I drink pink grapefruit flavored drinks
my face smells like the citrus
when I lose things and people
I change my hair
it helps me cope with the idea that I can never finish a stick of lip balm and most of the people I've known only yield disappointment
no one is at fault here
but the blame is usually pushed into my intestines
and I spend five days throwing up
I used to be afraid that I would never see the entire world
now I'm afraid I'll never spend enough time in a place I can call home
every morning the smell of grapefruit grows stronger

myopic frames on a stern temple remind me that once he too wandered recklessly and felt ardent
empowered by time on his sleeve
there was nothing he couldn't conquer and nothing standing between the open air and breathing it in
i suppose the difference here is i grab the breath of air and hold it in my pocket for when i stop being so nervous

marshmallow heart
the road only goes one way and the streetlights hover and coil eternally, you can never meet the epilogue
a drive-thru drink in one hand while you feel your hair tangling into a mess of a beehive, the one that likes to unwind in soft tendrils on a weak pillow
heart racing for the constant fueling of a near empty tank telling you to go further this time, this time
time isn't yours


holding in a cough
i too have tried to drown waterbugs
my cheek pressed against the tiles of a kitchen floor, hand perched languidly as my fingers make circles in the tiny swamp i made in the middle of the room
but i forget laying there until i hear my own soul walk in with bare feet addressing the elephant in the room, the one that hasn't left since i was sick with bronchitis that winter years ago
and i want to tell her to come here, to come back inside myself so it doesn't feel so cold this season of frost but she brushes me off with the temperament of a child
"i don't exist, i never did" the words dawdle back and forth from her back molars to her incisors  
and i remember when i felt like i was dying when i hopped from one state to the next but realizing a little to late that if i were to go back my dread would jump on the back of my shoulders and force me to look it into it's shiny face and show me the mild nuisance of what it means to be alive
so my soul closes the door and i hear the keys rattle and i myself sink into the warm arms of someone i spent my entire life with

morning dew drops on your collar
impressing me with the zealous way the seasons drastically measure the moment it takes me
to reach forwards and brush it off
liquid winter falling onto a ***** cement
the initials 'F T' written jaggedly into the cold stone of asphalt
i wait for it to disappear, for the flicker of everything gone to fade from my vision
but it passes too quickly
i look back up and there's no one around
the street is empty and the capricious wind has ceased
a sucker for patterns i walk into a fabric store and feel my hand linger on the erratic linens
fingers paused on the peach organza sprawled like a pink bubblegum sea
and i am swept into the manic fantasies of wearing the sheer tissue-like textile into
the abdomen of your sweaty palm and sinking like a sticky sweet stripe
until you put your hand in your pocket and i spend a year inside melting
into the every thread and curve of your jean until it is nothing but disgusting sugar
everything i could be when i am hidden from sight in the dark caverns of denim pants
who knew the tongue in cheek joke would be nothing but my tongue in your mouth
touching all the way up your gums  
find me sweltering beneath the uvula wondering if i could go back
to the time i found that girl with the mountain logo sweatshirt who whistled between her teeth and hummed all the reasons i should skin my knee and kiss the salty wound because there's no greater pleasure than knowing you don't have to wait for that morning dew drop to fall from their ******* collar

my belly grows the size of a bag of apricots
there is a will at the bottom of a lake that needs retrieving
the car sank but the body made it to the shore and changed her name by midnight
come springtime the ice melts and the water is back
crawling upon shy ankles
there are growing pains who find a home between nettles and
the hives of adobe wasps
i never could cohabitate with nature
when they ask at parties where i've been
things that are at rest stay at rest

Lately, all the darlings have started tasting the same and all the books keep preaching about the catharsis of going forward and I'll not be condemned to be Lot's wife's' tragedy but ******* this is growing up and everything is shrinking like the bible my mother threw in the washing machine by accident. All the wild has gone to my fingertips and there is no longer an energy to board trains to god-knows where because I know better now.
I don't longer miss you and I call my father daily now and I have a fond appreciation for dead things. Sometimes I think of all the times I prayed and all the times I sinned with you in mind and I know this is the guilt of poets. We are the victim and the instigator, we play our cards right and you resent us for it. And I write to you because it's easy to say things to people you hate. Like kissing someone and not tasting their blood but someone else's and enjoying it. Revenge in, not one, but all the ways you know how.
I often dance naked to Claire de Lune, do you know why? There's an elegance to being primordial and vulnerable. There's grace in things we find obscene. I cannot dance, mind you but I dance thinking you're watching. Much like shaking the hand of  a married man and lingering with his wife within earshot, there's a thrill knowing you'll be caught.
Thus, I write my inhibitions and fears in poetry hoping you'll someday read them with absolute stoicism. I dare you to show a little emotion. I dare you.

