maybe it's the way i was raised
or maybe it's my cancer rising
but i only ever feed myself well when i am feeding someone else.
i mean,
my love language is soup.
which is why my whole house smells like curry, garlic, and ginger,
why over the course of a couple of days i spent twelve of the hours i had meant to spend sleeping
pressing blocks of tofu,
individually sauteing seven different types of vegetables in fresh herbs and aromatics,
and really testing the capacity of my roommate's food processor.

I don't remember when I first started believing that everything that feels good is either dangerous or morally wrong, or, most likely, both, but I imagine it started with the church.

I don't remember when I first started believing that love looked less like a fairytale and more like my best friend falling asleep in my sweater with her head on my shoulder, so close I could smell my shampoo in her hair, but I imagine it started with her.

I once spent six months eating cold unseasoned green beans out of a can for almost every meal because suffering for suffering's sake feels righteous when you believe that you deserve it. I once spent ten years pretending not to be a **** for essentially the same reason.


And lord, am I ever. A ****, I mean. A big, masculine ****,
Like,
I have always been more king Kong than Fay wray.
Like,
I have always been taught to be afraid of what my hands can do.
I remember big fat ***** depicted as monstrous,
Only able to destroy,
And I wonder if that's why there are so many of us who make things.


i keep a knife in my pocket most of the time because i have been backed into enough corners to be cautious,
but mostly,
i use it for fixing things and cutting fruit.
danger is contagious and i do what i can to stop it from making me dangerous,
I do not want to be a frightened and frightening thing.
but one time a woman i really liked tried to wake me from a nightmare,
and with ghosts still circling my head
Before I was awake or aware,
i punched her in the face.
When I opened my eyes, there was fear in hers and blood pouring from her nose and no amount of apologizing could unbreak what I had broken.
she kissed me and told me she still trusted me and it made me remember all the ****** noses that i had once forgiven with similar ease.
So i told her i was thinking of moving to oregon and that work was getting busy and that i would wash and return her tupperware before she left in case it was a while before i could see her again.
i hugged her at her car
and she held me for too long
like she didn't even notice all the sharp things where my skin was meant to be.
i spent the next six months
bleeding venom and avoiding handshakes.

And I don't mean to say that I am violent,
Because I am not,
I do not yell
Or degrade
Or intimidate,
I never sleep punched anyone else before or since,
I would never hit a friend or a lover while awake. I only wear spikes to make people think before they touch me, I am all flight or freeze. But violence is not the only way to hurt someone you love. Shutting down or running away can break a heart too and blood all looks the same when it's drying on your hands no matter where it comes from. So now I try to protect the people I love from everything dangerous, including getting too close to me.


i keep a knife in my pocket most of the time,
but on days when my body remembers in the present tense,
i take a knife from the kitchen block instead.
i cut up limes and sweet potatoes,
drown out the sirens in my head
with bubbling water and simmering oil.

i'm still learning what love looks like,
and i am so tired of breaking,
and maybe this is why every time i see someone beautiful i fantasize about building them a house,
maybe this is why i make soup.

i am only easy to love
on the days when love is not a life raft.
i have never been afraid of fire
but i am frozen earth
full of ancient seeds,
already there are new green things pushing up through cracks in me
and i worry that if the ground were to thaw,
softer things might take root,
and i am afraid that anything delicate might not survive in me.

It's not that I am wholly unable to love recklessly,
I run whole body into the ocean every time i see her,
emerge breathless and invisible and singing praises to nobody at all but the stars.
The last time I wanted to die, I took an overnight bus to the ocean. I held my breath and dipped my whole body beneath the surface of the sea,
tried to practice drowning but instead,
by mistake,
fell in love all over again with the waves and the moon and the stars,
All the beautiful things too big and too powerful for me to hurt accidentally.
I am a soft foolish thing,
All alive and longing.
I have loved fully
What I always knew I could not hold,
My tiny heart so full of moon and sea
And every mountain
That every place is now both a home
And not.

I am not as afraid as I used to be,
I have done a lot of therapy,
And maybe one day I will sleep next to somebody breakable without feeling guilty.
And I think maybe one day,
I will trust myself enough to love the softest things that love me in the fearless way I love the ocean.
And I don't know when that day will be,
Or whether you will stick around long enough to find out,
but i do know that i want you always to be warm and full of good things,
so in the meantime,
If you want it,
I made you some soup.

imagine
you: fire
and me: arsonist

i mean,
i think you're hot.
i mean,
i know how to get you going,
but i would never claim to be the boss of you,
i mean,
i marvel at your power.
i mean,
i don't mind if you scorch my eyebrows,
i wanna smell you when i take my hair down.

sometimes,
we bring out the worst in each other,
i mean,
always,
we bring out the most in each other.
we run the gamut from
criminals
to revolutionaries
but we are best
when we are both.

imagine
me: ice cream,
and you: spoon,
i mean i wanna fill you up,
i mean you make me melt,
i mean
sometimes the sweet things
are simple.

imagine me museum,
all history and velvet ropes,
imagine you scholar,
head full of context and hands in your pockets,
harmonious reciprocity.

imagine this a love song,
me Billy Joel
and you,
Uptown Girl,
imagine the miles stretched out between us crumpled away like two ends of a paper ball,
imagine you road trip
and me apology
imagine us
in some hot town that knows us,
with hair that smells like smoke and matches in our pockets.

