My stomach began to hurt about two days ago. That was the morning I woke up to an empty bed and throbbing head and no messages from you, no "hey darling I got here in one piece," no "goodnight dear." But then again I never date guys who talk like that. My stomach hurt all day and I wanted to talk to you so bad I gave into temptation and you said everything was good and you had "forgotten" to text me and I brushed it off later and didn't ask for the story when your friends kept teasing you about "the married woman you hit on."
My stomach still hurts and it's been two days now and today I told you it hurt and you said "I'm sorry" when all I needed to hear was "I love you, I'm here" and I cried harder than the sky did all the way home and tried to take a nap but now I sit here trying to scrawl down thoughts in the messy way I do when my mind screams with the need to spit them out. I can't understand how it always ends up like this, always hurts like this, LOVE ISNT SUPPOSED TO FEEL LIKE THIS. You've taken my mind in your hands and molded it and my body bends easily to your will and my words will never tell you how much you hurt me because I can't lose you and my head needs to get it out and everyone tells me that my poetry is best when it feels the most real well it feels PRETTY ******* REAL RIGHT NOW and the sickest part is that its when I am most ****** up that I can create the most beautiful things.
You're an artist. Finger-paint my messy mind because no brush strokes could do it justice. See the way that side is always a little smudged, darling? See the way my hands always shake a little, spiderweb lines that map out my grotesque sickness? See my broken inability to understand why you couldn't possibly love me, I know you can't love me, I've seen me I've felt me I've heard me.
You were perfect. Take that label and shove it up your *** hahahahaha. Or maybe stick it on my chest to be worn like a badge of detestable irony, I wish I could hate you but every time I try to breathe out the words "I'm leaving" my mouth says "kiss me" instead.
And all my friends and their cookie cutter boyfriends live their days in warm snuggles and cookies and I breathe blood bubbles and think about throwing my toaster in the shower just for ***** and giggles.
You were mine, are mine? Never mine.

I can tell you about the girl.

Her freckles were beige constellations,
and her voice was husky and rasped
like birds before the churning of a storm.

She was weird and laughed at everything I said -
which made her even weirder,
because I'm only funny in certain photos
and in certain clothes.

Her left arm was covered in scars and burns.
"As you can tell, I'm right handed," she said.
Arthritis surrounded her wrists and other joints,
and all I could think about were my
grandmother's arthritis crippled hands,
and if the girl would thank the arthritis, one day,
for no longer allowing her to self-harm.

One of her feet were bigger than the other
and, when she walked, she would lose balance.
"I'm not sure if the world is too fast
or if I'm too slow. Then again," she winked,
"it's probably because of my feet."
I liked her because she treated me like a person,
but didn't take me as seriously
as I took myself.

I struggled with self-respect
and she struggled with a drug addiction.
Her arm was needle park
and sometimes she missed ******
more than she missed me.

She wasn't the type of girl to shake
without her drugs -
she'd, instead, talk about them
like they were old friends.
She understood them
more than she understood herself.

After a few months of ***
and, "I'll be sad when you leave,"s,
I called her my girlfriend
and she smiled.
Flecks of speckled angles, bright,
I saw her, first, she accepted
my night.

Five days later,
she overdosed on morphine.
I picked her up.

Her eyes were glazed over.
I said, "I love you,
but this is *******."
She cried and said,
"Forgive me."

I lain in bed, next to her -
next to the avoidance of death.
She asked how I was
and I said, "Everything I write is ****,
but I'm glad I can write ****** poetry
about how we'll be okay."

She asked, "We will be okay, right?"

I hope.

"Nina, why do you always date *****?" questions my best friend in the way that implies an answer is not needed nor wanted in the warm light of his front porch in the car that belongs to me but he offers to drive when my stomach is sick and a new ****-up is laid like fresh paint on my mind.
The question itself spins like a coin in my head that will never lay flat, like a bad autotune job, like a Rube Goldberg that will never halt, like it has too much truth to it.
"Why do you always date *****?"
Because they don't seem like ***** when our eyes meet and the ***** of their smile makes my nose crinkle with an incessant desire to smell the warm scent of their chest as my head lays pillowed on it in the early morning calm before the loud realization of what events transpired the night before, before flashbacks of mixed bodies and sweaty whispers, before he decides he's seen enough of me, devoured his piece of meat, he's not hungry anymore.
When will I be his favorite food? The one he can have for breakfast lunch and dinner and still crave, the one he will always ask for seconds of, the one who is home to him. Every time I meet someone I call all of my friends and swear he's the ever so infamous "one," and every time I fall for the ******* lie that he "will not break me," YOU WILL NOT BREAK ME?! Then why am I shattered, laying in pieces on the cold tile floor, my mind a messy oozing disaster? But maybe my heart has always been just a taped up broken mess since Paula left, maybe when Aaron and Spain and Mitchell came along it was all too easy for them to pull at the poorly tied knotted strings I had sewn into my heart, maybe my soul was just a little too welcoming, maybe my mouth was a little too eager to feel theirs against it. But I can swear that when you "made love to me" it was really just *******, or else why would you take the one piece of me left only to complain after that I hadn't shaved. Well I've shaved every day since, cut bleeding patterns into my mortified anxiety, ripped tears from my eyes before I dare let them fall, and watched you kiss her over and over again. But if you asked me back I'd still say yes, rip the shredded heart from the box I've tended to keep it in and place it back in your hands to wear like a new notch in your belt, a new trophy for your collection.
"Why do you always date *****?"
Because some wretched inner part of my being believes I deserve it.

