like ones

I wished to see

meeting mine

through my face
down my spine

they never did
no matter
the shape
I made

so those before
they watched me fade

I glow now
when ours get stuck

his are the ones

open me up!

Usually I write when I am sad; that is my inspiration, like your writings about death, and that’s it: the secret to writing is depression, sadness, loss, pain-- isn’t it?--and you make me want to write, but I can’t because I haven’t been sad, I’ve been content in this healing process, while the scar on my right cheekbone fades from swollen red to flat cherry, my mind fades from paranoid-obsessed to tranquil-normal, and you are a large part of that softening.

I want to write about us and you and this new chapter of my life, but between our little dates and tear-filled laughs, I can’t seem to find the time, and I’m so thankful for that and you and me, and my strength and your understanding, like yesterday, when we laid like hibernating caterpillars in our floor-bed cocoon, watching the full season of that show, followed by another movie, and yet, more television, and then slipped into bed, where I'd hoped you’d take my clothes off, and you did, in the dark, in my ***** cat-**** blankets, you lifted my Alex Grey shirt off and kissed me, pushed my left knee far away and it slid across the white sheet with a sound that made me want you more, your touches were, as always, so soft, as was the way you licked my bottom lip like candy.

I love that you do things that I am too shy to do, I’ve never had this before and I love the way I can make you laugh until you cry, and of course, your hair and big color shifting eyes and soft lips, and your slender fingers and the way they pluck delicately while your voice is quiet, giving me chills, which is why I am saying I am not sad, I am not feeling pain, I am feeling the lust and joy of healing and normalcy, I am feeling you and me and us and my new life outside of what I had known, just two months ago.

You can't act weak.

You can't show that your life
feels
utterly
unfamiliar.

Because then
they'll be the ones

lying awake at night


biting their nails


quietly crying


into the down

trying
to not look weak.

He pointed at trees
telling me their names
so I looked at him
like I saw
the future.



He puts his fingers
between
gum
and
lip
all the way down the throat.



His hands rubbed
my dead heart
pulsed
the sides and now
it sings
like it's in the
******* opera.

I ride the backs of rumbling bikes
and drink ***** in my bed.
Or play the same dumb songs
so I can speak the past.
I change my yellow hair
to red
in moments that sit still.
And I sometimes enjoy acid
in the tall grass
holding blue wolves.
I rip apart the drawing
because it stares too long
and tape it back together
but he never comes.

I tried to fill my holes with the appendages of others' bodies and at the time it was unclear but nothing was working. nothing. holes were still holy as ever-- just more noisy. loud. like one of those naked embarrassed stuttering confusion howls. and it was all a sound we all made together as I forced our jaws open just to watch them kiss and move. just to see my own civility get lost among the skins.

If I could visit us
on repeat, I would:

In the shower
and you’d tell me I look cute with wet hair

On your leather couch
and you’d bring me breakfast

Spreading out our arms
in the middle of the floor

Tied in your bedsheets
in the corner of the room

That same joke over
and over and over and over

I trace films and films, ***** straight
loose change on the nightstand
Friends smoking on the cold back deck,
some sticks to pass the time
When the music played so loud
at all those torn up parties
You were a new-found curse
We were a good song until we stuck

Still from this far side
I try to breathe,
and let go of that love
Reaching for feeling
I buried deep
way back and greeting death
Well we’ve come this far,
why can’t we rest

We saw butterflies and real evil
and the bareness of bodies
But once you jump off of that daunting cliff,
you just never come back up
I’m sure that there was more
to our overstayed goodbye
It was just too much
We hoped to drown, still swimming up

And from that far end
you try to leave,
to pick up this whole mess
And all those good ways you looked at me,
they’ve rightly been reset
And I’m still trapped here
So you go ahead




*Imitating "Gold Mine Gutted," Bright Eyes

I don't really think

I keep in mind

just how much

you broke my heart

The one that has pulled me
out of the sea
has pulled me to see
that others are still capable
of loving me

Not that he is there
or that I am here
just that it can be done

I remember
day by day with him
how to open my mouth
and taste fun

Pleasure, sorrow, truth
the teeth through a real smile

Oh, god
how it's been a while


*For the guy whose bed I ****** in

letting
go
doesn't
stop
*******

until
there's
someone
to
grab
onto

I liked biting his perfect skin.
I liked being able to look at the purple and red marks and the feelings they induced.
The feeling that he was mine.
That I had damaged him that way.

on what is now
i guess
a sunday,

i miss you. truly. painfully.
i wonder if you miss me
or if chicago has birthed
enough girls
to keep you
entertained
or maybe
interested

maybe
what i miss
has been dead
for quite.
some.
time.

about a year.
and a half. maybe
more?

and still,
through drawn-out-
annoyingly-long days,
which feel empty
without your presence

i miss you;
your shedding brown
on my shower walls,
twisted in the brushes,
static to my white sheets.

warmth
god that warmth.
i'm telling you
it's hard
to come by.

and jesus christ
your eyes;
so green,
and grey,
and blue,
like two planets i studied
through a telescope
that i never figured out
how to read.

i miss your like-hands
on my shoulder blades at night,
their grip on the
(to me)
terrifying
ground-shifting
bus ride
in the mornings.

and

i don't remember
your kiss,
but i bet anything
i miss that too.