“be safe,
get some rest,
text me when you get home.”

i used to love a boy
who never lived to be a man.
i was fourteen years old,
in a psychiatric hospital
after swallowing so many
of my mother's pills
that i couldn't remember
her name.
he told me i'd been crying
and rocking back and forth
for two days.
i told him i was cold.
he gave me his sweater.

“be safe,
get some rest,
text me when you get home.”
things i say so often
they have become more incantation
than conversation,
a protective spell rubbed
river-rock smooth
by worried hands.

i say,
“you look cold, take my jacket.”
i say,
“have you eaten today?”
i say,
“here, drink some water.”

i do not say what i am thinking,
which is,
“baby,
the sharks are circling again,
where is the blood
coming from this time?”

because when i said,
“i love you, stop dying,”
he said,
“go home.”
i said,
“i already am,”
so he killed a fifth of tequila,
cut us both with the bottle,
and passed out in the bathtub.

so when i see the dark fingers
that tug at your bones,
i will not ask you any questions
i don't think you can answer.
tonight,
we will only talk about things
we have words for,
and if that means
all we talk about
is stars,
then i will spend
a lifetime of tuesday nights
talking to you about stars.
and if staying alive means
going away,
then i will buy you a bus ticket
and tell you to never look back.
dragons were not meant to live
pinned under glass and i would
never ask you to be
anything else
to fit comfortably.

and the last day i see you,
i will not say goodbye.
i will not tell you i'm afraid,
i will tell you i love you,
crank up the stereo,
punk rock screaming
at a purple sky,
and i will drive you home
one last time.

the moon is a lesbian,
which i know because she has
kissed every inch of my body
more often than any lover
i've ever known.

i have watched the way
she kisses the ocean
and guides her gently home,
have seen her face reflected with love
in the ever-changing sparkling surface of the sea,
and i don't know any other word
to describe a love like that.

