i am focused on the immediate future
the week is golden & sticky
in my palm;
i tremble in the midst
of cold,
nearly icy hours

the embrace of a ****-dwelling sweater
seems so close to the surface,
as if the small
ocean of my
reality contains nothing but a high, beautiful child
swimming with the fish.

i rain on green
fields beside massachusetts highways
& cows sleep in the brush
spiked with my
dew. it is
the only
safe place left

so things get worse before they get better; i guess that means it’s october again, i’m hungry all the time, greasy hair, the whole thing. whatever.
in the fall months, during the cold mornings, my body floats in limbo
while the old feelings soak back into sleepy flesh. my dreams become heavy,
hairy with the symbolism i can’t seem to understand in english class; i’ll let myself eat graphite in small microscopic doses
nothing more, nothing less.
& my life is soft rain, una y otra vez, a thousand little resurrections
along the length of cells in my small intestine. sadness has no place here anymore; i thought i let that out with the long hair & the
crying episodes & the horrible empty after his death in the bitter green month of may.
so maybe transformations are all in the small things. the sun rising chillier each week, the elapse of a long season for the third time running. no era has ever been so lucid, no era has ever been
so fuzzy. it is almost as if i had climbed into the skin of a tired sheep, displacing its thick, warm blood
with my own soupy lymph.
& everything else has been that, a gentle pulse of tv static, from womb to seventeenth october
& all those lonely imaginary things in between

my baby is sick. so sick that she rocks with the stench of it
it is always another kind of pain
fingers bent backwards, or
he is no longer on this earth in the dimension of this moment.
it is early morning. walking down campus, eating the remains of the breakfast rotting in my bag
we laugh. i mind the accent marks

planets will melt
because of you
because of chalkboards filled
with triangles, closed windows,
fairy-lit stars
saccharine winters of slush
and bitter pink summers will wrap you in fur
plastic-like,
library-like
enough tired inertia to slow sleepy heartstrings

the rat is belly-up in my hands. breathing is hard due to the plastic vat of formaldehyde-drenched vermin on the desk next to me.
seeing guts open on the table is reminiscent of lying skinless on my heavy bed, organs wet and bloodless inside my body cavity.
combing through the rat, i find i'm peeling back my own painless ribcage, tasting defeat in my own clawed fingers.
it's like selling the fur off my body for the sake of extra credit points, tossing my own torn-up skeleton
into landfill, flopped belly-up below blue plastic gloves and bits of my own drained flesh.
seeing the divide between gory body and vague fishbowl conscience is so much
stickier than i ever would have imagined;
my arms are covered in it,
the ends of my hair drip
with stomach acid. the bisection
of my own blue heart exists tangible in my live shaky hands,
the coil of my intestines curled helpless
in my poxy palms.
how ugly, to dissect for commodity! how ugly, to dissect for the sake of distance, the sake of false superiority over animals that twitch!
how strange to rip my own body open, how repulsive to lie suffering under the cast of my own disease-ridden hands!

i don't know how long it's been since i was thirteen years old- feels like a lifetime
maybe i am cicada child,
living 3 lives, dying too young too eggy
leaving my ridgey shell behind, hanging from a tree.
tan jacket, goes past my thighs
but i leave it wrinkled in the closet. maybe when it's summer, when bart trains switch with buses in the back of my head
and my phone is a soft playlist of names i don't recognize.
it is late but i am not sad anymore.
sometime this year the salt dissolved from my arms and the bitter coating fell away from my lungs.
i am in my second life, eating other bugs
waiting for summer

the pasta is too gummy
marsh swamp buckets
sheep on the hill overcast rainy a little the grass is green
im having withdrawal
from her face, you know.
throwing out my report card with my lunch
wanna have a skinny stomach
there's milk on my jacket sleeve, i remember it warm on my wrist.
everything on my hand has faded
it's just little poky hairs now, no more hearts.
the girl in my head walked by me red gray blue she looked like berkeley (no, richmond i guess) like a drizzle sun today's weather she walked like the rainbow at the end of the hill
someone lit the bathroom on fire.
i know if he was still here,
the moon would be out
but without him the pasta is just too gummy my stomach too full the hills too wet