My eyes click clacked
To the cling clang
Of a bottle of *** hitting marble
Ava was sitting on the bar countertop
The boy with the glasses
Folded between her spider legs
Their teeth like piano keys playing one another

She ****** his shirt
Red maraschino
Pet his cheek with her
smooth leather palm
Stroked his hair with
Comb fingers
Bejeweled with silver rings

She stretched out her vowels like taffy when she spoke
Giggles stabbing themselves into the middle of her sentences.
“I️ like the way wine makes me feel”
She purred,
Swishing the words around in her mouth before she chased them down with
Pino Gris

I’d never seen this version of Ava.
Night velvet
Black cat
Skin sheets of raw silk.
She was slippery and evasive,
Like a mermaid
Hiding behind her hair and her scales and champagne,

Because
Inside
I️ knew
She wished the boy
With the glasses and the red shirt
Was her Brooklyn boy
So she kissed him with wine lips,
The force of disappointment and pain

Have you ever felt fear
So strong
It made you
stop
&
Turn
&
Run?

You’re running and hear
The heat
Whispering against your neck
Bleeding
Into your cheeks and the tips of your ears
Cherry stained
Anxiety
Cherries, red and fat and sickly sweet
Force themselves up your throat

You’re running in shoes
That aren’t meant for running
Down the sidewalk past the midnight hour
You make a biker stop and stare
He asks you something
But you’re too busy unzipping the air and
Flying
Through it
Trail of cherries behind you.

You’re running
Across the street
And you feel your hands fall off
And then come your toes
You lose an arm
And then it’s twin
Your whole torso
And hips
Left on the double yellow line
You’re just a head and legs
Cherries spilling like rubies
From your lips

You’re running
And running
and running
Until you only feel cherry seeds
On your tongue
Only seeds between your teeth
No more cherries
Your legs become red silk ribbon and you pick a tree as tall as heaven to
Collapse under.

You stopped running.
You wring the cherry juice out of your sweater
Lick it off your fingers,
Wipe it out of your eyes.
Your legs grow back into legs
And you collect your
pieces and parts
on the walk back.
Follow the trail of smushed squished cherries

You pick one up
put it in your mouth
Sour as battery acid
You swallow it whole
And go back to your essay
On rhetoric.

-spring sprung a leak, and there’s no stopping her

You know,
Maybe,
It’s just me but I guess I just find it
Funny
That people say it’s girls who have loose lips
When the boys at this table have mouths
Like open caves
With stalagmite teeth
Bats come flying out

I guess,
Maybe,
It’s just my magic trick,
The way I become invisible
When the boys
Sit down for dinner
And they open up their backpacks
And their gym bags
And pull out butcher knives
That shine like brand new quarters
In the cafeteria fluorescents

I’m not sure,
But maybe
The churning of my stomach
Is a sign
That there’s sharks
In these waters
I feel my wet socks in my wet shoes as I jiggle my knee
And watch the boys
With their knives
Start chopping up girls on the plastic top table

They cut slices off of Julia
and Megan
And Kara
and lob them across the table
to their friends
Just Like the men at
Pike Place Fish Market
Fling whole salmon
Into each other’s gloved hands
I saw them do it
When I went to Seattle once.
I feel water climbing up my legs.
I see a shark fin.

Did I blush red?
Maybe,
When the boy next to me catches
Katie’s legs
In his calloused hands
And laughs a laugh that sounds like
An out of tune violin
They’re all laughing now,
Like car horns and fire alarms
Laughing about
Katie’s legs
And Kara’s ***
And Megan’s hips
And Julia’s ****
It’s the ugliest orchestra I’ve ever heard

And perhaps,
Maybe,
I’m the only one who’s noticed,
But we’re not in the cafeteria anymore
We’re right there
In that room
In that bed
In that moment
With
JuliaMeganKaraKatie
And I don’t want to be there.

And I know,
For sure,
No maybes,
That If JuliaMeganKaraKatie knew
We were all here too
In her room
In her bed
In her
That she’d cry enough saltwater
To flood the whole earth
And wash it clean.

We leave the table
Bones on the floor
Shark boys clean their teeth with toothpicks
My clothes are soaked
All the way up to my neck.

-I never go in the ocean, I’ve seen the sharks when they frenzy.

Closing took an extra half an hour. Not that I minded, that was just more money in the bank. My foot was itching to press the gas behind a silver Camry, impatient to munch a few Tylenol pm and put the world on pause. I merged left slipping past, I noticed a little hand. A cinnamon child, cherubic and fresh putting her head out the car window. Her little head nested between her folded arms, her hair a coiled ebony flame. I remembered that; remembered that girl. I was that girl. Bathing myself in the wind, tasting the air from the passenger side window. Her eyes closed like iridescent oyster shells, her hope worn like a jacket. She had not a fear of the world, not jaded, not cynical, not damaged. I gazed at her in admiration, this brave little lioness. Sometimes it's the small things that pick us back up.

