After a while,
I stopped writing love poems.
I'm sorry we broke.

A man smears his face on the window that I live behind

and I have tried to clean it before

and I have tried to keep it that way.

He oils it up and gropes for entry,

he wants in this house.

A man smears his face on the window that I live behind,

he asks when I started being a *****,

when I stopped letting people in.

I tell him I go out and get the mail every single day

but that doesn’t mean I need a man to force sins upon me

and then ask me why I haven’t washed them away.

Mother

you didn’t warn me about the boys who would take my body and claim it as theirs.

Mother, did I not hear you when you told me about boys who would put their bones on my bones and tell me that they owned me?

Mother,

I must have missed it, must have turned my ear away

the day you told me about the darkness.

Mother,

I have found it.

Mother, years ago I found it. Found that gaping hole in the air that ***** you right in, takes all your light away, takes all your good away.

I found that still sea air, the doldrums,

found that place where nothing moves,

but only shifts endlessly,

rocking back and forth, reminding you of

your wet solitude.

Mother, I know you try to shut the world out. I have seen the way your eyes glaze over

lukewarm

the stacks of magazines in the hallway,

my entire childhood in your bedroom.

I have found my dollhouses in the garage, the animal cages,

the rust.

I found the bell to my bicycle, I found the streamers.

Mother, I have watched you watch me and see something other than yourself. Mother, I know that you see me. How I watch the waves of possession overtake this house.

How money has given us too much,

how we shook our pockets to fill the void,

how we filled the barn with boxes.

Mother, I have watched you buy more boxes.

You have shut away

so much, you have heard me beg you to cut your hair,

to get rid of the dead,

to stop burying things that aren’t.

Mother, stop buying.

Mother, start seeing.

Mother, how many books can you read before you realize that you should just

write your own?

Mother, I have asked you to let me live and you have kept me close. I have asked you the questions that I already know the answers to. Mother I have watched you waste this house, cut holes in the walls and move from bed to bed like a withering animal,

I have watched you stack your clothes and still buy more,

I have watched you carve paths in the mountains of this home.

I have let you let the kitchen mold. I have watched you let the sink fill with a musk and a stench, I have let you fall in your own dust.

Mother, I am sorry.

Mother, we didn’t ask each other the questions that needed answering, we didn’t sail this wind at all. We only ever shifted, rocked and swayed in this house, let the gutters collect the trees, let the wasps inhabit the rafters. Mother, watch me build a new house. I will not let anyone in, I will not let them see how bare it gets when you have to keep moving. When you let your sails go and need to make yourself lighter and you

throw yourself out of that black hole.

Mother, watch me watch you as I try to do more than I can.

Mother, sell your books. You’ve already read them. Mother, eat the food in the kitchen. Your body is wasting away and your hair grows long. Mother,

do you see the way I have let my hair collect itself? How I have stopped cutting it? Did you hear me when I said I will comb it out and slice it off?

Mother, feel this rain. Feel how it is filling this dry earth, how it buries itself in the cracks of the dead silt, how it breathes, easy and weightless.

Feel this rain. It will swallow the ground, it will raise the sea and your sails will soak and I want to push you away. Mother,

find yourself an anchor, but don’t use it so often.

Mother, we need to start asking each other questions.

Mother, sail.

The day I let you in,

I explained to you how I am a mountain.

I did not say it like this,

but it is nonetheless true how my secrets are buried in the caves within me,

and it is true that many have ridden down the roads of my skin,

and it is true that I have been mined and I have been torn apart in search of something,

and it is true that I am still a mountain, unchanging and relentless.

The day I let you in, you told me you were the sea.

And see

how the love-like wind picks up your water,

takes it to me,

shakes and rattles down my tree-bones

and rock face.

See how the mud clears;

sea, how you have washed me.

See how the rain you’ve brought has forced me to weep,

a muddy colored wet that runs clear in days,

see how your hands have run, soft and dewy

over gravel rock and tree.

See how you have found the caves,

see how things are built within me.

See how I am a mountain,

sea, how you are love to me.

Today I thought of how

closely my hands resemble my grandmother’s,

and of how hers looked in the coffin.

At the funeral,

I was asked to take pictures for my uncle,

and I’m not going to say that it was my proudest moment

to witness the side-eye glances of black-clad neighbors

and still have to hear the click and see the flash

to forever-remember the floral arrangements

and the way my grandmother’s hands looked.

Why my uncle couldn’t operate

a disposable camera himself

was something I didn’t ask, and so

for hours I perched on ripped heels in a cemetary

clicking and flashing and thinking that

the obituary should have contained the footnote

that cemetaries are grass and pliable earth

so it’s best not to wear heels,

lest you sink in,

and join the best of them.

Red birds flew into my window every day for years, especially during Spring

and I asked my mother

what they were called.

“Cardinals,” she said,

“but I think they’re called to you,

I think—

I think they are for you.”

“Mom, I’ll give that one a name.”

And I did.

——-

I still see cardinals.

The red shocks me,

like a bloodstain in a new house.

——-

When my father almost died,

I was not worried and I did not ask many questions,

only saw his body in the bed, a green-blue-yellow-black mess,

a broken-bone nest,

with sticky pads stuck to his skin, sending electricity to his nerves, lest

they forget themselves.

——-

He had the car turned into a cube, and it is somewhere now,

the cage collapsed,

the rust blooming inside of itself.

The day my father chose to drive into a wall,

going somewhere from 100 to 200 miles an hour (I never asked him), they dubbed him Rocketman.

He flew.

The car toppled and twisted and regurgitated what it could;

it was an illness,

and it could have killed us.

My father is okay.

——-

My father went to an air show months ago to see how those streak clouds are made by planes,

and there was an accident

and he saw peoples’ bodies lying and dying.

He told my mother how he saw hands separate from their owners.

He has not told me these things.

——-

The cardinals have started to scare my father.

He sees them too

like bloodstains in a new house.

The first time I died, it wasn’t intentional and it was only in my head.

I keep dying, I keep staying alive, nothing is intentional.

They told me to put glitter on my scars,

to cut off my fingers and toes and feed them to the earth,

they told me to live in ways that forced people to look at me.

So I

cut my hair,

dyed it any color, made people look.

What happened was, they stared more at my knuckles, skin that spoke “STAY HERE”

and I knew that scared them.

Put glitter on your scars, they said. Put paint on your body, push ink up under your fingernails, tell the world you are alive in all the ways you can.

So I sang my life on city streetcorners, I screamed my life in fast-moving cars on the highway, I closed my eyes while I was driving straight and I am alive, alive, alive.

I keep dying though. Everyday I keep dying and it still feels fresh now, like a new bruise just barely bloomin’ under your skin or your coat. I keep screamin’ to keep the demons at bay, I keep writing to keep the mania movin’ and groovin’ to what life is now.

I keep killin’ in my head, I keep killin’ the demons, but sometimes they touch the back of my eyeballs so gentle, I cry so deep, I leak I leak I leak.

Put glitter on your scars, they said. I will keep trying. My home is a place in my heart that I haven’t found yet, my home is watercolors and ink and blood.

To the ones who have wondered, I am still alive. Some days I barely speak, but don’t worry because I am still so alive, I am still screaming to myself, I am still putting glitter on my scars, I am still writing life into my skin, I am still putting water and sun on my face. I am still curling my toes when I hear good songs. I am still wanting to run when the boys look at me. I know they want. I know I want something else, something you.

I have turned my bruises into landscapes, my fingers into dancing sprawling actions, my fists are still here, I swear. They still say “STAY HERE.”