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

im not outside anymore, and that makes me sad-
the smell of ginger doesn't hurt my nose, it actually reminds me of the bitter herbal store with drawers and drawers full of crickets and fungus and crushed things i can't name.

there's a moment before i fall asleep, the moment i wish for dreams again & the moment i put the glowsticks back underneath my bed. i guess it really works, because last night i talked to m and 77 for the first time since, what was it, ninth grade? or maybe fifth?
theres something really unnerving about the park next to my old school. there's something that's not quite opaque about it, like the dogs and the kids and the trees and the homeless men aren't real.

maybe it's a good thing i don't like hamburgers that much, maybe it's a good thing that most food sticks in my throat. that way i can focus on the important stuff, like drywall and plumbing

i really really miss you so much i think my heart might give up and lie down and sleep for millions of dinosaur years. i think my cells might stop and take deep breaths and i think they might explode simultaneously, it will be so beautiful like a fireworks show, i just know it

it's three pm on a thursday. don't tell me you have anything planned other than to sit on the back porch killing flies and picking the skin off your fingers. i know it's humid and full of lime outside but sometimes it's good to have sour lungs, you know? breathe it in. come outside.

an old old lady sat beside me at the bus stop. she was making a huge black and red and green and yellow blanket & told me it was for dreams. i didn't know what she meant so i nodded and offered to pay her bus fare. she was gone before i could look up and it made me think of cyclopes and orange peels

i'll live in the ocean one day!
for now, we're in glitter and rot, covered in murals and expensive tea none of us could afford. but one day i'll be a seagull too & i won't have to worry about the ground shaking anymore

there is ice cream in your hair again, it's strawberry like last summer and pink like broken plastic
there was a pretty boy on 38th street, he made me laugh because i used to think i could only love a six-petaled rose or a green garbage truck. but there he was & i think i might grow old
you hate when i complain, don't you, but that's okay because she'll always kind of make me want to die, or move to venice. either way i wouldn't get to see you again & i guess that's supposed to be sad.

hey isaac, it's good to have you back. i think we both changed a lot, you're a little dizzier now and im a lot less purple. i still can't give you my address because they repainted the old house. isaac, it's such an ugly shade of (beige?) now- it makes me want to forget the last four years. they cut down the juniper trees, too, i saw the dead flowers and i didn't cry
i don't think ill ever grow out of the shower or the floorboards. ill sit here forever, waiting for cement blocks & burning hair & suffocation

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

alabama sun, it's almost hot here in a sad soggy way
i knew a kid in california who lost all her teeth on a pink plastic skateboard (we were all carrying garbage bags filled with computer cables and ipods and cube-shaped monitors)
there was a girl in england somewhere, too, she was bright bright navy blue and i couldn't stop staring at her glittery skin. my grandma told me it was impolite so i decided to grow antenna eyes like those banana slugs clinging to my neighbor's window.

(i think i'll shave my head and rename myself after the moths that come out once the afterimages of the sun leave the corneas.)

she told me we could live in thailand one day, now look what you've done! i want to live again for the first time since my tiny cells began to divide!

the brightness goes up and down, day / night.
girls with shaved heads, new york i think. i think you'll run the world, you with
a diamond grille and no eyebrows. sketch artist,
sidewalk chalk- it wasn't very fun, but it lasted-

the park in albany is full of love; last year was burritos and this year was sour cream and onion chips. it was swings and sky, the kids blowing bubbles, the girl who / looked just like me.

i don't want to lose my house. i'm scared.
i want to be set ablaze / pyre / sacrificial temple / knife /
i want to be there in new york with you.
lip gloss on our eyelids,
strawberries & liquor store croissants.

