I think I loved you most the winter your heating was broken
And we’d stay inside all morning
Pretending to complain that we couldn’t get out of bed
Our clothes becoming little islands on the floor,
Ones that we could not quite find the courage to visit

Your hand stayed glued to my hip,
Your breath warming my shoulder
Like a long drag of whiskey
That kind that had a home so far away,
In a glass bottle on top of your refrigerator.
The one that would not be opened
Until that fateful day in February,
When everything went wrong

And on that unbearable night
When you joked that you’d freeze to death if I left you
There was a long silence
Like it might be true.

Now it’s warm enough
That I show too much skin when sitting in bars
And you avoid me like the plague,
Whispering in any girl’s ear that’s near to you
Every time you see me watching out of the corner of your eye

We should have stayed inside when the ice began to melt
Because I think
When those doors opened and we finally ventured outside
The world had changed,
And so had you and I.

I'm restless like a low-class little nothing. Or a something. Or something, I don’t know. I tried to run away when I was twelve. I kicked puddles, ate a package of crackers, came home. I wish I could come home now. But he doesn’t kick puddles, he kicks the stairs loudly when he’s drunk and can’t walk up. He stains the mattress when he ****** the bed. He calls me from the gas station at 4 am saying “I love you baby, come pick me up.” And I shouldn’t, but I will. Will I? I will. And I really want to come home now, I miss the comfort of my warm bed and your soothing hands and would you make me tea when I am sick? I know I’m older, but let’s please forget. He fights and get cuts and scrapes and scabs and bleeds them onto me and I don’t think it’s gross. I think it’s gross when he tries to make love to me. and it hurts. We are not one, we are two. Making love, the term makes me laugh. It’s called *******, I think. It’s not like in the stories or the movies or the fantasies, *******. But this is what grownups do, right? Smoke cigarettes on street corners and don’t use condoms and eat ecstasy like aspirin and sweat and dance and collapse and come home and cry. Because they used to be the good girls, right? Was I a good one? Oh, no, I really want to come home now. Plane tickets are gold and he is too afraid to fly and too afraid to let go of my arm. The bruises are okay, I like the shape they make. It reminds me of a horror movie. I used to not be able to watch them, I was too young. You won’t be able to sleep, you’d say. But I can’t sleep now and I think I might still be too young. I want to come home now, can I please?

If I could only sit still, I would write a million words about us, about you, about me at the bottom with my hands on that rock.
Scratching my fingernails against it so that I could go home and complain to you about how much my tiny hands hurt, and how I could not hold them in yours.
If I could hold my train of thought, I would type out a memoir about you and me and the time we decided to make love in a parking garage elevator late at night, my back against the glass. And who might’ve seen us while they walked home.
Their names and their faces, all those people that aren’t us. I would write about how when those doors opened, the world outside had changed and so had we.
If I could keep my fingers steady, I would dial your number on my telephone. I would cry your name into the speaker, and I would wait patiently for you to take me back.
I would be on hold forever.

The city's best hypnotherapist
Can't seem to trick me into thinking you don't exist
With the shades drawn in his office
I remember tiny flashing thoughts
Of your breath rattling in your chest
Why won't you stop smoking cigarettes?
Of handwritten letters, begging
Your hands around my waist
Or as I wait,
the aspirin sliding down my throat
Thinking it would cure me of my broken heart
Of the words "I don't love you anymore"
Or
"I've been ******* her for months"
He can't make the thoughts fade
Of me on my back in the park
Blowing out smoke
Waiting for death while you fall in deep
Deeply, deeply, deeply
Out of love with me
I'm getting sleepy, very sleepy
As I fall into the grasp
There is no erasing
For what slipped through all the spaces.

And I'm in love with you all the time
with the words that you say and
the love in your mouth
the way your tongue feels as it rolls over my eyeballs,
the name of your first dog you couldn't tell me.
your legs as tall as buildings
they crush cars
and they crush me
underneath,
with my teeth sunk into your shoulders
yours wrists turning
and your bones cracking
lovey baby lovey baby
are you slurring your way home again?
Just in time to stop traffic,
thighs trembling,
I've buried all your clothes in my backyard again.

