Mulan sang about not knowing her reflection.
well, the trouble is, I know mine,
it's just that I don't like her at all-
the way her big eyes are like a child's,
stuck in a woman's long face
and a crone's deep blue bags
and a ghost's pale freckles.

I used to think she was pretty,
but most of the time now I just glare a little
and I ask her where the time went,
even though I can see **** well
all the minutes pined away in the shadows
of her cheekbones,
the ones people used to call beautiful,
the ones that they now silently observe and think,
just a little too deep, a little too empty,
and they're right.

God, they're right.

Because she's spent too much time staring in that mirror,
trying to will herself to believe that she is beautiful,
she is worth it,
she is better than what other people think,
and she's been lying all this time.
The pair of us, we've never liked liars,
but I'm staring her in the face
and I'm deciding to tell the truth.
Girl, you've spent years in this misery
and you have nothing to be sad about.

Maybe it's all those **** tears you won't shed.
It's because you know you're uglier when you cry,
when your eyes swell up
and you suddenly have lids that rival your bags,
and your skin is no longer so pale
but for the huge red patches all over
like swollen blood flames.
If it's one thing you're more afraid of than anything,
it's that Daddy lied when he said you were pretty,
and you were a fool for believing.

You were a fool.

Are a fool.

Those swollen, patchy cheeks might pass for motley,
might as well,
so why don't you cry for once
and accept that he doesn't love you,
that you're maybe not going to do great things,
that you probably won't live up to your own expectations
and certainly not your family's,
and maybe you're not as wanted as everyone promises,
and yes, you're maybe even a bit unattractive
but for God's sake
it's even worse to try and convince yourself
that none of it's true.

Sweetheart, it's true.

I'll cry with you.

pick up the pencil.

my mother told me
to make something,
but I didn't have the strength.
I didn't have the courage
to tell her that the pencils are suddenly
far
too
heavy-

"you have to start making art again."

mother, I've tried.
I've tried too many times to count.
I have spread out my pencils
and arranged my pallet
and taken inspiration till the pieces
blend, lose shape,
but everything has lost its color.

blues are so gray.
red is even grayer.
yellow is a sickly highlight,
and I can barely stomach
the near black shade of old purple.

and when I look up,
I remember that my world
has gone gray, too,
and I had forgotten
till now,
pencil shaking, paintbrush askew
between weak fingers.

why bother?
it's all the same color
anyway.

so I let the pencil drop.

I think I made a wrong turn somewhere.
I mean, I guess- well, it's embarrassing, but I just kept following my GPS
even when the roads got rough
and my gut felt a little strange
(you know it, right?  That twinge you start to get when you realize you have no idea where you are?)
and before I knew it,
I was in the middle of nowhere.

Maybe the batteries are low,
though you'd think they'd install some kind of warning about that-
I mean, people are depending on these things, you know, to get them places.
They've even got them in phones.

Google Maps, I hear.

Anyway, I really...I really think I'm lost.
Could you give me directions?

...or leave me in your wake.

You never believed me when I told you
I was not some do-it-yourself, weekend project;
these holes are beyond your repair
and you simply have to live with them.

But you thought you could fix me.
You have wasted your staples and plaster
and spread paint over casts
that never even fit.
The dust of the drywall has settled
in the hollow of my throat
and choked out my laughter,
and I am simply tired.

These halls were meant to be tred lightly.

I tried to warn you, but you,
thinking yourself experienced,
announced your arrival with loud steps
and by swinging wide the windows,
and proceeding to tear out the frames
so you could make them anew.

So if you cannot learn to tiptoe,
I will have to draw the shutters
and remember how to lock the door at night.
Those old muscles will ache
but it won't be hard to relearn.
For I am Misery's daughter,
and you thought you could fix me.

I've said it before
(I'll say it again)-
grief is where I come back to,
because she made me that way
and I am a lot
like my mother.

She taught me how to cry
for other people,
and I am crying now
not for my own pain,
but for the pain I will cause you.

Cry.  Cry until your tears
dissipate and die,
and scream in a way
that no one will ever hear,
like I have for months.

God, I've got to tell you.
I'll tell you,
and I'll cry with you,
and when it's done,
I'll still cry for you.