she remembers when everything trembled,
i only remember pond water & algae-

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

angel is at the door. / you don’t know what it means, but /
oh m, please pray for me. please / melt the dust off the doorstep, let angel in.
bring the bread to utah and eugene and atlanta and north dakota / the places he was in / the shows you wanted to see /

dear butterfly, i want to go to rome like they did. i want to be in monterey again, it sits in my stomach. / the ocean cemetery, the seaweed, the rain / i want to reach down into my small intestine and pull out seagulls, potato chips, the mist. monterey, please come back /

i’m inferior to the little girl inside me. / she is blue and unbreathing due to the strangulation, my cramped ribcage. we were hand in hand in eighth grade, i think, when my body didn’t end / when my memory wasn’t sticky from too many rewinds.
angel, come in / i’ll pick the fleas from your wings, i’ll shave your head for you

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

you started out big, i think. i think you started out with big lungs and a big heart and giant thoughts, i don’t think you were like everyone else

i wasn’t there for the rest of it. i was in
los angeles, i was
playing soccer with the cousins in white dresses in grassy backyards. the sky was plummy, my shoes were wet, i remember it like an uncut gem mined from my mossy mossy memory

but imagination only goes so far. it doesn’t cover things like lost keys or atlanta, you know.
i’m good at lies, but that’s inherent. we’re fluent in
self-hate, i think,
we’re liquidy like the wavy falling sky.

sometimes my mind’s blown, i feel like an eight-year-old watching aliens land again & i feel my hands start to shake
i suppose it was the same way for you. i guess u have the same little memories, the goopy mac and cheese from elementary school, the neighbor’s cats’ names, sore arms, bad bruises

in my dreams i spit blood & gum. it always seems to fall forever, which is weird because i'm standing on solid ground. / in my dreams there's so many babies, the tiny forgotten ones & the ones i birthed & the ones that died inside me. / i don't know what it means, just like i don't know what it means when she doesn't eat all day / just like when he sits behind me or when i wish i was / zaina. / do the ambulances haunt your neighborhood? is it like a wool wool wool blanket the way / the sirens keep going for hours? / she tells me she wants fries, or that she doesn't like her dad, and i'm there but i don't know what to say. it's not like last year, last year when i was made of metal & we were all / figments. it's better now because i never wanted to be dust. i think i just wanted to / **** my fingers & sit in the back of class / i wanted my heartbeat to sit down, to relax / babe, take a load off

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

we are your daughters too! we are your daughters, have you forgotten that part? have you been gone so long that your memories have shriveled into space gaps and brain tissue and eggnog?

young stud, blue jeans. there’s a sister in the room, you don't have to worry about being dizzy anymore. is there comfort in her hair. is there a mosquito green pond in her eyes. or is it just me?

some meadows are full of honey, like the one in san francisco above the trolley lines. maybe it was there that they walked barefoot, full of moon wedges. maybe it was there that the gravitational pull of the earth first began to melt.

we are exactly the same! closer than twins! womb-slick and half-closed, hands grasped together from the moment the first cells began to split. mitochondria. fibula. ozone.

i wanna hold your hand sometimes! i’ve been thinking of monserrat lately, her knee-high black converse shoes and her tulle skirt. i have been thinking of sitting behind the science building and tearing my history textbooks into strips and i have been thinking of the alley behind the safeway and how i pretended i was luxa for a few hours. all of that ends at graduation with elan’s red dress and her mom in pajamas.

i still wanna hold your hand, i am fifteen and dumb and you are seventeen and beautiful. the inside of her stomach was so long ago, it’s the difference between the beginning of a century and two years after it has begun.

maybe we aren’t so alike but i know that i still dream of water bugs and swamp gods. does your heart beat to pacific tides? does it float and gasp, like duck and pelican? because the ocean is still ready for us. it is gooey with patience and whirlpools and spongey with squid ink, squid eggs and krill.

the east coast is waiting for you too, ready to fold you into its hilly green arms and take you away. some places are too pretty for their own good, they are too much lighthouse red gas station not-oregon hot dizzy head sit down warm cement. i don’t want you to go. and i still don’t even know where you want to go to college, but probably not san diego because someone said she wanted to play there and you didn’t chime in.