girlworm, you grab a wrist like you've known modesty in the shyness of a bare feeling gripped tight on the one offering it
tightrope fingers falling into the spaces of unspoken territory, slipping into familiar qualms like the worn lipsticks that fits the grooves of my lips like an object of my affection
knowing the contour of what i'm never aware of
anxieties creep like an overgrown lawn
these fears personifying into antsy women invading my kitchen telling me that there's not enough ventilation and the stove is on leaking gas into the baby lungs of a young smoker
and when i begin to argue they give both a look of sympathy and disgust as they say "oh child you drown so easily"
so i sit chewing my nails as i count the birds outside flying back and forth from their post as if they can't remember where they're going towards or if there's something that could possibly pull them elsewhere
my mind swirls in the smoothie of a plastic cup that sticks to the coffee table, the rings of different bottles painting circles for me to memorize again
my paradise sits with the roughness of his knuckles and the ambiguity of eyes that could know everything and i would set fire to the stars inside because of the jealousy that grows from pretty things being smoldered under skin
when i begin to lose my person, pale and shivering i go towards it
empty stomached and ready to be buried in the clothes of her
that i can imagine becoming the consistency of yogurt in my lap
kissing back my tremors as i lift up her hair from curious shoulders
dry-heaving the importance of the cheeks that feel warmer as they settle on hands that are brought together as if in deep prayer and i know i will collect myself again one day
girlworm, you're a swarm in my chest and i am me

There are two types of secrets
the ones sworn under oath never to tell anyone
whispered in crowded hallways
and while getting cold water from the corner store
and the ones you weren’t supposed to hear
the ones tossed in the dark, the ones forbidden
under the fingernail sensitive
top of the tongue scalding, threatening to
taser your skin with the weight, the electricity
that these words hold suspended in thick air
every Sunday evening I would listen to the
perfect consonants through the wall
the sacred sermon my mother and father would ritualize
the stories from before child, B.C
it would start with a question, so daintily pressed through
gleaming teeth
and he would bellow triumphantly about the hero within him
the time he intervened between two bloodied men with
pulpy faces touching with the grace of dancing gods  
his fists gracefully gliding between a pool of face
and can’t we calm down, and can’t we breathe the hot asphalt
of the day, the gravel of car exhaust ******* out
our sweat, I think you can
and these men with missing teeth and missing souls
would spit but their heads would level and my
heart would soar up through the ceiling, flutter right out
through
but these fairy tales were also horror stories
about the time the man was a boy and his father would
chase after him with a crowbar never to return home,
running barefoot through the hot concrete of the streets
causing blisters to appear like water balloons
popping them like the lungs that burst that day
but nothing but tears exploded out of them
and I thought I understood
the legend of the damsel in distress
my mother waiting by the door, waiting for the burns to fade from
her skin, waiting for the roof to cave in like the feelings
she promised she would swallow with cough medicine
and funerals are only birthday parties when you’re surrounded
by death, oh to be young
but then the secrets started to venture out of the confines of
my home, spilling out of my bed to become
real stories I told myself at school when I didn’t have
a Band-Aid for the scorching burn of sitting all alone
so I started living them, as I sat huddled in the bathroom
envisioning a toy cowboy stranded in the middle of the
bathtub, repeatedly soaked to make his clothes almost sun
bleached and his smile submerged, blotting, erasing
teaching myself that there’s no such thing as free will
when decisions are made for you
and this toy cowboy with his gun perched politely on his hand
Ready to deal some bullets or a handshake,
I never knew which but it didn’t matter
when there wasn’t conversation exchanged and
I wondered if he tried to escape when I wasn’t looking
did he feel like a goldfish in a bowl
his reality distorted, the glass too thick to realize
there was more than loneliness, more than
constant drowning, that being cold wasn’t a
state of being
no I don’t think so
that was the big secret you see
listening when one has nothing to say
you pick things up like lost puppies
or thumb tacks left on the floor
or you lose them like bobby pins and self-made money
my memories, my worst enemy
coming to an empty house at age 13
no home-made meal like pressing my face against
the carpet, being stealthy quiet
until I heard sound downstairs
the neighbors, the clatter of dishes being distributed
around the dining room table
laughter and television news about the ****** of a
teenager being shot outside his front yard
and this was my bread and butter
screaming of kids wrestling about who gets the
bigger piece of cake
the movement of chairs, the kissing of feet
walking from one room to the other
and although these mumbles didn’t tell their story
it told mine
the living room turning from bruised peach
to melancholy blue, solitude buzzing
through the creme brulee walls of my parents
studio apartment,
the tapping of a faucet, the slight erratic breathing
of a pipe leaking gas nearby but I survived
there are two types of secrets told
the ones you’re supposed to listen to
and the ones you forgot you knew

