As I sit in porcelain canoe, submerged
in lukewarm bathwater, which grows
colder and colder each passing second
I take a long, longing look down at my
belly-bowl full of jelly-rolls and wonder,
am I worth more than the sum of my parts?

Am I more than *** and ****?
Am I more than the 206 from 270 bones,
give or take a few here and there,
without which, I would be entirely jelly?
Am I more than the lips, the teeth,
the tip of the tongue?
more than the skin and hair and
and miles of veins pumping
life in pulse after pulse as I sit doing
nothing but contemplating my worth?

if you took it all away,
if you cold-shouldered  
this body I have come to
love and hate and love again
in one lifetime,
if you held the meat,
would the milk be enough?


I have fed you with milk, and not with meat: for hitherto ye were not able [to bear it], neither yet now are ye able (1 Corinthians 3:2).

Barren—they call you and now
it is your badge of honor, one
you wear proudly on display.

They likened you to a desert for
a lack of children and lack of
desire for them.

Be Mojave—Gobi—Sahara—
because your glittering, glass sand dunes
are great
and bearing fruit and flowers
is your prerogative and yours alone.

Ice
Beautiful, yet beastly.
Creeping translucent tendrils of cold.
Frozen, frigid fingers pointing down.
Crystalline and gelid shivs poised to ****.
It is only day two of the ice storm and there is
expectedly, more to come.
The weight of the world rests upon delicate, weary boughs, and though they're strong, they were not made for this.
Limb after limb encased in ice, cracks and secedes from the once-great behemoths —remarkable evergreens, landing in a crashing heap, only to be collected once the thawing ends.
One tree, if not the most important of them all, is kept under careful surveillance—24/7 watch.
She is called Survivor—for weathering a different kind of storm— though now, 25 years later, will she survive this? She has already lost one great branch, and others now cannot bear the weight of frozen glaze on their spindly arms.
Electricity is yet another danger to many others of her kind.
Fire and ice alike threaten to claim them.

C.  kissed me in his beater car
J.  in the hall,
But he only looked at me
and never kissed at all.

C’s kiss was quick, demanding,
J’s was sweet and light,
But the kiss that lingered on his lips
haunts me day and night.

each day I push the stone
each day I tread the waves
each day I carve the marble

but when

when will I see peace —the long-craved result of all this guiltful carving?
when will I breathe feely, free of tons of tons pushing and pulling on me from every side?
when will the stone break over the mountain and bring rest?

when will forgetfulness step out from the block and free me from my bonds by saying,
"enough tears, I've come to end your suffering"?

I was meant to be named Elise but my aunt stole that name away from my mother —from me

I never felt like an Elise anyways, but even so I’ve always felt a strange ownership of the name and when the girl named Elise sat
in the back of my painting class, I felt a kind of kinship to her, perhaps in name or what might have been in name.

He looked at me with lamenting eyes
which said everything he hadn’t with
his own tongue and that was how
disappointed he was with me.

He caressed my legs which were draped
across his own but stayed quiet as I
supped hungrily on water which became the
only thing I could stomach after all the
drinks I’d happily given into

But if only he knew why —if only he
knew how terrible a place my mind is.
If only he knew how blissfully deadened
my racing thoughts were when I ******
on the sweet, stinging nectar.