the day we smoked a joint in the woods
and then walked eight miles in the rain
to gas station coffee,
we passed two other gas stations on the way,
but you were holding my hand and
i didn't want it to stop.
you said
"you're beautiful"
and i said
~~~~
because you were the most remarkable
person i had ever seen,
leaned up against the hood of a stranger's car,
smoking a cigarette like a lesbian james dean.

you'd call yourself
"lesbian" sixteen times before breakfast
until it stopped sounding like venom
and started to sound like a prayer,
because how could i ever look at
love like this and feel anything
but holy?
my new church was the woods
by the river,
and i learned to worship
at the altar of your body.
you took me in your arms and you said,
"baby,
you're beautiful,"
and i told you i loved you
because beautiful had never
meant anything to me
except that i had something
people could take.
i heard "beautiful" from your lips and it sounded
like a blessing.

the moon is a lesbian because
she knows how to love without taking,
i have scarcely loved a man
who has learned how to love without taking,
that is not to say that no man
can love without taking,
but it is a skill that is learned
through a grief
that i have shared with every
queer woman i have ever met.

when you kissed me in the attic,
it was not the first time
i had been kissed,
but it was the first time that a touch
felt like a gift and not a punishment,
and it was the first time i understood
why people write love songs.
i wanted to write you a love song,
but after a lifetime afraid of my own voice,
all i could sing you were hymns.
not because i had made you an idol,
but because your hands on my body
made me feel clean for the first time.

the moon is a lesbian because
the night i stumbled out of
the apartment of the man
who only loved me when
he thought he could keep me,
blood on my lips and nowhere to go,
the moon kissed my fingertips
and she said,
"baby,
what took you so long?
welcome home."

i had this dream
where i was locked in a glass room,
gasping for air with
thick fingers wrapped tight
around my throat.
the streets outside were crowded,
people stared and screamed,
but no one ever tried
to break the glass.

that's how monday mornings feel,
walking down halls filled with
well-meaning people who would
help if they knew how.
i am a butterfly pinned,
broken and bright and iridescent,
and you cannot look away but
what can you do?
i cannot ask anyone to stick
shattered shards into their skin
just to step between me
and an oncoming train.
i want no one else's knuckles
broken for my safety.
sometimes the wolves
outsmart the shepherds,
and i am softer than i seem
and not built to fight forever.

in my dream,
i kicked my boot bottom-first
through the glass
and sprinted a path through the crowd,
****** and breathless and bruised
and alive because
i know when to stop waiting for
things to make sense.
sometimes the monsters are
stronger than you'd hoped
and some things are not worth
holding onto.

i stopped seeing the shame in
running for my life
the day i ran out of other options.

every night you take
your illness up to bed,
the only lover you ever learned to trust.
you open strange eyes on strange mornings
in a body that is not yours,
in a place you don't remember.
you ought to know better.
count all the tiles on the ceiling
thirteen times
and press your teeth
into your tongue.
repeat until you trust yourself
not to say something odd.
it is hard to love a woman
who speaks with spirits over breakfast.

cheap ***** goes down easier
when you're already drunk,
so **** it up and
swallow so much poison
you forget how much
you hate it here.
dance with everyone who asks
and pretend their hands
don't burn your hips.
train your lips to smile
and you'll look just like the living.
it is hard to love a ghost.

a little perfume at your collarbones,
and your lover won't ever notice
the scent of melancholy
that lingers in your hair like smoke.
your red lips will distract
from the disembodied screaming
that tends to tumble at your heels.
you can hide dark circles
under your eyes
by lying face-down on the floor
until you remember how to be fun.

the night is for lovers,
but the stars burn your eyes
and your rusted mannequin body
does not remember how to dance.
the night is for falling,
and police lights,
and crying in a waffle house parking lot.
smile like you still have a chance.

the night knows your secrets,
but if you are lucky,
she just might pretend to forget.

monday morning
and my skin still looks like
something you could touch,
but we both know from experience
it would burn you if you tried.
my mouth in the mirror
is soft and still alive
and hides the ghostly grinning skull
we remember from our nightmares.

wednesday every pore is oozing poison,
and when you tell me
i look pretty in my dress,
i can feel the sharp edges of scales
pressing up through thin flowered fabric.
wednesday i slash my lips red,
and as in nature it's a warning.
i am only an animal and
i have been consumed enough times
that my body has
made itself dangerous.

friday is a heavy knit sweater
even though it is warm,
because friday my chest
is caving in
and i cannot stand
even the accidental brush
of someone else's skin on mine.
friday no one tells me
i look pretty
and i fill my lungs a little fuller.

sunday is disembodied echoes,
a bathroom floor,
and a body that has never been mine.
sunday is gorgeous,
because i am not real,
and i am not here,
and all the things that have
happened to this body
have nothing at all to do with me.
sunday i am nowhere, which is
as close as i have ever been
to free.

there is blood in the streets
and dripping from the slick soles of shoes
of the smiling old men
who sell souls and buy lunch,
who never see and who
never stop smiling.

there is blood in the streets
and flaking like rust from the walls
of the banks and the prisons,
staining the palms
of the rich and the ruthless.

there is blood in the streets,