silk blouses and cotton underwear
the nights merge into a sticky soup that falls into the pocket of a sweater i was wearing when they said that death is permanent
the voice echoing into the receiver of my first cell phone
the wavering tremble of someone in the middle of realms
sleep and consciousness turning the other side of the pillow
wondering if the smoke in my lungs felt comfortable
wonder if the moon sinks lower into your backyard
i was never good at distinguishing shadows and when i found myself on the dark side of the mattress;
my feet cold and feeble i wondered if you could hear my heart a thousand miles away
the fluttering of a drowsy bird, lethargically dragging it's clumsy wings into the plummeting stifle of open air
you said my lips were like the halves of a plum
i bit them until they bled but it was never as sweet
it was never as sweet

What is literature to a convict?
with his name erased from his shirt, his memory
sitting in a warm chair
his only poetry is the girls he sees from across the glass
with jargon hanging from their sweaters
hem untied, tongue tied
“I want to live in a hotel” he tells his social worker
“all the way on the last floor at the very end of the hallway
I want the privacy in every suburban bedroom to be a joke
and I’ll laugh so ******* loud”
this prisoner has never killed a man
but his gums always bleed, like boiled beets
what is lost to a convict?
nothing, if you’ve searched long enough for it
“I don’t read, I have the best works inside my head
not memorized by pleasure, but by force
like a bullet to my knee, like a birthmark
not small enough to hide.”
“baby, I used to be a free man sometime”
and he was. He was free but he was also alone
a felon in his own right, grew a mustache
when he was only 15 and lonely
Walking alone one night he stumbled upon neon signs
upon god’s fruit, not everything is dressed in flowers
but a woman with caramel legs doesn’t need such luxuries
under dim lights, under smooth songs
this man found heaven to be boring
but the malaise in the gates of paradise
made candy melt down tight skin
“so this is fair. to be accompanied by hell
I could almost buy you a drink” he tells her
he tells her
he tells her
he tells her again
she smiles
this is not indulging
this is business
she used to write those words
on cigarette wrappers
until she could say it in her sleep
no love for poor men
and why does he wear a suit with a stain on it?
What a fool, she thinks
but this suit
this calamity of an accessory
was worn by that man’s
best friend
before, before the world turned cruel
before he knew what the difference
was between justice and closure
“sit down, tell me your bravery
spill it as easy as your skirt,
***** it as quick as the
dirt that’s been thrown on your face
you’re more than just
lemonade on a summer night”
but she swings her hair
and she asks for more
than a mortal man can offer
she wants the world
she wants the money he doesn’t have
and she calls him a thief
and she calls him a liar
and he’s left in a room
some bodies are nothing more than consolations
“I wanted more than a taste of life”
so he searches for her
but he gets lost in yellow taxi cabs
can’t decide whether he
should be in a hospital
or a cemetery
but he goes to a cathedral and
speaks with a priest
he beckons, he screams
he rips his hair off his head
in clumps they fall into his faded jeans
he clamors about the ****** he’s never committed
about how he just wants to be a famous writer
or a composer everyone cries to
he wants god to give him a bruise
he grabs the priests’ collar and kisses him violently
as the priest gasps for air, clutching nothing
all he wanted was a little peace, a little passion
why can’t you understand? None of this is carnal
none of this was made for the intention to be ****
he was sick of feeling ***** without ever being unclean in
the first place
and as he sat on the curb of that church, that solitary step
after being hurled by meaty altar boys
he wanders once more  
his crooked feet knocking posters and people
with closed eyes
until he reads the paper, until the obituary has her name
but it’s not her name he recognized
But her picture, the brutality of the night being exposed in daylight
he sees it everywhere, in the subway’s screens,
in the dry mouths of old men
there’s his ******, the one he’d been looking for all along
not committed by him
but a ****** nonetheless
set a flame for unforgiving service, for
inexplicable excess of satisfaction
set on fire like Salem witches
he wants to hold her hand one more time
it’s not the absence, but the obsolete
revenge, a platter served medium rare
what is vengeance to a convict?
an eye for an eye, a soul for a soul
he can smell the **** in everyone he crosses
he taps his foot in the downstairs
of the neon signs where he smells
nothing but sugar
and as they whisper in the dark
of the man responsible,
of the sentenced ready for his execution
he can almost taste him, running in shadows
and riding in comfort
Until he finds him at the bottom of a hotel
with his tie sloppily tied around his neck
and his eyes bearing the wicked semblance of a vulture
he goes upstairs
all the way to the top floor at the end of the corridor
and as he walks he can feel his steps amounting to something
this is what he was born to do, since birth these
were the footsteps he was told to follow
the death he was meant to document
savagely prepared for him to feast
he taps his shoulder after this ******, this sadist
has opened the door, ajar
clean and astute, clean cut
our inmate throws him into the
blow of hardwood floors, lamps flying
make his eyes go wild
his spit falling into the carnivore’s mouth,
he asks what is solitude to a slaughter
he trembles, he’s alive in this moment
wiping his mouth with the sleeve of his suit
digs his fingernails into the whites of
this ****** body and he cackles,
he’s a raven, ravenous
he’s a ghost ******* nothing but hot metal
grinding his teeth, blood flows out of sockets
the shrieking echoes, pain splinters the walls
but nothing is heard because no one is there
this is love, this is the romance he
always wanted
gouging the egg yolk out of another man’s eyes
our hero cries a primal cry
and repeats her name over and over again
like a prayer told too late at a sermon
and as he drown this poor man, who is
no vulture anymore, but a wet parakeet
he recites the words he had written into a paper napkin as a child
and if the first apocalypse ends the world in flames
the last Armageddon will end in a deluge
he watches the criminal’s head swells
drunken with happy fervor, he celebrates
by resisting arrest
what is literature to a convict?
his life told in verse
the catharsis this sad existence could never offer him
until it did
and he smiles
a scam to end all scams

