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Chestina N Craig Apr 2015
Muscle memory has made our movements
so cyclical

we
tangle ourselves up monthly

entering  each others presences
with our
amens

your back an altar
that I worship at,
your arms the extent of the world that I acknowledge exits
for now

but the sunlight will always find its way
between us on your pillows
and will always rise
sure of its self
that is has picked the right moment because,
it is the golden boy of the family

and you
will always rise sure of the fact
that you must leave
because it is your ritual
to never expose enough to be a full picture

and I will allow myself to learn again
that the sun
is the brighter star here.
love relationships heartbreak boys life heart sunshine sun rituals
Chestina N Craig Mar 2015
Be brave enough to love a girl
Who is:
Sensitive as ripe fruit
                               and
Resilient like redwood

2. Carry my lipstick remnants in the
valleys
of your collarbone.
Learn the ways to
find the flowers
under my epidermis and make them
bloom.

3. I do not want your love to
come in a
hand
me
down
box.
Show me what’s collected in your
Black hoodie

pockets.
Mar 2015 · 366
Will You Go With Me
Chestina N Craig Mar 2015
The graffiti that flew by
on an abandoned house
asked me

“will you go with me?”

It makes me wonder
What was their leaving like?
Was it shredding of divorce papers?
Lips so chapped from lack of love and lots of screaming

Who decided to go first?

Was it middle night terror?
An escape plan, 3 parts desperation, 1 part hope
When knives go flying
You tend to want to watch out for your own heart

Or was it a hypothetical new year in the middle of March
Spring and flowers are coming
Someone’s chance at a bigger and better temporary
A grand gesture to invite their loved ones along

Will you go with me?

What will my leaving be like, when it comes time to add a new home to my list

It is always in the pits of inadequacy I remind myself
This around you is temporary
And you are getting better and better at building what you need
I wonder if I will have someone to ask
Will you go with me?
Mar 2015 · 378
On Being Gracious
Chestina N Craig Mar 2015
I try my best to be like fruit

so that any scars and bruised left by your poking and
prodding careless hands

teach me to be softer and sweeter than I was before.
Feb 2015 · 523
This is About a Boy
Chestina N Craig Feb 2015
We are two people with flashlights for hands
rooting in each others rib cage

showing off the bits of broken glass we swallowed

I will try to make mine pretty
and you'll laugh
cause everything *****, really.

I hope you think that what you've found between my crosshatched texture
one winged birds and fraying rope

**** a little less than most things
Chestina N Craig Feb 2015
Dear Alarm clock that always has the wrong time,
you really **** with my sleep schedule.
Not in a bad way
its just,
you showed me how much luminescence there can be in the dark
and now I want to be awake for all of it.
Chestina N Craig Feb 2015
Dear Sweater that is to small for me now,
at 16 I lived in you
at 17 you helped me learn to hate my body
and at 18 my best friend had to pry me from within your stretched out, past due hold
you’re still in the back of my closet somewhere.
Feb 2015 · 3.0k
Addict
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
Feb 2015 · 1.0k
Etiquette Guide to Happiness
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
Feb 2015 · 1.5k
The Spine In Detail
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
Dec 2014 · 1.2k
The Flowers Love Me
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
Dec 2014 · 947
sorry
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
Dec 2014 · 2.8k
Gold
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
Oct 2014 · 469
MY MURMURING HEART
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
Oct 2014 · 299
I Hope You Never See This
Chestina N Craig Oct 2014
I do not want to be a girl so easily over looked for sleep.
The blessed invitation for your hands to make my planes and valleys your home answered with fear, maybe?
I want to be desirable
I want to be unforgettable
The feeling of rejection stings like scraping fingernails across my deepest insecurities
I want to spit out this feeling into my wineglass.
Instead it is silently swallowed
gathering like bile in my gut
My therapist calls these ANTS
(automatic negative thoughts)
and they whisper desperation
Aching “fill me”, “fill me”
Consume till you feel whole.
I give so much to those who only know how to return less than half.
Remind yourself that you are a storm
and everyone is a walking warning label.
and really we all have spaces to fill
like the area behind me on our friends couch which you take up till you are wrapped around my like a vine
and how I have always loved the resilience of plants, just like I love your arm around me
and you and I are resilient.
each in our own ways I know, because the physical is the physical and the friendship is what we have got
those mornings following your body with mine
your lips on my neck tracing cigarette burns
I have never smoked in my life, it would not ever feel nearly this good.
The light in me sees the light in you
singed at my edges
I want to see more
and
I want to ache less
Chestina N Craig Oct 2014
When you break five beer glasses at work
do not berate yourself
imagine yourself as a young child
she is with you for this instance in your life
would you be as cruel to her as you are to yourself?
You have as much right to let thins shatter at your feet as she does
Do not take this as a mistake
Take this as a subconscious act against the addiction that held you parents in its ugly hands for years
2. If you want to find your joy in speaking to strangers
then allow it
hang out with the boy in Hawaii at 3 am that you just met
discover that his leg resting on yours feels like the warmth of the island
even in the depth of the night
realize that you do not have to miss the cold skin of the boy who was your first everything
you are a girl who needs warmth,
and you are a girl who can find this warmth in others
3. I’ve learned in the past month that the best way to figure out who should be in your life is to love yourself harder than you ever have before and watch for who resents it.
4. Do not apologize for your emotions
You are human
Do not allow someone to tell you that you are lesser because you are angry
Because you are sad
Because you just don’t know
5. Teach people the acceptable way to treat you by reciveing nothing less than what you need
Wear your self-love for all of them to see
Scream it from the rooftops
You are a goddess
You are not to be underestimated
Sharpen your eyes so well that a look will keep them in line
But do not forget to keep your softness as well
Do not harden your heart
Just because they fear your fire does not mean you should douse it
Do you not realize how many other people it keeps warm?
Oct 2014 · 785
Burn
Chestina N Craig Oct 2014
My mother and I
are twin fires

she, a controlled burn
I, a lost wildfire

I was born a mistake from a spark

touch our lives
the wrong way
and be silently scalded

we refuse to dim

without her I would not know how to burn on my own.

— The End —