a graveyard full of my friends
and a holy battlefield
where kids with bandanas and baseball bats
fight for their lives and for those
whose guts stain the whole city red.

there is blood in the streets,
and the rich white men build themselves bridges
so far above the red running river
that they can call this peace.

there is blood in the streets,
but all you can see is a trash can on fire
and the scattered shards of shattered glass.

i was afraid i would do something crazy,
like shoot myself in the head
or call you
(which is sort of the same thing
only slower)

so i drove to the mountains
and climbed barefoot to the top
and watched the sunset
with my feet in the dirt.

you left flowers on my counter
in a cup.
wildflowers. like daisies,
but with thicker roots
and heartier stems.
beautiful and built to thrive.

you left flowers on my counter,
told me you loved me,
and left me sleepy and hopeful
and standing in the doorway.
you did not stop to check the lock.
i think you are the bravest person
i have ever met.

you are a thunderstorm.  an earthquake.  a volcano.  you could rip a ******’s throat out with your teeth.

you are the hot and heaving forest
sliced with sticky shimmery things,
(like bat-heads and beetlewings),
the slushing gushing river with its
tripping tumbling foam,
teeming with salmon headed
upstream to spawn.

your hand in mine is sometimes
the only thing keeping
my head above water,
but if my grief is ever heavier
than you can hold,
i forgive you in advance
for letting go.

georgia summers are so heavy and hot
that breathing is a chore,
which is something i never remember until fall.
four months of bleached bones and choking on gravel
spit me gasping and exhausted into every mid-september,
when the sudden lightness in the air is so hard to trust
that i flood my own lungs
and set fires in my throat because
i don't know how to live
when things are easy.

it has been one hundred and ninety six weeks
since the last time i used ****** and
one hundred and thirty days since my last cigarette and
twelve hours since my last drink.
it has been fifty seven months since i last kissed you,
but when i think about relapse,
all i can taste is your tongue.
i told you i never loved you
half as much as i loved drugs, but
you've been dead almost five years
and i'm still writing eulogies.
i don't even know if i miss you.
maybe mourning is just easier to swallow
than the truth,
that i have felt this way ever since i can remember,
that maybe i have never been able to breathe
because maybe i was not built to last.

so far i've killed every plant i've ever grown,
but the basil and green onions i planted this summer are still thriving
somehow.
i meant to abandon them when i moved,
but my roommate brought them in amongst my things and
in my last run to pick up odds and ends,
i put them in my car.
i still don't know why.
i haven't watered those plants in weeks but
i did bring them outside and it has rained enough this month
that somehow they're still growing,
some sort of proof that something living
can survive being mine.
maybe so can i.
maybe if i **** up all the sunlight i can find
and fight for every scrap of survival,
drink up all the water i can grab to sustain me through the dry days,
maybe i can also be okay.
maybe i can thrive.

i have not yet learned how to want to live,
but i am still alive,
and i guess that means
there's time.

there is some great glowing thing buried
somewhere in my skin and
nothing in the world scares me half as much.
when you ask about fear, i'll mention
heights and strange men and
shadow-things,
but never the wildness in my bones
or the poison in my veins or
the slow oozing dark that's running
down the rivets in my brain.
some things are too sharp and slippery
to name.

i never meant to hurt you, but my love was
beastly and burning and
maybe you were scorched beyond repair.
i tangled my fingers in the
fibrous network of your nerves
and carved secrets into your spine.
i did not know how to love gently.
i ****** your breath into my lungs,
briny and saline and
wild like the ocean,
and now i can't breathe but
i can still taste you there.

the inky, fractured spirit in my skull
is stronger than my best intentions and
stronger than the love with which
you tried so desperately to drown it.
all the broken things in me
were more than we could fix.

i'm sorry i stopped calling.
you deserved better.

you loved me
the way i love dirt.
like a promise,
a glimmering spark,
a catch on the inhale.
a soft and malleable thing
glowing faintly from its core.

you loved me like i love
dusty records and animal bones.
you loved me ephemera,
your glittering oddity,
your very best party trick.
i loved you all the magic
i could muster.

i loved you
every star i'd ever counted and
the memory of falling and
the shapes of all my favorite words.
you loved me
pheromones and
midmorning drunk dials.

you prayed and you promised and
you slipped your shaky fingers
five fathoms deep beneath my skin
and tenderly uprooted my veins.
you sweetly cracked
my ribcage wide and
picked all the seeds from my guts.
you lit up my new hollows
and found you hated
clean white walls.
you never quite forgave
the way i let you ****
the parts of me that you
knew how to love.
i loved you flooded lungs and
atheist's prayers
and never enough.

you loved me
the way i love dirt,
and sometimes in my dreams,
i cover you in daisies
and weeds
and trees with tough roots.
i watch the wild things
climb high and nest in the branches
stretching out from your ribcage,
wildflowers tangling their roots
through your bones,
your body a home
at last.

today is sixty paces south of heaven
reaching skyward.
here is dust in my lungs
and earth on my tongue
and half a hallelujah
strangled somewhere in my throat.
here is the ghost of every god
i ever believed in.

i fill my mouth with
promises and dirt
so there is no space left for poison.
there is no space left for anything,
but some days even breathing is a chore and