I have used you as a weapon,
and I have used you as a gift

For retribution,
for adoration

To give pleasure,
or bring pain

Behind a ***** dumpster,
the back seat of a dark green car,
on the loose lid of their old washing machine,
the crusty crack of an overused couch.

In several steaming showers,
and in several sultry beds,
bouncing on a trampoline,
lying pants-less on prickers in the woods.

****** up in a festival tent,
the floor of a motorcycle trailer,
under covers of a comfy bed,
in a white-walled hotel room.

To bring pain,
or give pleasure

For adoration,
for retribution

I have used you as a gift,
and I have used you as a weapon

Sometimes, some days, like on a train from New York to Waterbury with a crying baby, or on your lap in a taxi driving to the apartment, I can see you staring at me in a way that feels like adoration, and it’s something I now have that I’ve always waited for.

1.
Did you
ever
think of
me
as
a happy girl?
Or
was I
continuously
such a
sad
and desperate
thing?

2.**
Is it
still true?
What
you
wrote that day
about
me
being brave?

This is a place where sleeping is hard. This is a bed, on which, I lay my skull and it opens up, not to soft dreams; instead, to loud, forgotten thoughts. I am thankful for one hour of eyes closing. Two or more, at this point-- four sleepless nights in-- is a ******* blessing. When I open my bedroom window to the sunrise that I raced and beat, the air tastes like cowboys' dreams: all wide and free. It’s baby-blue and almost-purple and a shade of blushing-pink: all the colors that make me feel new and innocent: feelings I wish I felt. I watched my cat sleep by our knees, but she gets up with the sun today, just like me. There is an empty, quiet fireplace, one story and twenty steps below my heels. I want to put a log in and allow my body rest next to its warmth on the floor, but someone has been on the couch since last night. Today is Christmas and I feel lost in thought and wakefulness. Is it okay to say my heart is breaking? Because the stitches are coming out for a third time, and I’m afraid to tell.

I’ve been chasing this for almost one whole year
with little breaks of lust
tucked in between

The corners of those dates
have dogfolded ears
which stick out to me like a quenched oak tree
in a wide, dry desert

The short pieces
that once formed our long lull
feel nothing close to my feet
coming to a stop,
turning around,
feeling kept—purposefully

My calves are knotted
and my eyelids become cracked
from chasing the Black Hole in the sky:
the hole that used to be the Brightest Sun,
My Sun, the one that I once spoke of
so sweetly:

*“It’s different from theirs
on another planet, it never sets.
There is a light with the nights-- always.

The need to search or ask for love is lost, because so much is given.

And even when I move to a new planet,
where the sun sets and rises
as the moon ascends; loneliness climbing onto its back,
its dark qualities, bordering me,
it will not receive me.

because My Sun is still bright in my mind.”

His bed was one of my favorite things; it had no box spring to hold it up, just a mattress on the floor with a giant, lumpy comforter covering our almost-naked bodies. I slept on the left side of the bed where his heater sat on the wall, loudly pumping out warm air. When lying still we could hear the quiet scratching and tapping of little mice scurrying through the walls around us. A part of me hated thinking of waking up to a mouse sitting on my chest, but another part liked the thought that mice lived around his bed, like a little mouse mansion.

How smooth his skin was… the nicest I’ve ever felt, like a baby’s, untouched and unharmed. I liked biting his perfect skin; I liked being able to look at the purple and red marks and the feelings they gave me—the feelings that he was mine; I had damaged him that way. When I ran my hands through his chin-length hair it would feel sticky with remnants of the gel that held it in place the night before.

He’d lie on top of me with his smoothness and his stickiness, and the silver necklace he always wore would hang down, cold on my bare chest. He’d wake me up like that and hand me a cup of tea with lemon, which I hated, and then a plate of breakfast, which I loved. We’d put on a movie, keeping the white blinds closed over the window, even though the Saturday winter sun beamed through, telling us it was time to start the day.

Two nights ago I sat above the new apartment sign, my naked body dangling on its brick-laid edge. Cramped lights seared the parts of my legs they touched and it reminded me of watching pieces of fish in the oven. A breeze skated across my upper arm and ******, making me cold but awakening warm memories, ones taken from the house in the city that I cannot outrun. The fingers on my right hand prodded a cigarette into the crack of my lips as I tried to remember those four numbers, 37 and 62, and the circumstances under which I had deemed myself happy.