I got braces when I was 16
that year I never kissed anyone
but I made boys steal things from pricy bookstores
I measure time by my teeth
every year they get more crooked
the older I get they seem to shift back to old territory
old habits
old

now even smoking cigarettes feels boring
when I walk into bookstores
I leave sticky notes with advice I wish someone would have told me then

they did
but maybe if I had found it somewhere I was looking
I might have paid more attention
my retainer sits in a shelf collecting grime

It’s no longer burn the witch
it’s drown the ******
purity only attainable when it’s served
as a death dessert, martyr Mary
do you understand TV dinners
made the housewife go extinct
or berserk, I think that’s how it goes
catching their heads in ovens as protest
but listening came in through the door
as a catcall, festering on ottoman chairs
smoking that new cigarette with a cautionary
tale at bedtime
the ends  being ground, like the beef
that we’re all guilty of starting between
sighs, or the coffee beans blistered
trying to come up with an excuse as to why
high heels won’t break that man’s spine,
and it won’t in that new suit he’s so possessive of
because he paid for it with the sweat of his back
as the gaggle of his fellow businessmen
scuffle over who gets to lick the perspiration
that earned him that respect, that bought
the privilege of feeling like a man that stands out
from the wolves in offices, waiting at midnight
for the froth to begin to foam and to
claw at reasons why the bed is always empty
when he’s everything everyone wants to be
and I think you begin to sympathize,
I think you begin to understand why
balancing a ballpoint pen between your
forefinger and thumb is equally as
drinking the cup half full
the modern man with his chiseled teeth
and overt way of speaking throws
up at the American Dream, standing
naked in the glory of publicity fame
there’s too much lights, the makeup
is too intense
the crown of jezebels
Belongs to the hardworking man
with the unkempt lawn, and the
natural features of a god
it’s no longer burn the witch
it’s freeze the *****
while they stand flirting
with the boondocks trapping
fireflies and weak Christians
in their hair
and will you listen to me now?
as the hordes of provoked
believers stand in crowded
bars and in your own home
******* themselves mentally
as they chew and spit
into each other’s mouth
what they’ve always wanted to hear
and the pleasure comes from
not knowing and not wanting to know
and will you touch me now?
that the fantasy is created in your own image
and will you worship me now?
that I agree with these shackles
telling me that they were always meant to be there
that ******* is next to holiness
and will you accept me now?
that the book has been rewritten
and the villain is not you nor me
but the refrigerator with the lizard
that tempted humankind and
banished them from ever entering paradise again
and will you **** me now?
that comedy is only worth in whoever
has the longest tongue

