Broken girl
Folded over the curb
Neon pink wig
Halo on her head
Vomiting in the street
"Lose a contact?"
A smart *** says
Lost
She has lost more than that
Vodkas, beers, lemon drops
Spin her head
Completely around
Sea salt spray
Mists on her lips
Clears her mind
For a brief moment
Memories try to sneak back in
But the liquor swirls them away
******* on unsteady feet
Jostles her way
Back into the Riptide
Crowded with Halloween revelers
Sits, then slips off the
Retro bar stool
Asks for more punishment in a glass
Anything to make the pain push away
Even if just for a few hours
She's now had her fill
Halo a bit askew
Pink wig in place
Friends gather 'round
She's incapable of walking
Arms around each other
They make the long journey home
She gratefully passes out
On the cool, crisp sheets
Oblivious to the pain for several more hours
Avoided until she wakes up
To the cold, hard truth
There's no escaping it now

I have on a pearl necklace, the beads like cabbage
stonewashed by sun

and sitting upon this veranda I
watch wind feather a hilltop where your sister
lost her virginity to a man while she was but a girl –
the sort that marries nothing besides memories.

She would wear what I do if I remember correctly.
Your sister had taped posters on her wall
of which she would stay up late to kiss goodnight –

I heard their rustle
through the plaster, through your hair covering my
neck when you hid me next door
pouring my secretions onto your mattress.

Somehow, she was younger and older than you:
chopsticks in her whiskers twice your age
**** a scalp whose hardly brushed one’s headboard.

You and I, on hiatus
and she and I were always clean –

skimming our knees together while you had another
girl in the shower-stall, who cried when
she ate a sandwich
or abbreviated the name I wished never would end.

In the valley, the willows cut a dress your sister would
wear with my pearl necklace, and
I think I will marry my memories, too, if not you.

Today I picked up a pencil in a pathetic attempt to banish all the bad thoughts.
I wrote about you.
How we haven't been talking.

I wrote about my dad.
About how I don't want to hate him

I wrote about how I stopped getting high with my friends.
And how I should be focusing on important things

I wrote about how I stayed the night at my best friends house.
And how I took too much ambien and how it made me cry all night.

I meant to get all these thoughts out But now I'm swimming in them.

To the hopeful ones:
I am unavailable.
Emotionally.

Tuesdays remind me of third grade
and so does astrology.

Our tables formed a pentagon, it was me and the beautifuls:
come the good-looking maid called Destinee
with two e’s, not one and not even a y, she had two e’s.

I modeled myself after her cerulean lenses
eye sockets that were pulled back by dinosaur bones
and gave wrinkles to her forehead prematurely, six speckles
like ostrich eggs gathering under a stratum of mud.

She was dark-headed, she wasn’t fair.  
She had sorcery in her collar, fairies in her pulse.

Her mother had the name of a Chihuahua or evil witch:
I secretly cursed her for having a daughter so lovely
who I could not peck on Tuesday field-trips to a menagerie
just because she was as feminine as me.

That is how I learned about destiny
and Destinee, so pretty pretty.

Let us go to that market on Broad Street, the one by Little Theater
where I got mad at you and refused to scale your wrist like it were a skyline –
I did not even knot your knuckle-hair with my sweat.
I was so angry, but I want to go by there again. We can search for some
nectarines and decide which share of our bodies they appear, feel most like.
One will have to be rotting, because your cheeks are an old peach,
black fuzz on the ends of something round, enflaming –
another can be as young-looking as I was when you first touched me.
Then, you will hold the door open while we prance into the House of Pizza,
find that corner bench where painted lighthouses dawn the walls:
I have kissed you here before, once when I was sad and another with a grin.
Sometimes, I wonder how many places I have loved you
but that would be as impossible as counting every way I have known you –
sometimes you are a moon off the axis, sometimes you are a plum
sometimes you are bobby pins in my curl, sometimes not
sometimes I rest on the bench where you licked frosting from my cheek
and sometimes just going to the grocery makes me miss you enough.

Think of the lightning bug you smashed
when you drove me across town
and rolled your window up and down
to blow the skirt above my knees.

You said, “that is the only part I missed
when you quit smoking cigarettes.”

Me, I have nostalgia for the drag –
a cylinder riding my tongue.
I’ll never get to **** your **** enough.

Tobacco and *** once swam in me
in layers like those Russian nesting dolls.

In my heart, there is the littlest:
someone of a different gender than I
who cuts their hair and papier-mâchés it
where your teeth discolored my thighs.

This runt takes the size of a firefly
but he has no freckles: he must be adult.

Sputter, “I think you’ll smash something
again I think it may be me you wreck
because I am not an insect behind glass.”

and I know you enough to hear you say
you can unravel me like cloth anyway.

It's a take-your-top-off
Kind of day
And I'm getting naked
In the backyard
Merle Haggard rambling
Feverishly in my mind
I'm letting the sun
Get a little frisky
Kiss me anywhere it wishes
And the lilacs whisper
Fragrance
There's a new cadence
of Grasshopper sounds
I'm gonna change things
I'm gonna be that girl
That everybody falls in love with
Everybody knows her name
Dark-skinned
All muscle
All smiles
Living life outside
Kissing all the boys
And making them cry
Living life famously
Shamelessly
Physically
With a closet full of jorts and cut-off tees
I'm gonna be that girl
Because
It's a take-your-top-off
Kind of day
And I'm already naked
I'm a wild mustang
I've got nothing
To lose but my shirt
and my inhibitions