It seemed that we were almost-always-unabashedly *******, or at least I was, but there was that thoroughly **** time-- the night at the lake. Graceless games of Truth or Dare escorted shots of ***** into our mouths and conducted secrets out. Bottles’ tin caps clicked open as we split the clear contents inside, shook the smaller one, held it to the nose, waited for the levels of our laughter to rise like specs in the night sky: Pop, pop, pop! Up and up we went, watching down below, leaving life behind, fading away like the dimmed city stars.

I pulled the cigarette out of my mouth, releasing the white smoke. My mind searched for a time in life when smiling had come so easily, but the answer stayed the same.

The time I saw New York
I cried
I cried for all the things I could remember
in a thin burgundy slip on some empty set of stairs

It was two minutes before midnight
“A New Year”
Something I wanted so much to be true
but I hid my face and wept

When I saw
that all the young girls and old men
in fancy clothes down below
didn’t disappear
or move or change

Instead, danced in circles
mirroring the portraits of my shame

Spinning
around and around,
Stuck in their own involuntary pulls
of gravity

I waited
for what felt like a day
in a glass room with skin-colored curtains
things going in, things coming out

He came in, panting hard
and kneeled beside the cold table where I sat
Face reddening in the cheeks
on the nose,
just like mine

When I told him,
two tears fell out of each his eyes
and I thought
I was made
of stone

He carried me through the wet April snow,
put us in a cab
and took me home

There was a bath running
and steam on the mirror

I got undressed for the third time that day
and sank
into the hot
white bubbles

He held my right knee
with his left hand
and told me
we weren’t going to school tomorrow

Someone once close to me
will whisper something significant

And my eyes will wander

Over hills
and small lakes
Through the houses of the young

But no sights of the known
will be seen

Because I will have forgotten

I come here to ******* and cry
where it is silent and loud at the same time

the porcelain statues watch and release temporal tears
in a painful response
to my nonsensical quivering of the mouth
and squinting of the eyes

there it is again
that baked salt
on the roof of my mouth, the ends of my fingernails

It almost came last night,
but I stopped it with a breath before it got close
to ruining me again

Those happy parts of my life are distant memories
they're so far away
I can't try to meet the girl I was
not even halfway

I used to ask myself which era of my life was the happiest
or most fulfilling
now I only ask myself why this one is so lost

Where have I gone?
I wish I could ask, but I'm the only one who knows how

To help her
find her way back
or hopefully forward

locusts and loud crickets splay
soft songs over hot swells

a banjo strums
its twines of moss
snap the frail shell

its conjuring my missed sounds
they go faintly past my ears

Life is so funny

because it gives you all of these

amazing, indescribable, breathtaking experiences

surrounded by love

And then you die.

As a girl, her hands traced it in the soft darkness of summer
And that was all it needed: the tips of 4 fingers to say, “I will consume you now,
I will overtake your everything, your you.”
She promised and she didn’t know, and it happily devoured her
She was happy, too

As a woman, her hands snapped it in the hidden places of night
And that was all it needed: the evidence of 1 act to say, “I might disappear now,
But I will continue to consume you.”
She felt her old promise, and it easily burned her
But she had been easy, too

It is a shower for one, a leftover shirt, a journal
It is loneliness, cluelessness, a hoping
It is a nightmare, a few blunt words, a knot
It is reconnection, thankfulness, a knowing

It was a day, a smell, a letter, a clover
It was joy, a warm bed, it was a kiss and a day made
It was a basement, a taste, a song, a child lost
It was pain, it was bareness, it was a declaration and tears

It can be 6 years of life and it can be a home
It can be 2,190 days drugged and it can be a prison
It can be willfulness
It can be contract

Yet it remains a system of organs, of muscles, of bones
It is held together with smoke-roasted skin

It remains a collection of memories, of touch, of letters
It is held together with never-ending care

This means we don’t wear clothes
This means $13.99 priced ***** until 5a.m.
It means blankets and music and dancing freely
in the most messy littered living room
This means maybe knocking a candle over
or two
and lighting a fire
This means leaping hard
to drown out our sadness
It means kindness and caring and support
and love

Q: When a man chokes you in a crowded bar as he looks past the brim of his black hat and matches his eyes with yours, are you supposed to feel self-hatred?

Q: When a man wipes your tears away with his button-down shirt, tells you it’s all right, and wraps his arms around you, are you supposed to feel love?

Q: When a man sets a knife down, pushes your face into a brick wall and pulls your pants off, are you supposed to feel shame?


A: I really don't ******* know anymore.