I lay my woozy wobble head down
On the floor
And close the blinds over my eyes
And open up the windows to my ears
To listen to the lullaby that loneliness is playing for me on the radio

It sounds like low violin,
The sound bumblebees make,
Sad and sharp as the nails I dig into my palms
While I sway gently,
Horizontally,
to myself
On the living room floor

I can hear the piano
In the song now,
Popping sweet
Like a blueberry on the nights tongue.
The piano is crying
I am crying too.

I keep the blinds closed
Search blindly
For the bottle
I left standing
Like a bowling ball pin
Tangled up in my hair
I kiss that bottle and she kisses me back
And we laugh while
Saltwater and grape blood
Dance awkward and slow on my tongue
Like they’re at their first
middle school dance
And their hands are clammy
But their hearts are racing

The song ends and lonely smiles
Just barely,
Like a crescent moon,
And treads lightly across my
hardwood mattress
Lonely curls up next to me, and we all fall asleep
Like that.
Wine bottle on one side,
Lonely on the other,
Me
Right in the middle

- At least this time, it tasted like Pinot

You are afraid of me.
You are afraid because you wade in the shallows
and I am the unpredictable depths.
You collect shells that roll to your feet because you are afraid to swim alongside the mermaids. You are afraid because you don't have the capacity to love
someone like me.

She was perusing the linoleum trails when I walked into conoco gas at 6:49. I bought $20 of unleaded at pump three.
"I miss my jeep, but I sure don't miss the gas mileage"
she giggled from behind me with a filmy grocery bag bracleting her wrist. He name was Kiyomi, a Japanese citrus. "When my mom was pregnant with me, that's all she would eat. She joked that she'd give birth to a fruit instead of a baby."
She told me she plucked her shirt from the hamper when I complimented her outfit, and about her "**** neighbors" with whom she shared a complex. I made an excuse for the dirt sponging my shirt and tattooing down my legs. "It's from landscaping", I said as a way to somehow justify it. I felt like I'd known Kiyomi a long time when we said goodbye.  
With a half tank of gas, I started up Genevieve and we rolled off our opposite ways. It was as I walked up and down King Sooper's ribs of commercial aisles that I was so grateful to Kiyomi, the fruit girl. She showed her humanness to me. We hung up our social normalities like jackets, and spoke in the unfabricated way children do. Friday, June 3rd, roughly 6:53 pm, a girl of soil and a girl of fruit collided in connection. Like it was natures very own conversation.

There will come a hour
in a day that has not yet been born
that you will realize.
In the stretching of dawns arms as she yawns out the sunrise, you will realize what a gift I was.

In the bleeding inky blackness
of a night
spent kissing one brown bottle after another, you will realize
the treasure
you overlooked.

  Perhaps it will peek-a-boo at you
on an August afternoon
when you see a contemporary art piece on a boardwalk;
you'll see, you flaked me off
like a piece of the translucent skin
you peel off your sunburn.

It will fit together like a jigsaw puzzle
that you never cared to open;
left slumbering in your attic.

In a moment, in an hour, in a day, in the future, you will miss what I was for you.
You will miss me.

I liked the way his eyes felt looking at me trying to play pool.
He laughed when I got low to the ground, balanced the stick up on my shoulder.
He showed me how to hold the rod like a pencil; click clack the magic 8 ball across the billard frosted top. Disco Inferno seeped from the juke box in the corner.
I taught him how to play slap-rat, and silently relished every time his hand slapped on top of mine (I usually slapped fastest)
"I'm sorry my car is such a mess" he said. His car was spotless actually, the smell of vanilla oozed from the vents. We rallied questions back and forth between the console.
He didn't leave when he pulled into the driveway; neither did I. "I'm sorry to be keeping you, I can go". His hand slid to my knee "no, it's okay, really". It was okay. More than okay.

They both rest beneath the tent of thin, glossed books shaped like shoe boxes. Sitting in silence beneath the bolded print: "GRAPHIC NOVELS", wedged between teen fiction and romance.

The boy laid flat like the horizon with a hand folded and tucked beneath his chin. The father crisscross applesauced. They both wore sport jackets, matching patch of dark hair, oval face, a watery constellation of freckles.

I listened to them talk while my book sat opened on my lap; a storefront deli at noon. I did not read the words-I read their dialogue as it bubbled through the air and popped. With chartreuse vision, when dad explained to son Marvel and DC and heroes that are heroes in the laminated skins.

Perhaps heroes don't only wear capes, but leather sport jackets and orange baseball caps. Maybe they sit a bookstore on Friday night. Maybe they're called "pops". Heros who can sit in comfortable silence with nothing but time and a copy of Little Marvel.

On the plane of flesh where my knee joins my thigh on the left leg, I have a bruise.
A watery kiss from where it was sandwiched in my car door. The size of a dimpled golf ball, on the interior side.
It is vibrant in its hue; a mixing bowl of plum, magenta, teal and powder blue. It's freckled and veined like a Jackson ******* piece.
A little stain from where life not so tenderly reminded me of its existence

Even the sweetest of grapes
Can Leave a sour aftertaste
On your tongue

Like a footprint of
pain in the plain
Of pleasure.

