my hands are stained brown & contrast well with the bright whiteness of my quilt: white & cool as her tennis shoes, as the tennis shoes of the girl whose name I know you think of when we lie in bed & you press your hand to my stomach as though it were some kind of important holy grail, but it’s not (my stomach isn’t small enough to be holy). I tell myself that the brown is blood, from a bad ****** nose, but I know better. my roommate knows better, too, so do my suitemates. they notice when the food goes missing & they notice when the tiles of the bathroom floor ***** up like the face of a vulnerable boy. I’m getting better, though, & I’m constantly telling them that. my hands are getting less marked, less *****, less covered in *****. I do it usually, claw my body usually, when I see pictures of her (or when you reject me or worse when you reject me for her), which is why I usually don’t let myself see pictures of her. there are days when I see her being all-beautiful out in a large field with hair long like a glass of fresh milk & teeth clean as a never-worn hospital gown. that’s when I’m on the bathroom floor wishing you’d call me or ] thinking about another boy (a boy like you: a boy I once told myself I liked or loved, but didn’t, just wanted him to love me). the boys come when my body turns lonely like a mosquito bite on the sole of a child’s foot. my body turns lonely & I see my eyes burning at the beach with my body all self-conscious in a blue one-piece bathing suit. I love to swim but I hate my body (something seems so ****** up about that). I wish I loved tennis. I see her tennis shoes in my head & I picture her body smoothly across the court. I see her body playing like a sailboat with her hands gripping the racket like a new set of clean teeth.

A boy’s foldout couch : three of us tangled together, me whispering I HATE MY BODY  
(5 Artopee Way
Nyack, NY 10960
845-353-5555)



(Do not) Refill                                            Dr. Come Help Me Now I
   Am Pinching At My Skin
                                                                       Waiting For It To Shed Away Like Baby’s Hair
                              (I HATE MY BODY)
                (I WANT IT TO DISAPPEAR THE WAY THE SKIES IN JULY DISAPPEAR INTO SIDEWALK)
                (I SPEND HOURS WITH MY FACE OVER TOILET BOWLS & NOW MY HANDS LOOK LIKE ROADS, ALL CUT UP & BRUISED)  





FENICHELL, LOISA
120 CASTLE HEIGHTS AVE





TAKE 1 TABLET DAILY : CROSS OUT : READ: DO NOT TAKE AGAIN
(he has been kissing her all night do not kiss him do not kiss him three bodies all tangled together on a foldout couch DO NOT TAKE AGAIN)





BUPROPHION HCL XL 300 MG TAB
GENERIC FOR: WELLBUTRIN XL 300 MG TABLET

Drug Exp: 8/19/14

On a Saturday night in September
I am wrapped up with a boy
in between sheets that look
like photographs of my parents’
wedding. The next morning I flee
to his bathroom, look in the mirror,
see bruises like rats’ heads trailing
my too soft abdomen, come close
to fainting on his bed with my head
in his lap and ***** stuck in my throat,
strong sweat pasted to my forehead.
His palm is on my head.
He is calling me by another girl’s name
and I am feeling like 12 years old again,
like 12 years old I am fainting
after somebody talks about ****.

Another night in October the moon
is bright and full like the belly of a pregnant
woman. I find myself alone again in a
bathroom with eyes red as the breath
of a newborn. I hate myself in cycles,
the way water does, my flesh like
the skin of moths. This boy is still
calling me by another girl’s name, if
he calls me at all. But his voice when I hear
it sounds like my old baby teeth.

November I should not let anybody
hold me in the way that I am. November
I find my body lying flat against hard pavement
listening to songs about roads and graveyards
and driving. I still don’t know how to drive.
This boy does, though, and I tell him that this
is why I still talk to him. But he sees the way
my fingers tear at the crooks of my knees
as if they were cadavers. He offers
up his body to me like a lamb’s head.
But I am no god, no saint, and he knows this.
He does not come for me.

Your legs are not mine/these legs are not mine

There is a girl somewhere (on my bed) and she is crying in me
with me
when I see you I see

flesh and her
and three people entangled like meaningless holidays
on a rough and broken couch

my body stretched out
my face wet with newborn sweat

you compared what happened with us to a birth
but this is cold stinging your throat

we are like childhood beestings

we will always be
like childhood beestings

I tell myself that it is worse being in his car than it is being in his bedroom. His bedroom walls are yellow like sick ****** face. His car is green as childhood woods (I remember a man in those woods, all old and covered in beard. He was cradling me like hard ******* candy).

This boy is a boy with a body like a mountain of beady snakes. This boy is a boy I am telling myself is touching me (cradling me like hard ******* candy). In his bed I am hiding in between his sheets and they are white and I am trying to turn into a saint, trying to forget that his face is somewhere between my legs, his face like a cruel song. It takes me two months to realize that he is never going to call me saintly, never going to view me  as a god. I am just shot deer, all leftover entrails, all spillage; somewhere in a suburban town, past some quick trees, on a quick paved grey road, I am being run over by a black Schwinn bicycle the way this boy runs over my body on nights when his face is feeling soft and pudgy and vulnerable and drunk, full of aging beer.

This boy lying in between my sheets
has a body like a ****** nose. If it
were up to me his teeth would be bruised,
but instead his shins are covered in broken
thunder. Last night lying next to him was dark
as damp childhood hair (from getting out
of the pool, from just learning how to swim, from just
learning how to feel ashamed of my body, all
wet like fresh lips). Last night was so dark I had
to hold my breath: held it for 7 seconds before
I yelped for air.

This boy is not mine. This boy
is like somebody else’s death: he is hardly with me.
This boy sits still and cross-legged in between
my sheets like a black crab. He looks all skewed
and crooked, all out of place. When he touches me
I kick him, my legs flustering out and then recoiling
back in like dying ancestors.

Lately it’s felt like I’m dying over and over again,
like I am dying with him. This morning I wait
for him to leave, and then to die, and then to wake up
again, spring up like small new gravestones.

Every boy I have ever loved has killed himself.
Murmur the word “suicide” to me before I sleep
and I will dream about the days when I used to feel
dizzy, always, when I used to faint, always, when
I used to peck at my mosquito bites, always.

The first time I ride the subway by myself
I am 14 and expecting ghosts: I wait for them
to appear in the train windows like strong clusters

of wind but instead everything is still and crowded
with nothing but ripples of people. The first time I

ride the subway by myself I am 14 and expecting
some sort of suicide. Once I read about a woman

who hung herself from the metal bars that line
the ceilings of the trains, hung herself

like a constellation dragging down from
a lit-up sky. I drew a picture of the woman

and then a picture of her family but then
realized she probably didn’t have a family

and quickly threw the picture away.
My mother found it, saved it, it hangs
on the fridge now. The first time I ride the subway

by myself I am 14 and I want to kiss someone. (I come close
to touching a stranger’s hand, then his waist, then I recoil.)