The realization that the notion of change means nothing, brought in by tears at the exact magic stroke of midnight in Donald Trump’s New York hotel, Manhattan. Bookstores buying everything in sight to build an impression, being calm being calm, loving hands are held. Seeing winter trees so quiet in such a small mulled-wine-man-made town, searching for dead women down the curves of subdivisions in the dark. Waking wrapped inside scratchy childhood blankets that kept me awake last night, kissing that face near running hot water, shivering legs always trying not to be heard

It's the way I have to write when I drink
I can't deny myself the pleasure
Funny thing is
It's not pleasure
it's torture
It's the way I'd shower
and you'd have to get in with me
The way I still have to listen to your voice
humming out of my phone
keeping me sad, keeping me thoughtful
The way you'd kiss me
I'd have to kiss you back
twenty times over
I've held my breath for three months
and either have to keep holding it
not breathing
Or I have to take a big breath
and let go

I know you
probably better than most
You bring me tears on Sundays
Self hatred in the mornings
You corrode my liver
And shame me with embarrassment
to a point that makes me wish I was dead
You are degrading
And hating
And sickening
But one of the truest friends
I have ever known

I once dated a man,
no—a boy
who took a bath with me.
While we soaked
he said,
“Vaginas are gross,”
and I never stood up again.

Being human
the ability to regenerate
body, spirit, mind

Every seven years, I've heard

There she goes
she was strong, she was different
She was She

Through the pain and ecstasy
itching to get out, fighting to be let in

We expand,
minds somehow allowing us to forget
the knife, the black coat
sounds of running through an inch of snow

We move past,
letting ourselves live

And some days freeze up,
where it is said
that time stops

And I think about the way
I've moved on

At 4a.m. when it goes quiet
it’s just the chimes and me again
and I feel how lonely they must feel
calling and singing
with no one awake to hear them

The only dreams I have consist of pain
skin, stomach, palms, face
I can't sleep

And I know the only person
who could make me feel okay
would only be capable of doing that
three years ago

Let me in
Up the stairs
The cold hall and through the always-opened door
I'll sit myself far and try to look pretty
Into your mouth and down your lungs
Let me know the air you breathe, like I used to
My mouth will move, too
Our sounds will mix and harmonize
In the exact way you don't want them to

For the past seven months I’ve been crawling around on my hands and knees, blindfolded, with cotton in my ears. My movements have had no real direction, I have gone where I felt pleased to go, where the ground that touched the bare skin of my knees and palms felt somehow softer or more interesting. And yes I was blind, and no I could not hear; it was all done by heart.
Some choices I made were complete mistakes, and these wrong choices of direction led me to sharp floors which happily left my body bleeding, without bandages to stop the draining, and it weakened me.
But some places I wound up were surprisingly wonderful. They brought me laughter, ***, adventure, trust, new companions.
I’m in one of those places now where the ground is soft and it is calm, which I am thankful for, but it is dull.
I go to sleep almost every night unconvinced, unhelped, wrapped in sheets of ice and misinterpretation. I want more emotion-- the sting of rejection or the dizzying effects of nervous stimulation when taking a chance on a half-stranger at a party. I don’t want the same dry kiss placed perfectly on my bottom lip day after day. I want the kiss of someone who is dying to touch me, to make me smile, to see something new.
I want to know I have the freedom to swing one way or the other, even if I might end up bleeding. No sight, no sound, no sureness, just me and whichever way I choose to crawl in that moment.

Such a serious bird you are

with the premeditated patterns of a hawk

decisions made using wide eyes and fixed pupils

But I think underneath, you’re a pelican

the kind I’ve seen on cereal commercials

You’ve just taken a roll in the dirt

and it’s covered your color

So soon I’m going to bite your straight-lined wings

and show you what it’s like

to free fall

It was just that one day and every day following that I wished more than ever that he was real. Where the **** was he? Sure, I didn’t expect him to crawl down from the building next to us the second I saw the knife, but it was definitely within the “This isn’t happening” part in my head, as I was dragged into the garage and pushed up against the brick wall, that I think he could have managed to creep up and punch that guy in the face. And the stomach, or throw him into the black truck that I was next to. Why wasn’t he showing up? Everybody gets one, right? Why wasn’t this mine? Why did he always show up for Mary Jane? Everybody got one I thought. Even after it was over and the fear was gone and the shock flared through my body, charging me almost to the point of vomiting, I still wanted him there. I've never been so ******* disappointed.

There’s a tapeworm inside me
I’ve tried to get it out for years
everything I put in, it eats up

I tried to drown it with *****
and tire it with no sleep
and cut it out with another’s love

But I’ve realized it will never leave
because once you get your first tapeworm
it stays with you

So I’ve befriended it;
when it’s hungry, I feed him,
when it’s sad, I rock his sorrows in my warm belly

Maybe someday it will leave
but I fear that day
I’ll just begin
growing another inside me

suckin’ down cancer

thinking about thoughts

being drunk
and sad

always so secretly sad