That you carry a generation in your belly -
That it all begins and ends here, inside you.

That you can bleed for seven days straight and come back with teeth sharpened for war.

Remind them that that when something is taken from you, you will do everything you can to get it back.

You will destroy what destroys you.
Eating fire and spitting brimstone.
And never, ever saying sorry.

They will call you crazy.
They will call you over emotional.
They will call you loud mouth.

They will ask for your smile, pretty girl.
Give it to them with poison ivy lips and a razor blade between your teeth.

What no body knew was that Ursula was King Triton’s sister.
A perfect storm.
Banished from the palace -
When a loud, powerful woman gets out of hand, we don’t call it leadership.
We call her dog.
*****.
Bossy.
Fangs out and snarling, we don’t battle, we cat fight.
**** kitten gone wrong, when she learns to leave scars.

A dog, no not a dog, a wolf in heat.
Domestication is a ***** word.

***** is to know your worth, and take it.

To carry it in your esophagus.
A war cry.
Feeding your enemies to your children, and coming back starving for seconds.

Doing anything to stay alive.

Because you were raised by a mother who fed you fear for supper.
Packed your backpack with mace, and brass knuckles.
She told you to turn your body into a weapon.
She knew there would be men who would try to cover your mouth.
So she taught you to bite.

This is how you protect yourself.
A mouth full of *****, and a bark to match.
“Beware of dog” sign around your throat.

This is how you keep them away.
This is how you warn them.

Because the villain was not always the villain.

She was made that way.
You were made this way.

You’ve got brands still healing, still smoking, skin still searing.
You’ve got a trauma written in your blood.
You’ve got a ribcage holding onto your heart too tightly.

You are chasing down a revenge so sweet it could rot your teeth.
A heart attack romance asleep in your chest.

You will come back home limping after this war.

And you will tell all the other girls -

It ain’t all about the love story.
**It’s about the “being in love with yourself” story.

This is originally a slam poem, I am open to all feedback :)

#***** #strength #endurance #power #wolf #feminism #culture #women #dog #****

Leah Rae Mar 2015

Good ****

Give me..
Give me that good ****.

You know, that good ****

We're handed pipes instead of pills.
Told to smoke pain away something that's been breed 4 generations deep.
A poverty in the sheets.
An allergic reaction,
nuclear,
biochemical -
skin abrasions, lacerations -
3rd degree burns on our hearts.

Drink away the pain to sooth the burn.
To silence the scald.

No one even teaches you to hold yourself.
Instead they tell you to find someone else to do it for you.
Make you unable to be whole.
To be three fourths **** up.

Bandaging your own self inflicted scars in the bathroom sink.

To be metal jackets made of sorrow.
To be blacked out Saturday nights, too hung over to go to church with your family in the morning.

To be so high, you never even get low.

To be light bulbs busted, stayed bright too long.

That good **** ain't good **** when it turns you into the kind of slack jawed, numb monster your mother is ashamed of.

We are a generation self mutilated - no, no - self medicated.

Raised by television sets, they made cigarettes look ***.
They made suicide look pretty,
And binge drinking look cool.

They made it normal for kids to pass around bottles of liquor at 14.

You're too young and too fast, and you're trying to not ******* feel ****.

I've been you.
I am you.

So no, it ain't no good ****.

I don't have any good ****.

Cause nothing is good, if it's never been bad first.

If it's never been broke, and broken, and sick.
If it's never cried itself to sleep.
If it's never seen its own reflection in broken pieces of glass and felt akin to the shatter.

You have to feel every inch of the low to make any high worth it.

And let it be a homemade one.

Let it be love.
And lust.
And the sun, and good art, and loud music, and jukebox laughter, and your family telling you, you matter.

Don't let it be synthetic and manufactured. Don't let it be bought on street corners, let it be home grown, and natural.
Raised in the corners of your mother's smile.

Let those good moments be you.
Let those moments be life.
Let them be the warmth before the scald, let those be the moments before you fall.

And I know it hurts.
It hurts to be a volcano victim.
To be so irrevocably in love with life when it can burn you so badly.

Believe me, being numb means nothing.

And yes, I know it's hard.
Hard to be 14,
And 17.
And 21,
And 45.

I know it's hard, so ******* hard to exist every single day.

I know the bouquets of heart break, feel like chainsaws and forest fires.

I know the boys hurt your feelings.
I know your parents don't understand you.
I know your teachers don't listen to you,
I know you hate yourself

And I know you shouldn't.

Because baby,
A pipe,
Or a pill
Or a bottle
Won't ever do any good **** for you.

This is originally written to be a performance slam piece. Any and all feedback is welcome. Thank you. :)

#addiction #alcohol #drugs #mental #family #drinking #smoking #health #poverty

Leah Rae Jan 2015

This for my Momma

All I can think about is the passenger seat of your car.
Torn up apolostry and 150,000 miles of nothingness, the only kind of somethingness I ever grew up with.

You used to wake me.
A few hours before the sun would rise when only God was still awake, when darkness was the only thing we could taste.

I was 5.

A pair of scissors in my hands and a 20 minute drive into the nice neighborhoods.

Ones with spare bedrooms when we never had any bedrooms to spare.

It would be spring time.