staying alive is the best i can do.
today i choke the gravel down with water because
today i can do better.

today is sixty paces south of heaven
and the stars are only glitter
and every lie i ever told curls up through thick summer air
and dissipates like smoke.
here are outstretched arms
and ***** fingers,
and here, slithering through the tall grass,
is a soft unknown that feels an awful lot like
hope.

your words drip incandescent glitter-trails
and pool at your feet
in a sparkling graveyard of shattered glass
and unheeded warnings.

i don't believe in much,
but you said maybe we met for a reason and that
maybe the reason was to keep each other alive,
and it seemed as true as anything else i'd ever heard
and approximately twice as beautiful.

i don't believe in fate,
but i have ****** the wild hope into my lungs
that some cosmic force could trust me
with something this important,
that some great mysterious power
sending ripples through the stars
could have loved me enough to lead me here.

we are not the beautiful and broken.
we are the wild and the wanting and
the howl that rattles hollow bones.
we are the wounded and the wicked
and unbound.
we are the things that learned to live in the dark;
from our bones crawl the faintly-glowing bodies
that will out-survive the sun.

your lungs cough out prayers like my lungs cough out tar,
like my hands clasp bottles like your hands clasp blades,
like our hands clasp hands,
like i had never in my life heard someone's stories louder than the stars
until you told me yours on the roof of the abandoned hotel,
until i saw the universe bend tight around your words
and for once the height didn't **** the air from my lungs and
for once i thought about something other than jumping.

nothing really feels like home these days,
but there's moments with you i feel human and
i'll take all the reasons i can find
not to step out in front of a train.
i want to watch you breathe
without some great shadow-hand holding onto your lungs,
and i don't ever want you to forget how sunlight feels.

you and i, we were born survivors,
and life has a way of reclaiming scorched land,
of stretching its great green tendrils
up through sidewalk cracks.
i don't believe in much,
but god,
do i believe in us.

fairy whispers and inky half-formed memories beat shattered-glass moth wings against the brittle crystal cavern of your skull.

wait.

it's been a long time since you
remembered how to breathe,
and maybe that's why sometimes you sit in the surf and **** the ocean into your lungs,
and maybe that's why you smoke,
so that for thirty seconds it's okay
to look like you are choking.

inhale spun sugar and dreaming dust.
exhale chalk and emptiness.

wait.

maybe someday you will cough all the shards out of your lungs.
today you take shots so you have permission
to let the burn flicker across your face
and you jump into freezing water so you don't have to explain
why you always look like you are drowning.

it's not rest, but it's the closest thing you can remember.

maybe one day you'll stop feeling so
raw.

i loved you like a car crash.
i loved you skidding tires
and screeching brakes
and shattered glass.
i loved you three lanes shut down on the freeway.

i loved you cracked palms
and cigarette burns
and shredded skin.
i loved you mouthfuls of smoke
and blood
and prayers.
i loved you holy morning moments
and sips of coffee;
i loved you dopamine
and alprazolam.

i loved you sharp and cold and metal.

i loved you sweaty sunsets in your car
when you read the bruises on my thighs like rorsarch blots
and i traced constellations in your scars.

i loved you broken
because your shards fit so beautifully with mine.

i loved you ragged.
i loved you desperate.
i loved you hurting and wanting and whispering.

i used to wake up screaming every time i dreamed of you,
but these days i just wake up empty
and cold
and aching in the spaces your hands used to fill.

in my dream last night,
you kissed me,
and i woke up this morning
with questions and
a cold

i know how to jump start a car and
i know thirteen different ways to light a fire and
i know that i sleep better when you're here.

i know how to make a pipe with an apple
and i know how to roll poplar bark into twine and
i know what you're afraid of.

i know that sometimes turkeys drown because they stand
with their heads thrown back in the rain.

i know all the state capitals and
i know all the books of the old testament in order and
i know how far you'd have to jump to be sure you didn't survive.
i know that my biggest fear was always the time stretched out between
today and the end and i know that
lately i am not so afraid.
i know it's at least a little bit
because of you.

i know that my lungs crave mountains
like my fingers crave dirt
like my hands crave yours.

i know how the world looks on your seventy second hour awake
and i know how thirteen tabs of acid feels and
i know how to steal things without getting caught.
i know how thirty-year-old hands squeeze
sixteen-year-old hips.
i know that "*******" isn't a compliment.

i know deep breathing techniques,
calming rituals,
and numbers for help lines i'll never call.
i know that frogs breathe through their skin
and that sometimes
they die when you touch them.

i know that i do not breathe through my skin,
no matter how often i forget.

Little girl,
be sweet.
Mind your manners.
Don’t forget to say,
“Thank you.”

Little girl,
be good.
Do not leave the path,
and don’t peer into the corners.
A girl should have nothing in her mind
but cake and wine and flowers.

Little Red,
out in the woods,
an hour away from the village.
Little Red saw a wolf,
and she did not know
to be afraid.

Little girl,
Be sweet.
Mind your manners.
The wolf will take,
and you will say,
“Thank you, wolf.”

Little Red just wanted
to do everything right.

my hands are not
soft things that you can hold onto and
even at my sweetest i'm less like honey and
