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Chestina N Craig Feb 2015
I watch those who consume
to feel colored
in the lines
with the edge of  my eye
it’s the slap
heard at the end of a fight
its hitting me
but I’m only holding the bottle
Chestina N Craig Feb 2015
Here is an etiquette guide for your happiness
all of the parts of your soul which haunt you in the moments before sleep
you are allowed to be free from them
do not grab your thinnest blanket
your pillow that is self-pity
buy blackout curtains and darker lampshades
and move into a cramped apartment with your demons
But do not buy your demons a home
Spend all your viability on stardust, white light, and kindness of strangers
Knit scarves for your worth
Friendship bracelets for confidence
Buy plots in the forest for your faith
Cook five course meals for love
And when you are ready to make peace
Invite your demons over for tea
Chestina N Craig Feb 2015
Your spine is a holy place
From the tip of your neck, to the cradle in your pelvis, it is baptized in your waters
Starting with cervical, a lucky number of seven sections
The number of days it took god to create the earth
Greek mythology tells me, Cer is the personification of a violent death
Vic means to substitute,
Therefore this section substitutes itself for your violent death
Holding up an unlucky number 13
Pounds.
Of skull, and flesh and
Blood. Which it facilitates the flow of
It has hollowed itself out for nerves
Hollowed itself out so that you may feel
Everything.

Thoracic.
A dozen protective pieces,like the disciples foundation
Hammered in by thor himself
God of the sky
The horizon within dotted by a heart, some lungs,
Spleen, stomach, diaphragm
Stars in your very own galaxy

Lumbar
Five little graces
Luminary
Holding enough weight so
that the sun could settle down
right between your hip bones
root within your nerves
Apollo has come to visit
Showing you just how much holy light you can carry
Chestina N Craig Dec 2014
A year made of losses
Stitched together with a shaking doubt of my goodness
How could I know it at the time
All the tears cried this rotation of the earth
Watered wildflowers gasping in my lungs
We aren't  choking anymore
Growing up my trachea reaching for gold plated tongues
Flourish out of my cheeks and ripen the acid air
Now I spit petals onto the ground
Do the humans love me?
Do they love me not?
I don’t care anymore
The flowers love me
They made me a poet
Chestina N Craig Dec 2014
I am sorry that you may be right, maybe I am self-centered
I worry about it every day
That I sometimes I forget the word “we”
And sometimes I forget what words can do
I shouldn't forget that if I am a poet
Chestina N Craig Dec 2014
Today I decided gold was my favorite color
I think that says something about the many ways I have finally begun to really accept myself
Because why not decide that I am allowed to own something so fine as my favorite?

gold in the way that I am always trying to be a reflection for the world, of that sun shining down on me
gold in the way that I have finally accepted that my body is not an apology
that my body is not a prize
not to be plated over your pillars
to be seen truly as an earthy miracle
I am golden, not your gold medal

like the element
I require 2000 degrees of your effort to get me boiling, and I take no shame in that
and like the element
I am malleable, but hardly fallible
in my 20 years of life there have been things that have tried to break me, to pound me down until i shattered under their forces.
I will bend and adapt to all spaces
I will keep reflecting that gold light to the eyes that scan with bad intentions

I have dug so deep for this
Made of a fluid fused in the core of the world
Emergence of scalding rock
This is my birth
A fire-y eruption
Searing in the style of my favorite color
Chestina N Craig Oct 2014
I left a puddle of my stress tears on the waxy paper
Clenching my own hands so tightly till I could feel my heart beating
Wishing I had a hand to hold,
At least my uncle did
The nurse called those fate-determining wires spaghetti
As if the fear that they instilled in my already clenching heart
Could provide some kind of sustenance
Trying so hard to push all of the air from my lungs
As if that would return a number that would save me
I did not feel like I was able to empty myself enough

A pamphlet across the room reads off the words to me “what and why” and that all I can repeat in my head
What if I end up like my uncle
Why does this happen
Maybe my heart, just knew how to do too much, in too little time
Too much love, too much anxiety, too much joy paralleled by terror
Too many palpitations already, all it can do now is clutch to the only thing it knows, my body

The thousands of prayers that so many people in my position must have fired off
On that hard sterile table
Must cause god to see a sheen of white light when he looks down on us
So many little candles lit in hopes that they will be seen

I know that my heart murmur is not just a murmur
It is almost as loud as my voice
But unlike my voice it does not seek for the well-being of my soul and my body
It seeks for itself
A flap of skin with a mind of its own
Sometimes fluttering out words of its own language
Friendly fire
“I love you, I live with what keeps you alive, I control you”
This thing grown within my mother’s womb just like I
A fusion, my partner in development
I pray not, that it has changed its mind
Metamorphosing from a quirk, to tell boys, who want to hear my heart beat,
Something that makes me who I am
Into something that may tear me from the arms of the lovers who pressed their ears in eager fashion to my chest
into something that will make me,
no longer
what I am.
rough draft about my doctors appt today
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