Because she gave me
a lot of tears to spill,
and a heart bigger than
a broken galaxy,
I have to spend it all
on other people.

Like my mother,
I am nothing short
of charitable.

Black paint allowed to sit and separate into
oily, bleary, sticky, sick gray.

Spring flowers planted a week too early
wilted yellow under the last snow.

Pristine term paper fresh off the printer, carried through the rain
bleeding blood sweat and tear ink into obscurity.

(That was ten cents per page, you know.)

Artemis is my godmother, but she might as well have made me herself.
not with anyone else; just her womb of stars and moonlight, and a love of open air and indigo sky.  chase the horizon until it becomes a little less distant, and suddenly you just are.  she taught me that.  she taught me a lot of things.

whisper to the wind and talk to the trees; they'll listen.  maybe, if you satisfy them, they might sigh back a response.  notch your bow of silver bark and quilled arrows with the breeze in their feathers, and teach the deaf what they told you.  she does it so often that it's instinct for her now.  (I'm still working on my marksmanship.)

she taught me to run with the wolves, too, but neither of us expected that I would settle into the pack so well.  I am cohesive; I obey the hunt.  I know how to loose the same long, lonely howl.  I know how to protect and guide and follow- mostly, anyway.  the trouble is, I stray in my heart.  I long for more than long nights and stray breaths between sisters.  

I long for someone who will hold me, and that is the one thing my godmother cannot teach me.  she does not know how to catch a man's heart with her glittering arrows, and she has sworn off the folly of trying.

I'm a little more foolish though.  

she holds me close in my despair, and we are so alike that sometimes it becomes impossible to tell the two of us apart.  but it always comes back, the stubborn truth:  I can never join the hunt.

because my father's song is guiding my wanderer's heart, and I was born to chase.  I just can't chase with Artemis.

I love too deeply to give love up.

you,
breaking open hollow fragments
of the truths I trusted you with.
I can hear the plinking
of broken glass and promises,
pattering as if the rain
has become some sort of
fractured heartbeat.
they are small,
but they crack me upon impact
and you laugh when each echo
shatters my insides.

how can you not see
that I am trying to hide my face
for a *reason?
I do not want to admit that these
are tears,
and I do not want to pretend
that they aren't.
I just want you to notice,
to stop destroying everything
I gave to you
just long enough for me to breathe.
I need to breathe.

I need air, even if I don't want it.

This is fine, right here.

I will curl into myself
(savor my own warmth, for once)
and let go of my own fingertips.

Take a look at me.

Wonder how I got here.

No, really- wonder,
don't assume,
because maybe that's humanity's
biggest problem.
Everybody thinks they're smart enough
to tell the story just by looking at its cover.

I am white. I am so white it's painful,
so pale I know the frustration
of never having found a foundation
in my color,
of having to settle,
of being too much of an inconvenience
to make a shade for.
But there is privilege in this;
there is no denying that,
none whatsoever,
and please know:  I am not denying anything.  
I can't.  It is true.
My privilege is skin deep,
bone deep,
inescapable and ever evident,
but it did not get me here today.
Not entirely.

Because no matter how white I am,
my soul has never fit in.
It must be a motley of colors.
I am so white,
yet I'm not white enough-
eating alone and wearing the wrong clothes,
unable to read music
because we couldn't afford piano lessons,
and now that we have the money for birthday parties
no one will ever come.

I am ten shades less tan
than the preferred caucasian
and they will never, ever let me forget it.

I am judged the moment someone sees my family
because suddenly, the puzzle pieces must fit-
that's why she's successful,
she's a rich white girl-
except fortunate parents doesn't automatically
mean you get everything,
doesn't mean I didn't do chores,
doesn't ever mean I got paid for A's
or that college help was guaranteed.

I had to earn it.  
A's were expected, chores a duty,
allowances non-existent.
I fought for my success and only then
was I promised assistance
to get through college without drowning in bills,
yet even then
I still had six figures to consider
and weeks' worth of scholarship papers
just to make it out with anything to my name.
Privilege was present,
but privilege was not the reason
I won enough scholarships
to make it through.
I worked.
(It is possible for a white woman to work,
as much as I've heard that it isn't.)