more like old kool-aid and i'll
stain your lips and fingers blue
like the inky thing that slithers up my spine.

i don't remember what it's like to breathe easy.

i like the way your hands shake
and that's a weird thing to like
but i am much more cactus than flower
and i am not afraid of edges and shards.

you swallow smoke the way
i swallow metal and
wanting you makes me feel
sick again.

i want to string all the pieces of you into
something that fits
but
your edges are jagged and wrong
and
the spaces in my chest are not the way you left them
and
my mouth is too sharp for kissing

i am tired of wet wings and
wax burns

when i found out you were going to be a father,
everything inside me went flat and grey and
i spent the next five minutes remembering how to breathe.
it shouldn't have surprised me,
but i guess something in me just hoped
that no one would ever choose to procreate with you.
lord knows i wouldn't even trust you with a cat.

when i found out you were going to be a father,
some dark heavy seed plunked into my chest
and sank straight to the bottom.
i saw the announcement and immediately
i could taste in the back of my throat
the way you called me baby,
acidic and cloying and sticky.
it burned hot and sharp through my lungs
like every word of every promise i remember you forgetting.
the news hit me with a power you yourself have not had in years.

you are going to be a father,
and since the moment i found out,
i have been whispering desperate prayers to the universe
that you never have a little girl.
i think about your greedy hands brushing curls
from some soft little angel face,
and i feel sick.
i think about you picking up her pretty little-girl things,
little socks and bows and shoes and toys,
and it takes everything in me just to sit here and breathe.
will you sing her the songs i used to sing you
in my own pretty little-girl voice?
will you hear me in her cheeky turns of phrase
or when she cries into her pillow
late at night when she thinks you're asleep?
what if she's precocious,
like me?
what if her prepubescent body starts to carve itself
into the shape of a woman's?
will it be easier to remember that a child is still a child
when you watched her grow yourself?
if she picks out tight shirts and short skirts
and paints her eyes dark and her lips red,
and she walks and talks and moves like a woman,
will you remember that she is not?
maybe if she is your daughter,
it will be different,
but then again i think being your anything
can never be anything but trouble for a little girl.
i should know.

i hope more than anything that you never have a daughter,
because i know if you do,
i will never stop wondering.
i know that the questions will keep me awake at night
for the rest of my life.
i will will never stop worrying that it is
at least a little bit
my fault.

when i found out you were going to be a father,
i remembered
everything.

i was over you on thursday,
but then i saw you again
and i felt this jolt right through my chest that
reminded me of the time i accidentally touched an electric fence
(and it was awful and you're the worst) and i hate how
i can make myself forget to want you ten times before breakfast
and be over you on thursday
right up until i
see your ******* face
and i
remember
hard.

your mouth in my nightmares is sticky and warm,
but in the morning all i can taste
is stale cigarettes and the bars dissolving under your tongue

a younger me would have swallowed,
but these days my lungs are so full of fear and smoke
that inhalation makes me dizzy.

my brain is epitaphs and popsicle stick jokes,
and i worry about trains.
you worry about nothing.

you worry loud.

i sit shredding a napkin,
head bowed so that you don't see my lips move
when i murmur to myself
things i wish i'd told you when
you were real and when
i still knew what freedom meant.
i don't regret anything,
except maybe missing that assembly.

i would rather do drugs
than do you.

i thought your name would be seared into my heart
like a brand
or written across my chest forever
like a tattoo

turns out, it was just scribbled on my forehead in sharpie
like a ****

whenever i think about how lucky i am
that i rode my addiction to rehab
instead of to the morgue,
something swimming up the channel in my spine whispers,
    *"there's still time."

you don't get permission to spiral out of control
just because it's october.
you don't have time to wax poetic about your soul falling out through your fingertips
or whatever words fit the you you're wearing this week.
**** it up.
drink some coffee.

this will be over by christmas.

last night, i realized
that i had become emotionally unavailable
and also that
my fingernails had gotten too long.

i clipped my nails and went back to bed.

i want to liberate your heart
from the birdcage of your ribs
and squeeze it into cool red stillness in my hand,
juice it and drink it down
straight, since you always mocked me when i asked for cream and sugar.

i want to **** the marrow from your bones
and drink the breath from your lungs like
helium from last week's balloons,
cheap party trick.
i want to leave you aching and empty,
with bruised spaces too expansive and raw
for small hands to fill.

i want to lock you up and leave you with your shrieking demons,
the ones i tried to coax from you with ****** lips and gentle hands
the night you told me you fantasized about
my lifeless body draped across your shoulders
like the nemean lion.

i will chew you up and
spit you out and
send your bones to hades.

i'm infatuated
with mysteries and contradictions.
i am drawn
to dreamy eyes and optimism,
to fire and revolution.

sometimes i think i love ideas
more than people,
and that is a lonely way to be.

the reason your joke isn't funny
has nothing to do with "politically correct,"
a phrase you throw out in vitriolic attacks
so mismatched with my gentle
"can we not?"

you think that you're edgy
and subversive
and i am just
sensitive.
you think that you're some comedic rogue
