Do you know how beautiful it is to be empty ?
Hollow, -
Like a drum. -
When you touch me i rear your sound:
Irreplecable, new, bright.
I am your echo - the thought that spurs you
The art that haunts you,
The woman who cleans you.

The soft edges of femininity,
Round, *******, complements,
Heels, ***** of the feet, sockets,

Soft eyes, soft hearts, soft hands
Tinkering, thanking, crossing, legs.

Girlhood is enclosed in a silver box
With mute pastels and a heavy soundtrack of strings,

Strings which bifurcate, dissect, divulge,
Horrors, bells, instruments and lush melodies.

Girlhood smells of iron, hot animals, heaving,
Converging, pin ******, the sharp alacrity of Knowing.

Eyes are wet, armpits go black , round edges
Protrude into a potbelly, grow and stagnate,
expand and collapse.

You are the wheat, you are the marrow. You are wholesome and life-giving, where the disease takes hold and lays waste. You are dizzy like a wildfire, cut loose and vengeful. You have arson on your mind and crime on your bloodied lips. You speak in a contrived directness which is apparently an act. People find you sick when they love you. I wear socks around you and I am callous. You invoke the terror, beget the night sweats. I grow my teeth for you and clamp down on the nearest artery I can find. You think about French ideas and German systems. You meditate without much meaning. I don’t recognize your face when I see it. Yours is a disembodied voice which haunts me all the way to my echo chamber so that I may never be free from the resonance of it.

The world is at a dizzying standstill. All I can do is eat and clip my fingernails, while I grow and stagnate, expand and collapse, exerting energy in vain to bring the air into my lungs and grow eyelashes,  then pluck them off with heat. I have detritus, waste, bycatch, excess, growing and detaching, living and dying. I am a Monotony, a repetition of ****** functions which persist blindly, in spite of my sinking heart and my fleeting mind. I am dense with lint, heavy with lungs. I stand upright with my bones and gawk at the pallor which has overtaken my gaunt and plump adult face.

my breath smells the same as my sister's.
not our explicitly clean breath, nor our post-meal breath,
but the natural essence that diffuses from within that cavity.

our parents were the same so the germs- the bacteria
that populate our orifices must be related too.
twin tongues, the same undulating monuments of calcium
and cavity.

What can I say of a father
Who was too ill to notice my birth?
Whose gentle nature at once endeared him to me
         and caused me the greatest pain of my whole life.
And Dad, when I went to wake you all those mornings in vain,
Did you notice the fear behind my squeaking laughter?
Or the sound of my retreat?
Did your love for me grow when I sketched your sky
And folded the laundry while you were away?

I think of the slow droning burn of the days,
How my life was a struggle for power, a struggle for words.
I waged war at seven.
There had to be violence and noise and ruin,
For the tumult that surrounded me never ceased
And had never before been produced
By my own small body,
Though I believed I was the perpetrator all along.

Our finest chinas grew fewer as I grew older,
And the laziness of my household grew too.
Gnats swarmed our remaining plastic bowls
As the rooms expanded both in fullness and in void.
A lack. A lack of mom. Dad away in the shed, tinkering.

Sometimes, Dad, your face took on a look of health.
A health whose glow radiated unto me, your satellite.
And in those moments of brightness, i believed in god,
In everything, in your capacity, in your love, your promises,
In my own beauty.

I brought you my words and lavished upon you my art, my books,
My trinkets of artistic arrangement.
I showed you the house of my creation where there were girls
With blue shoes and there was peace within the six pink rooms.

The moon learns in time that there are passing phases
And that the constancy of the sun’s luminosity is illusory.
But i was too young to know of ancient cycles,
And in my beating heart it was unlove
and there was no trace of hope when you turned face
And eclipsed me.