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loisa fenichell Mar 2015
(My fingers won’t stop growing like shells!
My fingers won’t stop growing,

but without water, just with food!)*

As I stand in this bathroom stall
in this congested church
I can’t stop thinking
about how much I hate my fingers, about how much larger
they suddenly seem. This stall is stained
in blood and *****
and graffiti that reads, “girls day 11/13/14.”
Nothing seems so sad and so dry as this stall does.

I think of you sitting in the pew
with your hand on the thigh of the girl
whose hair is sheared short as though
it were Judgment Day and she were an apple tree,
its branches cut into small, fragile pieces.

On Judgment Day
my grandfather died
and everybody in my family
and everybody in my town
went to the funeral

except for me

who cried
and cried and cried

and I’m still crying

for the way his skin used to fold over
like a moon violent in its softness:

1. he’s a dead man with a body like a fish
who has just ripped off its scales.

2. he’s a dead man who before he died liked to stand
on top of the one cliff that looks out onto town  
and yell, “I will not spill my guts!”
But he died anyway.

Would I be lying if I said I loved my grandfather? Would I be lying
if I told you who I loved?

Here: I will tell you who I love, for a dare (triple doggy dare style)
Here: this is an experiment
Here: on Judgment Day (on the day my grandfather died)
we’re all experiments; we’re all experimenting with those we love
in terms of the way we kiss them:

we go into the woods
just to touch each other’s chests.

We lie on tops of rocks and I kiss you
as though I still need more fat on my huge body.
loisa fenichell Mar 2015
This feels like coming home from the moon
the way ghosts do. Do not tell me you love me
on the days that you don’t. Winters here are
far too heavy with snow, make me feel sick
inside. I will always remember sleeping with
you beneath your comforter, and I will always
hate it. We stick our fingers into slices of lemon.
When we pull them out, we see blood. This belongs
to us. I am sorry, but I am not small enough to faint.
I am sorry, but I am terrified of the boys who
lock their doors & love their mothers without realizing
what it is that they are doing.
loisa fenichell Mar 2015
The two of us pick chicken eggs
in heat sticky as a mother’s breath.
The heat that rises off of the lake
in the summer feels worse than any
awkward kiss. Your body is taller today, your hair
slightly lighter. We pick chicken eggs
for our mothers. Our mothers wear dresses red
as the entrails of flies, and sit out on porches, and drink ghostly milk
from sweaty glasses. We watch them drink the milk
and we picture them as newborns. I wonder if you sometimes
picture me as a newborn. This is the first day on which
I am afraid of you. My hands blanket my stomach (hands like wool);
my stomach is growing larger everyday, gutting itself out
the way the waves do off of the lake when it storms. It’s because I’m
feeding myself too much: this is what I get for being afraid of you.

In the summer we get too many bees. How many calories in a bee sting?
How many of them can line the inside of my mouth, all sharp and dangly,
before I die the way a snake might? How many calories
are in the shadow of a tree? Us and our eggs sit underneath the shadow
of the largest tree we can find, with me trembling, without tears, without *****,
just a wooly mouth. Today, I’ve never missed anything as much as I miss
my own ribs. Today, you look beautiful like the largest cow. Today, where
are my fingers? They used to be so long. You used to be too afraid to touch me.
loisa fenichell Feb 2015
The car we decide to drive looks
like a crooked body. When Leo and I stop at a gas station,
we enter the bathroom, look into the full-length
mirror. Even with him standing up, I can count
all 24 of his ribs, all of them poked out and looking
like nooses. I imagine witches dead and dangling
off of each one of them.

He is that thin.

The way he looks
reminds me of my father.
Right before my father died,
his face looked like cruel weather.
My father in a hospital bed,
my father in a coma.

Right after my father died I listened to “Wild Horses”
on repeat. The lyrics seemed to fit well with the white
of the hospital walls (I know I dreamed you a sin and a lie.)

When Leo and I get back into the car
I put on “Wild Horses” again.

Leo was not there the day my father died.
Leo did not come to the hospital once. Leo
has hands large as Vatican City. There have
been times in my dreams when Leo looks more
like the Pope than he does himself. Leo’s skin
is not nearly as wrinkled in real life.

In the car we eat cheese and peanut butter crackers,
drink cartons of orange juice. I eat and drink until
I feel sick. This is normal. In this heat, sticky and dry
as the corners of my mouth are, it is all I can do not to make
Leo stop the car so that I can stick my hands down my throat
and *****. The vomiting is normal, too. I have only

just met Leo. It was me who suggested this trip, my body
in his bed, me staring up at his ceiling, and it was me
who was surprised when he agreed to take it with me.
shoutout 2 my irl friend leo for letting me use his name / character in poem bears no resemblance to him
loisa fenichell Feb 2015
I have chapped lips, red skin, no bones, no blood.