A slam poem


Your contact picture was taken the day you forgot to buy me a Christmas present
And when I scroll through my phone and see your name I remember crying until my pillow was painted black with streams of dashed hopes and childish mistakes.
On our third date you took the clip out of my hair and put it in yours and I haven't worn it since. Now I keep that clip in a desk drawer and try not to remember the way your voice cracked when you whispered my name and breathed your secrets into my mouth before trying to rip them back out through my heart when you decided you'd had enough of laughing over clips in your hair.
At night I lay awake and command my mind to conjure up any thought that's not you in your grey tuxedo, you in your painted skin that you outgrew when you smoked your first cigarette, peeling layers of who you were when you still filmed ghost hunting videos and touch-ups of who you are now, with your tears like rare prizes I wish I could collect in bottles and auction off to every past girl you've ever loved. And ****, there's a lot of girls.
But in the grand essay of your every past love I am the typo on the third page that knocks down your grade two points, the ****-up you would do anything to hit backspace on, the messy extra letter that somehow is overlooked by your meticulous eye because it's 2 am and you stopped giving a **** at 10. I am the coffee stain that gives away your procrastination like a badge worn across your chest, like a bruise on your forehead she may notice when she leans in to kiss you, like a tear in your favorite tie that she will see when she slides it off your neck and slips it sensually onto her own, not knowing I think about hanging myself with that very tie 1036 times a day if only I thought for one second it would awaken you from the slumber you fell into when you found whiskey and me that one December night on the countertop that wasn't even our own.
And I awake every morning drenched in heartache and heavily breathing out the rhythm your heart would drum as I lay at night with my head on your chest and my heart in your hands and my body in your mind. I was the glass sculpture you couldn't resist playing with no matter how many times you were warned not to, I was the wet paint sign you couldn't resist testing, I was the fire alarm you just had to pull.
But I would burn my tongue on coffee watching the sunrise with you again and again and again if it would resurrect the Christmas lights that burned like dying stars in my stomach in the fleeting moment where I truly believed you could love me, your kisses like butterfly wings that became bats all too quickly, your love like a fever that broke too fast- sweating and crying in bed at 2 am-I MISS YOU AND I HATE YOU AND I NEED YOU.
Yet maybe I knew along that this would happen. Yes, maybe I saw you as an opportunity to rekindle my old romance with anger and pain and depression, maybe when my friends told me you were bad news, I rejoiced in the idea of my old friends returning so much so that I opened the door and said "come on in," arms opened wide, play dough mind in their hands.
Or maybe I just really loved you.

Close my eyes and breathe in and get through the day and whisper a prayer and hope with all of my heart that I don't run into you.
Lay in bed and clench my hands into fists to squeeze out all that's left of you holding them and try not to breathe in too fast or else the hole in my chest will surely cave in further and don't think of you, don't think of you, don't think of you.
Clean my room and don't notice the things you left behind when you left so quickly.
Make my bed and don't remember the way it was always just a little too small for the both of us.
Take a walk and don't walk past your house, or the restaurant we went on our first date, or the park where we kissed the first time, or the hill where you coughed a little too much and left me alone in the angry cold to lie on the grass and want to die.
Don't think about that. Definitely don't think about that.

Happiness was a boy in a rhino sweater and giraffe pants whose lips tasted like soft serve ice cream.
Happiness was a boy who loved video games and hookah and baking cookies, a boy who could name every episode of Parks and Rec, a boy who loved spoken word and also burritos, who saw finding new bands as a sport.
Sadness was a boy who walked everywhere, a boy who never finished high school and was sometimes still drunk at 9 am.  
Sadness was a boy who's eyes closed their curtains to me, who's heart slammed it's door to me, who's body said "come on in." A boy who said he could never love me the way he loved her, a boy who said he didn't think he was "ready for a relationship," a boy who put me out like an old cigarette.
But I'm sick of all these emotions.

I shot myself in the stomach with the memory of you telling me all about Guardians of the Galaxy when I saw the broken DVD case sitting on my counter next to a coffee ring I forgot to wipe up this morning.
My lip is bitten through and through with memories that shake my head because they're too loud and bright to stick inside and they need to be out and breathe.
But I try so hard to keep my buttons closed all day, try so hard to hold myself together but I'm a puzzle with a missing piece and sometimes that shows up when people take away the coaster I put over my left corner and wonder where the tip of the sail is and I have to tell them I lost it years ago.
But you always ******* hated puzzles, and loved ******* puzzles like me who would give you anything you asked for because back then I had all my pieces and a syrupy desire to be yours and yours only forever, sipping on coffee with too-much cream in the early morning hours, wrapped in you, with your heartbeat singing familiar patterns in my ear.
And my birthday's in two weeks but all I feel is a narrow candle of hope in the back of my mind that maybe you'll think to call, maybe I'll open my doors to find you with a smile and a can of whipped cream, and even Reese's peanut butter cups (my favorite but the irony always was you had a peanut allergy.)
For now my bed is too small to hold all these memories, but, honey, it always had room for you. My mind clings to song lyrics, oxygen, because they hint that someone someday felt what I feel now, what I have felt for months. The snow globe you gave me that one time is broken in shards of everything you promised me and our last kiss, and it lays on my bedroom floor in case you ever come back and I have reason to piece it back together.
But when I see you this Sunday for mass as usual, you won't know any of this.