sticking it to censorship and "the man,"
which is ironic because
every joke you make sits
right within the lines
drawn for you by a society that's been telling you
w  h a t
t o
t h i n k
since day one,
and actually by perpetuating the stereotypes and ideas
already ingrained in our culture,
you become the man,
man.

you are not an artist,
you do not create,
you are not the revolution,
and you can't fight the system
when the system is you.

now sit the **** down.

i watched two entire movies last weekend,
which was a feat because
the chunk of time a movie demands
is numbered in the massive list
of commitments i am hesitant to make.

i watched two movies about
the fight to find a place
in a culture constructed to benefit the few
at the cost of the many,
and as always it astonished me
when the people around me seemed surprised.
"it's a good thing we have come so far,"
they will say,
as if inequality is a thing of the past.
as if we don't still live in a world
where people are killed based on
the color of their skin
or their expression of gender
or sexuality or
love.
like little girls don't still grow up
bombarded with the message that they are objects
designed to be pretty and pleasing.
like our cops aren't killing black kids.
as if my government does not deny
my ****** autonomy.

it is exceedingly difficult to fix a problem
that you pretend does not exist.

I am really excellent at ruining things
by saying things I know I shouldn't.
"I'm going to chase her away,"
I say,
"By always telling her how afraid I am of losing her."
You laugh and tell me
I'm probably right.
I think that may have been the first time I really understood
that "tell her how you feel" isn't always
good advice.
So I told you I loved you in code
and kept smiling,
because I am impossibly wrong for you,
and I want you to be happy
even more than I want you.

the nagging pinpricks that flower in my chest
every time i hold my tongue
when i could take a stand
exhaust me.
some days i wish i were not stirred
by every minor injustice,
by every casual -ism.
i am not all angles and shards.
some days i am soft lines and rounded edges,
some days i am petal-small and twice as fragile,
some days i am tired.
some days the inevitable backlash
of speaking my mind
can send me reeling.
the accumulation of anger and dismissal and mockery
piles upon my shoulders
and seems sometimes too heavy to carry.

but even on these days,
these quiet, glass-***** lows,
i know why i am fighting, and
i know to the core of my being that
i
will
never
stop.

less than one month into the new year,
and already i have made and broken resolutions,
quickly abandoning the poorly planned promises
i made myself.
i don't know what i was expecting.

i heard somewhere that it takes thirty days
to break or establish a habit.
thirty days.
five sets of six,
three sets of ten,
three sets of five sets of two.
you can't get four from thirty.

and i meant to go somewhere else with this,
draw it into extended metaphor,
but now the girl next to me is chewing gum,
and i want to cry.
i don't want to be a person
who freezes up at the sound of
saliva and substance.
it is far too easy to make my skin shrink tight
and start to itch.
i can't just pull it off,
and i hate feeling trapped.

i hate you now, too, for doing this.
i know it's not malicious or intentional,
but i will still resent you for as long as i know you
because you made me feel this way.
isn't that ridiculous?
but you know what else is ridiculous
is that the mind and body that have survived nineteen years
(despite my best efforts)
spiral out of my control
every time someone decides to chew.
i wish i could not be controlled
by something so simple and small.

(i think maybe the metaphor wrote itself.)

she's one of those girls with
painted eyes and
long sleeves in summer,
a vacant stare
and nowhere left to turn,
long red lines
slashed over years of cross hatched moon white scars.
she'll tell you dying is an art.

cigarette filter ringed with red lipstick,
she pursues her death in slow steps,
still hoping in some hidden secret place
for someone to kiss her wrists and tell her she did okay,
to fall in love with her beautiful tragedy.

and she is beautiful,
but not for the reasons she's assembled in her head.
there is nothing lovely or romantic
in her quest for self-destruction,
but there is beauty in her strength.
the glory is not in her pursuit of death,
but her ability to live.
she does not need you to save her,
and you cannot,
as much as she'll beg you to try.

kiss her lips instead of her scars.
love the breath in her lungs and the life in her veins.
treat her body like something too precious to destroy.
give her love to hold onto
while she learns to create her own.

it is up to you to love her,
should you choose.
it is up to her to decide
that death can wait.

my desire to build a world
where every little girl knows she is good enough
is enough to overpower
my desire to be liked.
i am done making pleasant
my priority.

Instead I sat stock-still as a room full of my drunken friends
laughed hysterically about ****,
and I listened in frantic silence
feeling like the **** of some joke
that I would never have the luxury of finding funny.

i tore down the blanket you had stapled to the wall
when i got too cold in the middle of the night.
you had put it there to block the light from the window,
but when morning sent sunshine streaming in,
you didn't seem to mind.

i was glad to wake up to the sun
because when she kissed my eyelids
and lifted me from sleep,
i realized that,
for the first time in a long time,
i was glad to wake up.

you can tell by the way she swings her hips
and pulls your hair
and licks her lips
and whispers in your ear
that she's easy.

you'll know her by the short skirt
and the tight top
and the high heels,
by the butterfly tattoo on her lower back
and the drink in her hand.

if she carries condoms
or takes birth control,
if she can't say no,