In the Dead Sea I met you
sinking in the mud, I waded
between this pool of fish
I was ***** and unkind
quick sand, swift drought
laughing with a closed mouth
like noon spilling into a water cup
my eyes dried
whispering my secrets into a
country with no name
in the Dead Sea I met you
caught in a caravan
caught in your headlights
49 reasons to uncurl your fist
and lay something breathing there
like my thoughts dehydrated
but this is about you
in the Dead Sea I kissed you
lazy eyed, drooling over sunken ship
like sunken lovers, like
sunken friends
nothing grows
except the skin around the
exit wounds
around the tattered lungs
the ravaged cartilage
but you know that
but you know that
in the Dead Sea I loved you

The walls are slipping, in your mind that apartment is ever a reconciliation of forced adulthood and early realizations with the faux french ceilings and the off white walls, everything from the closet you trapped that cat in because it dug it's claws too deep into your skin and where's the line between affection and possession. The Cortez Apartments, like the last name you will never be able to claim because it doesn't show up on your birth certificate, not that you ever much cared about birth. Would-be apartments once hotels, now stripped at the turn of the century, my mid-century nightmare. But it never loses the gusto to haunt you in its corridors and I think I could have learned to love that but now things are less glamorous and I only wear dirt-stained jeans.
I should have used that fire escape, I should have climbed to the rooftop and absorbed the city into a jar that I could look at when I felt empty of blood cells. A defiant permanence, I can still taste the lead paint chipping and the exposed pipe but you aren't supposed to know that and why would you.

In my mind there's a power that I keep by the shelf of books I once accumulated in an attempt to own everything
to keep something that would always stay, permanent to years
I never use it and at times the dim light from overhead makes me forget what it is i'm looking at
I don't touch it in case I've forgotten how to handle it and I think I may have
it might leave room for discussion or leave the room altogether
I was never good at piecing puzzles, the truth lying somewhere in the invariability of the same outcome
some call it probability or fate and fortune
it may even be unlucky
I used to be a woman who knew exactly what to say however poorly timed it could be
but now my mouth can't cooperate and I've forgotten all my favorite words

we are the insects trapped inside homemade fly traps
glued on at the roof of the mouth
underbelly, I run around looking for trouble
trailer park princess, bar-fights in every space between my teeth
I'm a child of a child

I beat my paper wings against the shamelessness
Dance like the cigarette breaks are forever
Swisher blunts for the forget-me-not flowers inside backseats of cars, cabs, stolen automobiles
Revenge, locked jaw police officers like the fathers that never let you hold a gun so you become one

Taste blood, tongues, beauty in chaos
loose lips, stolen drugstore mascara and no more bruised knees
Boys like soft but you're the ******* Armageddon, knuckle-ring gods and all
so the men want to be kings and you grow up a feral cat sleeping in twin sized beds with a mouthful of curse words

Lord of the flies, lot lizards and truck-stop races
gritty bathroom graffiti is the cathedral but prayers never stop
Taverns with your name and the angels that spit
The television static never ends here, cicadas  
Doors with mosquitoes held hostage, home for supper
wasted by dessert

Down in the dirt, grimy bathtub I unearth all the things I couldn't drink away; all the motel fantasies, ***-stained skirts and the neon lights waiting for the swarm

I keep wishing to be in Nevada
that we would chase the sunset all the way to Florida  
and then you'd talk about your clinical depression and
I'll tell you about the time my father kissed my mother's knuckles
on my birthday
You'd tell me you're in love with the way I always have a story to tell
and I tell you I wish you had something better than a storyteller
I don't speak about browsing through my parent's wedding pictures for days after their divorce, or the way I couldn't push my bully off their bike
But I wanted to, how I wanted to
Instead I tell you, god has been playing hide and seek with me since I was a child and I keep winning because he hasn't found me yet
and I'm beginning to lose faith
You tell me about the poplar tree in your back yard and writing an angry poem on it's bark and that's how you knew it was fondness
I say all I'm looking for is a slowfuck under the sun
and you tell me it's okay  
because at least for once, you'll want the same

the sun is my king and sometimes it asks me
what i'm doing down here on earth
i can't help but explain that everything has it's place and there are certain rules you cannot bend
i consistently want to have a ****** job wherein it slowly melts my spirits but not really
what i really want is nothing by the sea
doesn't matter which one
where i can pray into the sand
where someone asks
who are you? what are you doing?
and i can tell them
at ease, at ease
like that cowboy i remember from my childhood
this is me at my most degenerate
at my most free
but you wouldn't know
except the sun king and I