My skin won't tell you that I've suffered,
quite the opposite.
My skin won't admit the times
that I pulled at it, hated it,
the days I wanted to make my pallor permanent
and the day gooseflesh trembled
beneath a blade.
It can't tell you about the tears
or the panic attacks
or the abandonment or depression or inexplicable grief
for joy I never knew,
belonging I never experienced,
and privilege that could not protect me from assault
or hatred,
because most of you wouldn't be listening anyway.

I promise,
there are reasons for my self-loathing.

But you won't know it,
won't even realize it exists as a subplot,
if you refuse to open my book
and learn my story
because my cover is white.

You won't realize that
I am scared to let my friends meet my family.
You won't know I've lost friends after they have.

You won't know that I care,
that I'm angry too,
so furious my teeth are cracking
but I can't say a word.
I am not supposed to.
I have been scolded for it.

Everyone says
not to judge a book by its cover,
yet they still do,
tossing novels aside every day
because their binding is displeasing.
Maybe some of the authors before me
wrote horrible stories,
but you stand to discover an unexpected favorite
if you can give others a chance.

And you stand to find a fellow motleyed soul
by opening that shiny new book you can't trust,
don't want to trust,
and testing the waters of the first delicate page.

you make me want to write something beautiful.
something like honey that drips on the lips,
golden and sweet and precious as amber-
or perhaps decadent frosting
made of buttercream, fresh vanilla-
constantly stirring the wrist, stirring the mind,
must fill the tongue with sugar and patience.

but how does one write that something?
how do these letters and commas and gathered dots (ellipses)
coalesce, rise, reach 415°F
without collapsing in on themselves,
or worse- growing doughy and sickly and peaking too early and too late?

....

could you teach me how to make, how to bake,
this beautiful food for the soul?

Clasp your hands.
Bow your head
and pretend it's your choice,
and not the weight of the sky
crushing you in its need
to kiss the earth.

I pray that I won't hurt you,
even as I know
I ask the impossible.
But that, I suppose, is prayer;
dusty lips and hollow bones
and a fervent need
for dreaming,
hoping against all odds
and asking for changes
when faith says it's all
already written.

(It's the most beautiful paradox.)

september

you sang me a song
and your voice trembled,
and there were ashes in your pockets
and stones on your shoulders,
but you picked my favorite songs
and filled the entirety of my car and my heart.
of course I said yes.
how could I not say yes?

october

you told me in the parking lot
and the pouring rain
that you loved me.
you smiled so wide that
I thought your cheeks might crack,
but they didn't, they shone,
they claimed the sun's place
in the midst of that storm.
and I whispered it back,
not because I was ashamed,
but because no one had ever said those words
and meant them before.

november

you took my hand and laced my fingers
with yours.
you were the first person
that I let walk me through the hallway,
through the city,
through life,
and the first person I ever wanted
to actually hold.

december

you taught me the meaning of grace.
you gently touched my walls and left fingerprints,
so I would know when I saw them
that I was always yours.
you wouldn't break me down,
but you would always remind me that
I was never alone
with smudges on windowpanes
and Christmas lights in your eyes.
Lord, you knew how I loved Christmas,
and I think I'd never loved it more
with you.

january

you walked me through the new year.
you told me your secrets,
and I told you mine,
hundreds of miles apart.
my heart might have broken a little,
but I learned what love meant.
I learned it meant true forgiveness.
you have forgiven me for my weaknesses,
and I have all but forgotten
what you still suffer over.
(it was not you, my love.
start anew.  the year is young.)

february

you shouted to the world
that you loved me.
I had never felt comfortable
with public declarations,
but I had to admit,
there was a beauty in your pride,
and it was hard but lovely to remember
that the beauty was me.

march

you clung to me as I faltered.
you saw just a glimpse of what I had meant
when I warned you I was broken.
you couldn't even catch the pieces of me
because I didn't let you know
they were falling.
I am so sorry.
I blamed you for my own faults,
and you, like the lamb I loved,
let me do it.

april

you still held me
even when I held you a distance away.
how could you be so strong?
I want you to forgive me.
I realize I love you,
and I put myself back together
on your charity.

