do not date a girl
who writes.
she will internalize
everything,
carve poems
into your eyelashes
instead of
kissing them,

she will analyze you,
calculate age
from the rings
your coffee cup
leaves
instead of refilling it.

she will memorize
the way your
lips curl around steam,
but not that you
take it
two sugars,
no cream.

she will read your
palm instead of
holding it
against her chest.

she will not
blink
when you leave,
because she is
already
romanticizing it.

Clear is not innocence, clear is lack of justice. Clear is ****.
It is ****. Is me, is clear, is vacant, is *****.*


They took my sweater first. Cardigan. Blue, bought it on a family trip to Florida (on sale). I was fifteen. 15.

15 years old and they paraded it around the basement of my classmate’s house.

Parents not home.
The Home in the suburbs. Classmate’s parents going through a divorce
(very quietly).

They kept alcohol in the closet.

15 years old and He took my sweater first. I think his name was spencer.

I can’t remember- they were feeding me , helping me to breathe in grain alcohol. Soak it in. Clear. Almost water not quite water looks like water. Breathe. Breathe drink breathe drink . 15

I didn’t know how to drink. My first time drinking breathe drink breathe no more breathing heavy breathing they took me into the bedroom upstairs.

What happened there . The strangest thing I don’t remember woke up the next morning not my shirt WHERE’S MY SHIRT. **** my sweater can’t find it.

wearing someone else’s socks.

The socks are black with rubber grips on the bottom

The silence you clothe yourself in will become a second skin. You will work hard to remove it. You will scrub yourself raw until the sweet scent of orange blossoms replaces the lighter fluid that has seeped into your pores.

When you finally tell someone, you will be drunk. It will be 2 a.m. You will tell your parents, it will spill out of you as you hover over the toilet. Your secrets mixed with ***** and something sour, something burning, something permanent. It will feel good, to flush the pain out of your throat.

It will be hard for you to be intimate. When you talk to that boy in your English class, you will feel butterflies for the first time in months, those same butterflies whose wings were clipped that night last July. You feel the butterflies, yes, but you will cringe when his hand brushes up against your own.

When that same boy asks you out on a date, and he opens the car door for you, you will want to run. You will feel the air in your lungs combust when he kisses you. You will think he is trying to draw blood when he bites your lip.

You will wonder if he can he see the bruises and fingerprints that still stain your nakedness

You will not believe him when he says “I love you”

When he asks why you never want to touch him, why you talk in your sleep, why your chapped lips are a graveyard eroded from the salt streaming down your cheeks, you tell him everything.

You do not cringe when he tries to hold your hand this time.

I keep thinking about his bones. How I will never see them.

Sometimes it feels like he is holding me between his fingers, watching me sift through the spaces.

one time he rolled my naked flesh onto the floor and refused to clean it with the ***** sheets.


How naive to base my well being off of someone else’s existence-



(BREAK YOUR MIRRORS. Your stomach cannot handle the person he has made you become. Break your blood vessels open- the ones in your lungs. Scream about the glass-covered floor- You created this mess by trying to look at something that wasn’t real.)

He wants me to break my body like the holy wafers on Sunday when I was a child, when I still believed in things that weren’t real.

My body is his, but only when broken and scattered with prayer.

I have to strip myself clean, collect the mud that clings to my teeth in harsh clumps.
bite my tongue to resist the temptation of running it across my jaw.

There will be dust on my eyelashes but I should leave it.
(Someone Else will always brush it off.)

and this next part is very important because my Whole Life-
MY WHOLE LIFE- people have been tying rags to my Sharp Parts,
trying to Save me.

I am round, my floral underwear straining against a torso that isn’t used to the beers he never buys me.

he’s been ******* other girls

he knows that I am young; eager for it-
for the something that doesn’t exist in him.

He can see me blink, feel my aching when I wake up.

He will let me do it again.

(He’s sorry. He met someone better. Someone with taste, someone who pronounces words correctly, doesn’t laugh too loud. He’s sorry.
He never wanted to mean this much to you. He never wrote about you.
He closed his eyes when you danced. Shook his head. No. You should forgive him. He’s a ******* metaphor. He’s sorry.)

and I'm sorry.

sorry that I am
starting to make things up, starting to remember things differently.