It's like you're left with extreme paralyzing psychosis, or deja vu, or an epiphany that you greet with swinging fists and bouts of palpitating aggression that doesn't have any sense of direction.
It's like when you try unlocking the door to your house, but the locks have been replaced with new ones and there are people inside that you don't recognize but they're strewn across your expensive living room set that you bought when you were manic.
Then you realize that your home has replaced you. This always happens.
Maybe this is the plot twist to your life. You're the one that's haunted and your house is afraid of opening the door when you arrive.
See, perhaps it's tired of being inhabited but not being properly lived in.
You don't remember seeing an eviction notice but it feels exactly the same like the time he abandoned you during a thunderstorm.
Except it wasn't raining but your mind was already creating apparitions of puddles and floods.
You can't say goodbye to things, you can't let go. You claw and you scream but nothing ever comes back.
It's like missing the last train home. Like, forgetting about your birthday. It's like deleting a number knowing full well that you have it memorized but it's the thought that counts. right?

I am alive in a home-made dress that was bought for two dollars at a yard sale
there is domestic bliss in routine
in the inching of my hand on a knife that will be used to slice the
tomatoes growing outside
there in no harm in loving you eternally
I think about everything often
about the way I tried for years to soothe my fathers’ psychosis
and my mothers’ sadness
I think about the temporary loss of my body and the way I absorbed it in sweat
my bones constantly caught in bushes of bramble thorns  
and I wish you could see how far you have to go to come back home

I've seem to have lost my youth, I fear it was never there to begin with.
All the fuel that was riddled on my tongue as an adolescent is rubbing off with time, like a word I don't know anymore.
I keep darting to women on bus stops looking at their knees and wondering if all the lines there are like the rings in a tree, like the creases in flowers rich men buy for their honeys.
All these bodies piled in a room full of smoke, in recollections of other times they were in smoky rooms with strangers but all I taste, remember, is the sun on my forehead while Spanish guitars play nearby and there's a million voices, curling into chatter, into banter I can reconcile.
The night is young, this is the way to die if you're ever going to but the days are permeated under my shoes; I walk into 99 cent bargain stores and don't see plastic like she does, do not see the degradation of objects that never dissipate but easily break. The ***** floors of feet that live in small apartments, that dry-heave for the cheap cigarettes and low cost security cameras for their victim-less crimes. The resilience of things that grow in the only place they know where.
No I see a 25 year old girl stocking the shelves and watching the soul in her hair run for the door, for the foreign on her skin evaporating into the electrical fans, her golden years on the ankles that will one day twist in slippery showers, in greasy paved roads, in the heels she never learned to wear.
I see my generation through glass windows, through transparent doors, in between every beer I sip I don't find myself losing my worries into the inside of my bra for later inspection, under my wallet for when the party goes into the graveyard hours and I'm frozen in an unknown couch. I don't think about the time she left or the time he lied. Not about the knots everyone you meet leaves, or the heartbreak residue in drawers you don't open anymore. No time.
Standing in front of cold deli aisles, there is no resurrection of when my friends would call me by my first name, no remorse for the chances I didn't take when my shyness didn't burn on my face. A father that had a heart attack at the beach and I wasn't sure if the tears were because mortality was there holding my hand or because there was sand in my eyes and would it matter?
The neglect in my stature, the depth that is lost every time my head falls on a new pillow once again. When they talk about the jokes they wrote down on napkins, on fast food places at midnight, when the leather jacket they smooth down but all I see is the thread that is unwinding below their waist, the condiment stain on their napkin and how so very easily beef reminds me of the hospital.
I want to say that yes I am young, I have always been. That nothing has changed since when I was 12, that when everyone picked up their addiction I chose mine as well. That being alone is like a rock you take off the ground and you hold it for so long you start forgetting it's there until your hand untangles, until your jaw unclenches. You look around and you notice everyone is laughing and you try to as well but the second is gone, eyes are blinking, the sun has turned slightly and there is nothing else to do but grab another rock. I'm afraid I've exhausted myself too quickly.
I imagine the exasperated nostalgia of childhood is because there was no past, no better memories to cling to, you can't look back when there isn't anything there. But you begin hanging out in dim places, where the people are grittier than the seats in bars, in subway cars. The gods in your desk start to lose meaning, and the love, all that love, stops defying gravity like the bags under your eyes. The guys with caramel complexions treat you like the rosary on their chest, with reverence only when it's Sunday. The way the sweat glistens in yellow lights.
and if I didn't exist in all of that, then I wouldn't want to.