Like April kissed May
& the Earth came back home to tell us she loves us after being away.

We would steal flowers.

Fists full of roses, hands carved by thorns. Daises.
Sun flowers.
Tulips.
Daffodils.

We would fill the back seat.
I think - people forgot that the flowers don't sleep at night.
They are still there, waiting for the silence of a sunrise to wake us all up.
Every night I thought they were waiting for us.

For me.

For my hands, still so small, to cradle their broken necks.

My mother was always good at holding beautiful things just a little too tightly.

Now mom - I wake up alone in my bedroom at 3am and I can still smell wet earth and the fear of being caught.

I rise looking for dirt on my shoes, or petals to tell me..

But now I don't find anything.
Just hands still stained with rose thorn kisses.

You used to always say I was a good seed in your garden, and momma I think I've finally bloomed.
A wild flower.
Tired of thunder storms.

A few weeks ago I handed you 1,500 dollars. Poverty is a ***** word we share sheets with.
I know you needed it.
I know I won't ask for it back.
I know some part of you could barely bare to ask, a tongue turned violet, bit backward and ashamed.

I know it's hard to make rent momma
I know it's hard to put food on the table momma

I know,

I know Momma.

But I am 19 years old, and you have taught me to pull the things I love up by the roots and **** them.
To hold them captive.
Like you used to with pills and pipes.

I never knew how to love any other way.

But I thank God,
The stars and the sun,
For these bouquets of heart break.

For this love.
For this insanity.
For this insomnia.
For a garden full of broken steams.
Of broken necks.
Of a home built on top of soft petal carcasses.

You taught me to hurt the things I love.
But I'm just now learning to love from an arms length away.
I know I am fire.
Smoke in these wild fire lungs.
I have to learn to not burn myself.
To not burn down forests I call home.

Momma you've taught me to stop picking flowers in the middle of the night.

And to instead tell them how much they mean to me in the morning.

That love under a cover of darkness, might not be love after all.
Just starving.

A hunger to hold something that I love so much it hurts.

Leah Rae Oct 2014

Dear Mrs. Laubenberg

The following is a quotation.
"In the emergency room, they have what's called **** kits where a woman can get cleaned out."
-Texas State Representative Jodie Laubenberg

Dear Mrs. Laubenberg,

I have never felt so betrayed by another woman before.
And I know this was your attempt at a prolife argument.
But you don’t understand anything about your own anatomy.

Unlike you, I know my own body.
The home I've created here,
inside myself,
these shoulders,
hips,
scars,
and stretch marks.

Believe me when I say - I am my own war memorial.

So let this body be ready to be broken.

I will give birth to umbilical cord nooses.

Hang myself with my own womanhood.
Blood soaked ******* and blue and black bite marks.
I will never be anyone’s victim.

I was built - hand crafted by some creator - who knew he was breeding me for war.

Let this body be a graveyard to all my past lovers.

Let it be known that I was built for destroying things just as often as I create them.
The lipstick I wear is the same color as blood.
I was made to devour.
A caged animal in my throat.
A growl asleep in my chest.
A ribcage built for holding me captive because I'm a savage animal.

Do not call me weak.
A ***** bites.
A ***** swallows her prey alive.

So don’t you dare push my knees apart into metal stirrups, and
“clean me out”.
Do not bandage my wounds.
Do not wipe me clean of this recklessness.
Do not cover these bruises.
Let me stand, a testimony to what they have done to me.
To us.
My wounds will not be silent.

I want you to look at me.
At us.

We need to carry these battle wounds with us.

On my college campus, we have been broken in like cattle.
We know the scent of fear.
We’ve been branded black and gold.
We were told to carry mace like an accessory to this sin.
To never walk alone at night.
To travel in packs.
To carry weapons.
To carry guns.
To carry our femininity concealed because bare thighs are dangerous here.

Each week is only finished when a ****** assault paints my campus crimson.

**** is a hate crime against weakness.

So I’m taking back femininity and I’m deciding what it’s synonymous with.

And never again will submission mean woman.
Never again will girl mean powerless.
Never again will tenderness be considered vulnerable.

I am a flower on ******* fire.
I am Mother Nature,
Thousand watt lightning storms and forest fires that could turn you into dust.
You cannot break me.

Every 90 seconds a woman dies during pregnancy or childbirth.

So yes, we are used to giving this thing called life, our absolute everything.

There are 400,000 untested **** kits in America alone.

So yes, I know, Mrs. Laubenberg.

I know you picture women’s bodies like machines,
cold,
hard,
metal.
Something than can be deconstructed, cleaned, and put back together.
But I am a human being, and I don’t assemble easily.

****** assault belongs to the survivor.

How dare you try to white wash your own guilt and try and file our stolen femininity under blood slides and nail scrapings.

You are a woman too, Mrs. Laubenberg.

And I know, these hate crimes look like girls in short skirts to you.
They look drunk.
They look *****.
They look like *** workers caught in fishnets.

They look deserving.

But Mrs. Laubenberg,

They also look like your sisters.
And your mother.
And your daughters.

And if something isn’t done to change this,

Maybe

**They might end up looking like you.

This is originally supposed to be a spoken word piece. All feedback is welcome.

#girl #mother #family #abortion #daughter #sisters #child #femininity #womanhood #rights