if she takes no convincing,
you'll know.

she's the girl at the party who drinks the most
and laughs the loudest.
she's the one you discarded the first night you met her,
when she gave you
the only part of herself that you deemed worthwhile.

you'll figure her out
from the tar trails of mascara,
the untouched meal,
the word "worthless" carved into her thigh like a brand,
marking her flesh as property
to which you are entitled.

pay close attention to her need for validation.
a **** will have the audacity to seek your approval
just because she's been told all her life
that she is  nothing without your love.
she will measure her worth
in units of attractiveness
and desirability
because that is the only system she's ever been taught.

you'll know she's a **** when they find the defendant
not guilty,
and he arrives at the ten-year reunion in a limo.
you'll know she's a **** when she doesn't arrive
at all.

it's easy to spot a ****
in a society that teaches her that her lips are for kisses
and not battle cries,
that her hands are meant to be cradled in yours
and not ****** into the sky,
that her body is your wonderland
and not her home.

it's hard to miss a **** in a culture that paints women as ****** objects
while condemning any expression of female sexuality,
that glorifies the "good girl" who becomes whole
when the right man comes along
and stakes his claim.
the women you ****** in the lifetime before you met your wife
weren't marriage material;
you need a girl who's saved herself for you because
a girl who lets you **** her
crosses the threshold from ****** to ****
in a bizarre coming of age ritual in which your **** is so ******* important
that its temporary entrance to her body
renders her worthless.
you can tell she's a ****
because for her, there is no right answer.

you can find your **** at rallies
and in body-baring photographs,
alive in the anxious triumph
of finding something in herself that she can love,
of digging through a lifetime of rubble
and reclaiming small shards of forgiveness from the dirt.
her self-identified status
rips away your long-established privilege
of dictating who she can be
and defining her worth;
your resent her new autonomy.

you can march beside her,
or you can step aside.
she has stolen back her power.
she was made for revolution.

i want to let my hair grow long and tangled
and weave flowers and moss between the strands
so i can feel like i'm a part of something living.
i want to learn to love my broken vessel
the way i love the wild.

i want to sink my hands in rocky riverbeds
and feel every kind of earth between my toes.
i want to learn the constellations
so i can point at pictures in the night sky
and not feel so alone.

i want to paint myself
in mud and freedom
and scream in my own voice,
triumph ringing through the trees.

i want to bask in the sunshine and radiate
light and strength and wholeness,
absorbing beauty and reflecting it back into the world
in new arrangements.

i will climb high and
sing loud and
march on and
fly,
until at last i can sink back
in well-earned exhaustion,
hallelujah seeping from my skin.

This year,
I want to follow through,
But commitment has never been my style.

counting breaths and blinks
makes it easier to detach
from hands where hands aren't wanted,
and lips and teeth and tongue and ****
and heat and sweat and rhythm.
heartbeats and seconds in packets of four
are better for the brain
than fists and blood and fear,
and ticks of the clock and fingertips tapping in time
beat uncertainty and helplessness
and not knowing if he's going to live
any day of the week.

i can wash my hands until they're red
(beet red, beat, beet red, beat)
and raw
(and dry and cracked and bleeding and bleeding).
i can write and re-write
and control and perfect,
perfect the verb because
perfect as an adjective is
impossible
(but nothing less will do).
i can line everything up and count it out even,
in fours or
in thirty-sixes,
(six times six, six six times, perfect square, perfect square),
and i can hope
that my neat tall stacks of the things i need to control
will finally outweigh
the scattered mountains
of the things i never could.

i can tell you how and when and where and what,
just please don't ask me why.

They told me I was a drug addict,
and I refused to consider it.
I was scared and I was fearless
and I was
ancient and young
and
I didn't know how
so many things could fit inside of me,
but I knew that they were wrong and they
could never understand.

They told me I was a drug addict
and I thought maybe
they knew what they were talking about,
after all,
and I wanted them to be right because
I wanted them to fix me.

They told me I was a drug addict
and I went to meetings
and collected chips
and spoke in group
and preached recovery.

They told me I was a drug addict
and I agreed until
I got to go home
and even then I kept agreeing
for a while.

They told me I was a drug addict
and I sat in meetings
and got a sponsor
and said all the right things
to my parents.

They told me I was a drug addict
and I got high
because I missed it.

They told me I was a drug addict
and they told my friends
and said I'd try to convince them I was okay,
and when I did,
no one knew who to believe.

They told me I was a drug addict
and that I hadn't changed at all
and even when they said they were sorry,
I knew they weren't,
really.

They told me I was a drug addict
in recovery and that
the worst was behind me.

They told me I was a drug addict
and I never stopped for good
because I guess I was never sure
if I believed them.

They told me I was a drug addict,
but I think I'm doing
okay.

I wish things had not turned out this way,
But here we are,
And there is absolutely nothing
I can do about it.
You will never again be perfect to me,
Or even beautiful,
Or kind.
You will never again
Be a person I admire,
And never again
Will I want you back.
I do not miss you,
And I do not love you,
But I do care,
And I always will.