it’s so funny about being postnatal. blue and orange hands, umbilical cords in place of functioning intestines, young toothless mouths and cottage cheese. sometimes i miss it. that’s dumb because i am still postnatal, i am still conductive to electricity my body is still blue and wrinkled. we are exactly the same, don’t ever forget that. don’t forget we shared a body.

get it out of your head
she says.
everybody knows i can't follow directions. everyone knows my bruises & my freckles; in fact, they know the parts of my body better than i do.
take your own advice
she says.
the rhinestones on her eyelashes are distracting. i keep thinking
they are going to fall into her eyes
but she knows this too
she knows about my ear piercings
she knows they are closing up.
you're such a *******
she says.
you're so ugly. you're stupid
she says.
i sympathize with hairy arms. i sympathize with her jawline. it doesn't mean anything in the end
except maybe that i cared a little too much
about things like crawling bees. or liquor stores.
i found your third grade notebook. you're embarrassing
she says.
we hold hands & in the process our bodies melt into each other
my right,
her left.
i feel her veins against my own. she is not very strong. she is all ribs & fat & cartilage.
sometimes i want someone else to walk beside me. she comes out of my body when no one else is around
we take the bus downtown. nobody notices
we are conjoined.

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

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 AM SUGAR WATER THE KIND THAT BEES DRINK THE KIND THAT IS MADE FROM BUTTERFLY SPIT I AM LIZARD I AM BEETLE
FROG LEGS AND RABBIT SPINES TASTE SO GOOD WHEN YOU’RE STARVING. THEY SLIDE SO FAR DOWN YOUR THROAT I THINK I MIGHT CHOKE AND DIE, I THINK I MIGHT PASS OUT AND I THINK I MIGHT SLOW DOWN.
WE ARE DRAGON HORN WE ARE MARBLE WE ARE HER DEAD PARENTS. I DON’T THINK SHE DESERVED WHAT SHE GOT. I THINK SHE DESERVED A HAPPY BIRTHDAY AND A BREATHING FATHER AND A SEVENTH GRADE.
NONE OF IT REALLY MATTERS WHEN YOU REALIZE YOUR HEADSTONE WILL SAY
BORED GIRL, DEAD GIRL, HUMAN GIRL DIED MARCH 2017. NONE OF IT REALLY MATTERS WHEN YOU NOTICE HOW BADLY SHE SAYS YOUR NAME
I DIED ON
TENTH STREET, I DIED IN
ALABAMA SOMEWHERE, SOMEWHERE WITH IV OR MAYBE WITH GEM. I DIED IN THE WASHING MACHINE AND NEVER CAME BACK. HE NEVER CAME BACK.
SHE PROBABLY CRIED, DIDN’T SHE? SHE PROBABLY DOESN’T LIKE TRAINS SHE PROBABLY DOESN’T LIKE FUNERALS BUT NO ONE REALLY DOES. EVERYONE IS
WAITING WE ARE ALL WAITING. NOTHING IS HAPPENING EXCEPT SHOWER WATER, CANTALOUPE, FERAL CATS. NOTHING IS HAPPENING EXCEPT PURGATORY AND CHEWING FAT WE WILL WAIT ALL OUR LIVES AND SOMEDAY I WILL KNOW ALL THE SECRETS

i wan t to die, it's slippery and hot, it's like... tears on frozen skin, you know, like hair and lime, the confetti kind of ugly
i think i might fall into a truck someday, i think i might be pimpled with fear hours before i die. im scared all the time, it's paralyzing and uncontrollable and i can't remember it now

i already know what i want written on my grave. i already know what im going to eat for dinner tomorrow. i already know how goldfish taste and i know what it's like to thaw a secondhand phone.

how are you going to tell me to die already! i don't know what qatar looks like, i don't know the smell of grapes or the color of grass. i have waterfalls to drown in and i have people to fall in love with, you don't know the half of it, i can't die i can't die yet

weeping sun
raining hot sweat like little metal tacks

they'll come back for you, wading through faded glittery cornfields and mirage-ridden orchards.
stay with the grasshoppers and eat the ruined, dusty crops. you'll probably grow antennae after a few weeks (just like i did)