Think of blood/think of hands.
Think of hands/think of blood.
Think of blood/think of hands/think of me,
with a cigarette in between my teeth like the corpse
of a puppet.

The two of us each smoke a cigarette for the first time
on streets dark as the water that leaks from a body
that has just fainted on a bathroom floor: There are times
when I picture myself fainting on a bathroom floor, with
a bit of blackish blood cornering from the tip of my mouth,
me nauseous and vomiting. I’ve never told you this and I won’t now,
even though it is night and I am lying in your bed once again,
once again my stomach feeling too much like I have just ****** an ex.  

A story about ******* my ex:
once after we smoked we tried to **** on the carpeted floor
of my father’s apartment, lots of sirens and taxis crowded
outside. I didn’t have any collarbones, any hipbones, panic
sweltered in the back of my throat like a cruel joke.

I am going to make mixed CDs for everybody I love.

I am going to let my hair down, I am going to forget to wear chapstick,
or worse I’ll remember, but my lips will still be chapped. A lot of the time
in my sleep I am asking you where my bones are. Or I am dreaming of old
women, old women who are either grandmothers or witches or both –
I can never figure it out. Neither can you, who are supposed to be so intelligent.

You are so exhausted, of everything, like a newborn.
You have never had a beard. My mouth tastes
like peanut butter. This is not a good thing, even though
I like peanut butter. My mouth tastes nauseous. Don’t you
dare kiss me. I am afraid to even kiss your cheek. You with
tall bones and lanky spine and the eyes of somebody who should be sad.
loisa fenichell Feb 2015
1.

WHENEVER I LOOK IN THE MIRROR IT IS THE SAME RED GHOST THE SAME RED GHOST THE SAME RED GHOST WHENEVER I LOOK IN THE MIRROR I AM CHANTING I AM CURSING AT YOU AT YOUR BODY WHICH IS REALLY MY BODY OR I WISH IT WAS MY BODY BECAUSE I WANT TO CURSE AT MY BODY & BECAUSE I WANT MY BODY TO BE YOUR BODY BECAUSE I WANT OUR BODIES TO BE TOGETHER ALWAYS OR NOT ALWAYS BUT A LOT OF THE TIME IN A WIDE, WIDE BED LIKE STACKS OF THE TEETH OF FOXES HAHA I THINK I LOVE YOU NO JUST KIDDING HAHA

2.

whenever I look in the mirror the mirror is red I am red my face is red

I think of you, of how beautiful you must look, were the sun to hit this mirror right here, just so, although it is night and I am alone

3.

I talk a lot about vomiting and blood

4.

WARNING: DO NOT LOVE ME BECAUSE I TALK A LOT ABOUT VOMITING AND BLOOD AND I HATE MY BODY AND MIGHT END UP HATING YOU, TOO, AND WILL BE JEALOUS

Warning: I love being soft I do not know how to be loud except for right now

Warning: sometimes I like to imagine us both with headaches, the romance of it all

We would eat rice together, and soup, and drink water, and share stories about the little visions we see with our hurt brains
loisa fenichell Feb 2015
I sit on your brown and ***** couch with my legs
folded underneath my ever-growing body.
Your house makes me want to *****, but I’m too afraid
to ***** inside of your house. You never *****: you’re too
tall and lanky, your spine too well-dressed. You never bleed, either.

I always do; always when I’m with you
there is blood on my big toe, blood soaking up
the skin that sighs in between my large legs.
Do not touch my legs, or my stomach. I used to know
when to stop with you, how to stop with you.

I stopped feeling safe with you this summer.
We both had chapped lips. The states we visited
were as dry as your dusty and battered car. We spent
this summer sleeping together atop unfamiliar grounds.

Not once did we have *** in your house, but still,
now that I’m here, my stomach is in pain as though we did.

I still want to *****. My mouth still tastes like your car, like exhaust.

Somewhere in the background you are calling me beautiful,
somewhere my eyes are closing, then everything is yelling
the way a father does. I am trying to remember being three years old again,
everything pink dresses against grey houses. How much would you
take care of me if I told you I was sick? What would you do
with my hair? I have dreams of you in which your body
looks like that of a still born’s, your face like cancer of the bone.
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