Wild glare, wild nights
Peter Pan and Wendy
Love at first sight.
Car door,
Smashed bones
I lied I lied I lied
"I didn't take him home."
Melted brain,
Moment passed
You darling narcissistic brat
I never, no I never
never said I'd take you back.

how stupid i have been to think "i love you"
means "i won't **** someone behind your back
and pretend
i'm the righteous one"

I was buying coffee in the morning, by myself as ******* usual, when I realized what we had got into the night before. In a haze I’d woken up with blood on the pillow from my disgusting cracked dry split aching slurring ******* singing ****-teasing foot in between my teeth spitting pulling bleeding stinging lips, and you were gone again. All cause these days I drink more whiskey than water. Because I saw it in a movie with a cute little proper British girl in a tiny dress order it. Whiskey gin-jah, she said to the fictional bartender. But I haven’t drank ginger ale since I was a sick complaining little eleven year old goblin who thought that *** was for people in love and that they just lay there naked and married each other or the movie ended or something. Now I’m only left with half the equation. Whiskey. Sometimes when I’m really bored with my girlfriends I tell them I want to get drunk and smash glass bottles in the street. They smile with their lipstick teeth and talk about their college degrees. Usually I just **** myself. So I wake up with cracked lips and a hangover and I walk to get coffee or water or new shoes or something, and then I stop and I remember what weird things we said to each other last night. After we didn’t make love, we ******. After we ****** and we didn’t get married and the movie didn’t end or whatever, after that. It was really cold so we stayed in bed and you held your cell phone open waiting for your ex girlfriend to call and say oh I need you I need your **** oh please come back. She won’t ever call, I hope you realize. She won’t call like my ex won’t look me in the eye, like he will tug and grab and whisper in whatever ****’s ear at the bar when he sees me. He won’t call and I’ll ******* run like hell if he tries to say hello so I don’t slip and fall on the way his voice sounds. On the feelings of his breath on my shoulders in the morning and the way he says tomato or how he always said, oh you’re so wet right now after he just came in me and he wanted to have *** again. No, what? You just came inside me you ******* idiot. God I hated that. But I miss the smell of his tee shirts and his box cutter toenails scratching my legs while I fell asleep. And maybe how he said to me, everything happens for a reason. But I don’t know. So I’m laying there and you’re laying there and you’re unpeeling my stupid ugly naked skeleton body with your eyes in the dim light of your cell phone that has no messages. And you said to me, I remember it now, that you wanted to play my ribs like a piano. You pressed pressed pressed until I thought I would have bruises. Like I was your property. You *******. You wondered aloud in your dumb voice with your dumb thoughts how hard you would have to press for them to break. And now with my coffee half spilt on the sweater covering my bent up/almost broke up ribs, that coffee that will never make it to my horrible gross decomposing bleeding lips, I imagine if you had actually done it. I imagine the sound of the late night phone call to 911. When you would have to dial my mother and cry into the phone, I did it I did it. I finally broke her. And she would ask, who the **** is this? And say, don’t call here anymore. And roll over and go back to sleep. You could have watched the sunrise on the roof of my apartment with my ex and passed the half-empty whiskey bottle back and forth talking about my crooked teeth. Two boys and their broken doll. That’s the kind of ****** up weird **** we got into last night. And the man behind the counter wants to know if I need change.

And after you left I threw myself to the wind
starting fires you weren't there to put out, down a rabbit hole with your tether around my neck
pulling me back to nothing.
You and your girl drinking tea in the city and laughing,
young urbanites
even in my own dreams,
you're wiping my tears on your toast.
And I really meant that I was gone this time
done for,
crazy,
ripped and pulled.
Until one day I sat down to write
and the words stuck in my mouth came running out like spit and blood and drool and blood and blood and blood
a piece of writing that no one can read
a piece of trash I forgot to throw away.
Oh how everything,
reminds me of you.