I don't want pity, no ****** white room, no Judas kiss; just a simpler truth that you wouldn't understand and I wouldn't expect you to.

a kingdom of rotten tomatoes
they spit their seeds for the harvest of tomorrow
one over the other they topple
waiting for instructions
"i'm waiting for the day to live"
one says over the other
one over the other

a red pool of friends
everything's my favorite
in between the cumbersome vines they hear
of the escape
the hand that reaches up into nothingness and picks the chosen one
ripe for plucking, into a palm if you're lucky
a unexplained romance to be devoured
don't leave us here to fall, they cry
berry of the nightshade come closer
their potassium-deficient king
is lifted from his ill-ridden bed and fed
feast into the sweet juice of a fruit ready to die
'a milky embrace between the tomato queen and i'

3rd grade, chipped tooth from swinging on the monkey-bars that were still wet from the rain. I held your hand even if you were a girl, too. How everybody teased. You kissed me behind the stacks of books in the library. I thought about telling my mom. I wondered if god saw.

2. 13 yr old stealing eyeliner from the drug store across the street. You blowing smoke into my mouth after-school. I was spell-bound. You taught me words like "****". You forgot my birthday and I gave myself a bruise punching you in the face.

3. he was in the hospital. I couldn't sleep for three days. I never told him about any of this. We spoke only on the phone and I wish he were sincere when he was sober. I realized then that people are revolving doors. I still love him. I think about him often. He's a best friend.

4. You made me lose so much blood. I thought we were more than child's play. You showed me your favorite artist and I showed you my soul. You took your coffee dark and I tried so hard not to smoke in front of you. He stared at my legs and I told him I took three different types of pills that are supposed to make me happy and he just kept on staring.

5. loading.....

When I was a child, I was the riverbed's bend. The silhouette of a person from far away smoking a cigarette. I was the blushing sunset and the barred teeth of nightfall, moon's jutted chin and all.
But as I grew up, people became less tree-house, more crawlspace.
In his drunken days, my father once went out with a crowbar shouting at god for giving me clinical depression instead of a man or a hobby.

When I was a child, I would hold hands the way you hold a loaded gun. No one told me that some people are bullet teeth, trigger wounds, and pistol shot screams. That I would become one of these statistics. Those analogies. My grandfather once told me that the bravest people of all sometimes go a little mad. But you have to find the darkest recess of your mind and tell it that you know what it looks like with the lights on. I no longer need a flashlight.

When you're a child, you're the billow of a skirt. The hum of a refrigerator door in July. You could be the sun's glare or the sky's mouthpiece. But as you grow up, you start blowing out candles for other people's birthdays. You begin looking at the cracks of pavement rather than moths clinging to streetlamps. your house slumps its shoulders whenever you open the door. and why?

if none of this makes sense, regard it as a poem.

Today I thought about burning bibles and how my house is surrounded by cobwebs and how do I explain that to people.
It burns my veins when I think of the god that lets children die and creates maelstroms inside people so they’re left begging for change in the streets and all those prayers are like pinpricks on my forefinger because if I was created in his image, then why do I curl my fists when I look in the mirror
It’s not easy being cut-cloth and vacancy motels in foreign cities I will never return to because I know their owner
I know the freckles in your back like constellations in my head
I've heard your voice when I was on the bathroom floor sinking, sinking
There’s no anchor in this ship and the tossed waves are like your tousled hair
and maybe the sternum in your chest is the Bermuda triangle
but I could have sworn I held your hand, I know this for a fact
because my pulse danced with yours those days
but now it’s these days and I can’t get a grip
and I bend my knees but the bruises are stubborn
I keep opening doors but I don’t know what I’m looking for
I want to call, for help, to my mother, to my father whose clothes cling to him like death and I want you to know that this isn't about you
When I was a little girl, I would go to church and hope that someday my knuckles would get kissed and not murdered
I wanted everything my parents didn't get
I used to think it was because god was too busy with other people's families and that's why their lawns were always greener than ours  
I wanted for you to exist so badly, I forgot that I did too.