It’s kind of like that lately.
Like Ice kissing my fingertips
While sitting in the sun
Like the crash coming down
From a Sticky sweet sugar rush
Like the hot coffee
that burns red trails  
Down my throat
Sipped too soon

It’s hard to differentiate
the hurt from the high
when someone gave you
salt
Disguised as
sugar
For a
Long
Long
Time.

I never want to become desensitized to touch. The butterflies never to stop swooping in my rib cage when his fingertips roll on my knee
or the oozing sunlight that drips down my shoulders when his hands cap them to shuffle me back from the fridge, sifting for a beer.
His hand a parenthesis on my waist; I am drinking ocean mists and morning dews. The meandering, lolling loops his fingers sketch around the tip of my elbow
I never want his hands on me to feel trite. I want them to set me on fire

I have had
Enough
Of your
Verbal venom

You held my arm tight
In your iron fist
And spit acid on my
Wrists
Watching it burn holes
All the way down to my bones

You always did like to watch
Your influence in action
Or maybe
You always liked to be right.
Either way,
I️ grew up with holes in my skin
and my self esteem.

I lied on my back
Under the oak,
Taller than my self assurance
And bigger than my confidence
In Civic Center Park.
The sky was pregnant with a thunderstorm past its due date.
The little local band was playing their little local songs on the little fold up stage.

I was Thinking about why I️t mattered so much how I looked to everyone.
Here in this park
Or in the grocery store
Or the coffee shop
“Because we want to be beautiful.”
I️ thought
“Because I want to be loved”
Loved.
Loved?

I remembered then, that I was
Perhaps not by all,
But by a few. A really important few.
They tell me in special languages
And bring me plates of spaghetti
(And I eat it, even with the meat, because I love them back)
And they drive an hour and a half to bring me home.
And I don’t feel so afraid
Or sad
Or irrelevant
As I lie with my cherry boxing gloves
Under the oak
Taller than my fears, and bigger than my insecurities.
I’m just one with the mamas and their tuft hair babies
And the beer sipping husbands
And the pizza chewing boys
And the women with bikes
And the couples on their blankets
And the tie-dye tee teenagers
and the taco truck workers
And the sleepy dogs
And the kids with the football.
I’m just with love.
It’s all love here.

— A tiny concert revelation

2:06 P.M. June 30th, 2018

Something wicked this way comes
Hair of ravens feather
Cheeks stained pink as peaches
Like he’s been out in frigid weather
Skins been sunglazed
Smile like sunrays
Disposition soft as day break on Sunday
He Looks at me
Wholesome
With eyes like soil sea
He is the something clean and pure
The wicked thing is me

You’re the first girl I ever felt in my
chest
Hammocking between my littlest ribs
With each swing
My bones creaked
And sang
A violin’s voice
You bumped my heart and made it beat
With every lazy kick of your foot

You’re the first girl
Who’s ever touched my hand
Crocheted your little fingers
In between mine, so
Where I end is where you start
And I feel like I could go on and on
Forever, attached to something this beautiful.

You’re the first girl that
made me fly
I strung my patchwork scarf
Across my back and flapped
My arms
And I had wool wings
And my teeth forced my lips apart and refused to let them meet again
I was laughing
I was soaring
I was Icarus.

You’re the first girl
Who’s made me cry
Big and ugly
Tire marks black
Down my cheeks
Hit and run me over with want
My lungs heave-hoing out oxygen
Like there’s just not enough in the
whole world to fill them

You’re the first girl
That made me feel
On top of the world
And underneath it
All in the same week.

-I’d keep the globe perched on my shoulders indefinitely if it made you smile

Someone once asked me why
I starve
When I know it could **** me
“It’s not even attractive
To be that skinny”,
They said.

I let the sentence simmer and bubble in my crockpot cranium,
And chewed it for a long time
After it was done cooking

“I want the parts of me”
I said
“That nobody has made *****”
The hips and the ribs and the spine
And the knobby knock knees
That so many man-children
In my young life
Have not had the chance
To bruise and scratch
And touch
And dissect.

I want the bones
And I’ve wanted them as long as my hole punched
Memory can recall
Because they are the one thing
That has ever,
Truly,
Only,
Been mine
And mine alone.
The secret I can grab with both hands.

-people can not destroy what you keep hidden

Office white
Like a feathered hen
She sighed aloud
and clicked her pen
I️ inhale, exhale, count to ten
“So that’s all? That’s I️t then? Take some pills and that’s the end?”
“Meditate”,
She said
“spend time with a friend”
Inhale, blink, count to ten.
Hands through hair again again
Tears and vision start to blend
Couldn’t she see?
The gaping tear
A ripped hole
Where the flesh of body should connect to  soul?
Blood in my mouth
Salt in my eyes
Heart going south
Tongue laced with lies
She smiled like plastic
Heart rate spastic
I️ could feel I️t
Unraveling
Frantic
Ecstatic
I️ could feel
As I️t began to fray
“Alright”
She said
“Same time next Tuesday”.
The doorframe echoed her footsteps away.
I’d never felt more fear.