may

you accepted my apologies.
you held me carefully,
as if you had finally realized how fragile I was,
but I clung to you as if I'd found salvation.
(I had.)
it took me all I had
to prove to you that I meant what I said.
your fingerprints will always be
on my windowpanes.

june

you flew a thousand miles away
and I missed you.
I woke up at night
and wondered why you were not beside me,
and you never had been,
but I realized I wished you were.
I never knew the depths of what missing meant
before you were gone,
then and now.

july

you returned, and I left this time,
but we laughed together
and shared our lives
and held each others' hands across the country.
that moment when I held you in my arms again
was when I found a piece of what I'd lost.
you took it.
I'm glad you did.

august

you and I just are.
we lay together
and I am okay with the silence.
I am okay with being close to someone,
so close I can hear your heart;
you have taught me to overcome
that first fear.
you are determined to overcome the rest.
time will tell.

september

you are my rock;
when the waves crash in,
you hold steady and keep me close.
I am so undeserving,
so fragile in comparison,
and yet you still shout your love to the world
and prove to me that you will always smudge my windows,
and I've thrown out all the wipes
because I am glad.

everyone says it is eleven months,
but I never stopped loving you,
so I count it.
make it twelve.

is that there's never
enough syllables for you
to say what you want.

(I think that's why they're beautiful.)

Sunlight is filtering in.
The floorboards are broken
and the counters deaf with dust,
but somehow,
these weak rays
are highlighting the rose,
the silver,
the gold
in every loose splinter
and wandering mote.

In this sunlight,
it even looks like stars
have settled into the living room
where no one else will walk
and certainly no one will eat.

This is acceptable.

There are beautiful galaxies to breathe
and a precious serenity
in the golden silence.

The thing about love
is that it punches holes in you.
That, you see, is why
it is infinitely more difficult
to truly love
than to simply like.

I myself tend to love
the wrong kinds of people.
I have been punched through
as if I were made for it,
and yet I never seem to hit
hard enough to leave
my own impressions.
Or perhaps it is not that
I have been punched through
at all, but rather that
when you burst
into a thousand pieces
the shrapnel pierced my heart.

I am a mess of it;
you live in the cavity of
my chest, nestled away in
the space between my ribs.
It is a miracle that my lungs
still operate, given how much
of you sleeps in their cradle.

Someone please take
these frayed edges and tie them
to at least give off a semblance
of wholeness.

(The reality is that I have
never been whole,
and you certainly didn't help.)

It started quietly, as most epidemics do.
A few victims, holes in the crowd; no one really notices them even when they're gone.
The same was true for me.

They saw that I was weak; they targeted me for pretending that I wasn't. It was a challenge to their superiority, and any rebellion must be culled.
This rebel could have caused an uproar, so they slipped a virus in my mouth
pressed my lips together
force-fed me poison
made me swallow
and watched my insides burn.

It locked onto my vocal cords, strangled me from the inside.
It gathered my heartstrings into angry fistfuls and knotted them together- made every heartbeat a struggle,
every beat beat beat a fight.
It burned my veins and severed my arteries, bleeding me out to the last aching drop.

They didn't understand the extent of the suffering they put me through.
I don't believe they would care either way.
I was silenced.
I was broken.
They broke me to pieces.

They dug my grave and left me at the precipice without the power to even stand or cry for help.
What was I supposed to do?
My knees buckled; I fell in.

They broke me, but they did not bury me.
I collected those pieces from the toiled, raw ground where they were meant to stay,
pick pick picked until my fingertips bled,
and put myself back together again.
After all, they'd bled all the sickness out with the rest of me.

The question became:
Who am I now?

out here, in the city, you can't see the stars because they bleed into the ink black canvas that is
the sky.
it's an imperfect black, a sickly pitch, with urban luster blotting out the deepest tones of indigo, scraping on orange luminescence around the edges of the sky canvas like God's pallet knife is rusty.
yet the sepia color is so much richer down below, confined in blazing streetlamps that flicker gold, in winking street signs- emerald, agate, rubies, precious gems in dented black boxes- and violet parlor advertisements that spray violent luminescence across the sidewalk.
it's beautiful in a lonely sort of way; I think the rainbow got a little tilted when humans tugged it from God's quiver.

isn't it strange?
how the most beautiful things can burn so brightly and bl o  t out
the subtle radiance all around them?
how the artificial can seem so much more real than the stars shining overhead- invisible, forgotten diamonds- because it burns just a bit brighter, shines just a little farther?

oh; the sun is coming up.

My fingers are aching.
They have stretched out to you
pleading, trembling,
needing your touch-
and you have taken the lips
that should have brushed my cheek
and instead whispered into
someone else's ear
that they are beautiful,
they are special,
they are not me.

You don't believe that there's
any issue with loving more than one of us.
Your heart, you say,
is more than big enough to support
that much affection.
But it has never been a question
of your heart, which, believe me,
I already know is strong.
It has always had everything to do
with mine, which falters
and stutters at a tilt of the world
and threatens to break
when you touch her skin.

I want to write about a girl
with auburn hair.
(It's not her natural color,
or at least it's not what springs out of her head,
but I think it's her true color.)

She is soft and severe,
fire and rain,
a smile that doesn't reach the eyes
and an effortlessly gentle soul
that shines from her gaze
when she's sure no one's looking,
but I usually am.
I can see that when somebody else notices her,
shutters fall and the house is boarded up.

It's hurricane season for her, always.
A never-ending tempest.

Swirling category four, cyclone in the flesh,
yet she stands there
solid-footed.
She is the eye of the storm.
She is the calm within the towering thunderstorms.

She touched my cheek accidentally
when she was helping disentangle my hair,
and I am caught in the wind and the rain
and the flame
and those green eyes.

Lord, help me not to sink.

There is no one here to help me if I do.

I oil my door to choke the cry that it makes,
and the rug on the porch hides the fact that it breaks.
my windows are broken, my structure's unsound,
but people don't know it when they walk around.
my white walls are painted and hung with a sheath
that is anything but the gray bleak underneath,
and they call it a portrait but nobody knows
the painting I framed hides a thousand black holes.
they could swallow this house and no one would see
anything but this lovely shell of me.

it's still white, still pretty, seems all the right way-
so long as the people inside never stay.
and they don't (the dust on the floor is my proof),
I blame their absence on account of my roof,
for it leaks cold wind and can never keep heat,
but the truth is, you see, that my friends never keep.
so I protect my walls and tread light on each floor
and I never, ever willingly open the door.
I can stay tall and sound and sure on my beams,
and, if I try, pretend I'm solid at the seams,
but the wounds are still there and it takes up a life
pretending to be perfect when perfect is strife.

Identity is a lot like clothing.
It is rooted in the idea that you must-
absolutely must-
wear it in order to offer anything
to society.

But sometimes, your body changes.
It is a natural process,
a revolution of cells and mathematics
and biology merging,
stretching,
or thinning into white lines.
It is something that every human
inevitably experiences,
and yet we are taught to punish ourselves
for our bodies
if they do not fit the clothing
or the style
that is "in."

I used to be thin and nondescript.
I conformed easily;
my skinny jeans were snug and comforting
and entirely right.
But as I grew older,
they began to struggle to climb my hips,
to nestle my waist and claim ownership
of the land they once recognized.
They became a distraction.
They became a discomfort.

So I traded them for something looser.
Something new.  Similar, yes, but different.
My friends did not understand.
"Why couldn't you just go a size up?
The old style was just fine.
A bigger size would suit you better,
so why not at least try?"

Why, indeed?  I still wonder.

Perhaps it was because so many people
tried to buy me new clothes.
I didn't understand or particularly like
the ripped, frayed blue jeans,
and I definitely did not favor
the vulnerability of short skirts
or tight dresses.

Why should you dictate
what I decide to wear,
as if you have any right to my body?

Why do you insist on such precise fits?

Why can't I dance through my days
in something loose, something flowing,
something I myself don't understand?

Instead, I still tried to wear my old pants.
And when again they no longer fit,
stretched and miserable and wrong,
I lay down in the laundry basket
and waited to be discovered
and tossed out
with the ***** clothes.