a swollen finger rising to the occasion
rising to the size of a grape, purple
bloated like a stuffed pocket or pregnant chicken
green oozing out like the slime i got from the museum and the smell of rubber and plastic following me in my sleep

a ghost by the window slipping into my thumb and biting pain
the numb pressure of muscle tissue ripping
the phantom claws out and shouts that women are debris
swamps with lost metal buried at the bottom if you dig long enough the days become one and their hair consumes you whole

i argue with the shadow, threaten that this bruise will burst and blood with meet alcohol, an antibiotic fever dream
it stares at me defiant, like a giant pulverizing a village
my fingers wrestle and before the abscess can pop
the fingerprints unravel until i am nothing but thread
a coil at the bottom of the floor
a dress to be sewn in a bedroom
the shadow stand up and fits her bones into the fibers, a bride in white
the thumb hurts no more

The house smelled of vacant parking lot gasoline
it always had that odor, the one where things are very seldom touched
and the flies build their nests atop the sweaty ceilings
my  footsteps were perfectly carved into that carpet, like snow angels

when we had first moved in the floor was a soft white
with time, it bared resemblance of an old man who hadn’t shaved in two
days and wore the same tweed jacket every day
coming home was like a war kissing a forest fire,
those days the air felt colder
the television spit into the raw eyes of a man who called himself a father
this could have meant something had it been years later
and it would have been important had it happened twenty years before

I will say with confidence that in those days the earth was colder
specifically numb in those people whose hearts are like plastic containers full of
marbles, however, the world could seem like a refrigerator at times
to a 15 year old girl with the eyes of caramels
You could say that the poetry started with the dead houseplants
or the mother that secretly smoked cigarettes inside the laundry room
but the beginning starts with finding cherry trees in the
mouths of two twin girls that lived across the street, the
one with the lawn intestines spilling from their front porch

there is no one in the universe like you, that holds true especially
with people who play with guns and the boy that was born with fins
but, there is a difference with identical twins
Siamese children who lick each others’ spoons
and never have the correct name assigned to them
spending all of eternity looking in the mirror
******* telepathically, and who can blame them
                                                    
2

Pe­ppermints.
All of my memories have the taste of peppermint being
rolled around the tongue on an afternoon
and my mind waters.
I am especially reminded of this when I walk up the subway one night  
and the shadows seem liquefied and I could be anywhere but instead I am
in a city where no one makes eye contact and
my jacket still has the tag as it bites into my skin
I can hear the clatter of my shoes on stark concrete, the wobbly way I never grew into my own shoes
as a man approaches, jogging quickly carrying with him a suitcase
I notice he has a slight misstep to his walking and suddenly he sprints into a jog  
rushing, he slams into my elbow throwing me off balance
and the smell of peppermint is stronger now, resilient,
powerfully filling my head like nicotine  
as he violently slips his hand into my pocket
darts quickly back  and starts running ahead, never  looking back not once
Within seconds he is gone
I don’t realize what has happened, afraid that someone somewhere
in the dark distance, inside a car with tinted windows is watching me
observing my movements, wondering if I will call out to someone
My mouth is dry as I feel into my pocket and realize there is a note inside
it is a metallic sheet of paper with an address inviting me to paradise  
in the back of the card, there is nothing but  a meticulously engraved
spider, sinister in its appearance and yet reminding me that I am no longer a child.

Suddenly I remember; it’s Valentine’s Day.
3

In those days the screams of crickets were louder, much heavier.
Like the dew couldn’t stop them from rubbing their legs against their backs.
As if summer was an aphrodisiac for the mentally suave and the utterly alive.
Such convictions never last, I was an insect that year
an everlasting metamorphoses slowly molding my body
an eternal cocoon coating my veins and never shedding
these nuances of growing up, despite all this I was still a child wrapped
in a blanket that didn’t cover my feet anymore.
My mother used to go down to the basement on a regular basis,
I called it the swamp because it always made me feel as though I was
trudging through quicksand in a valley down below, separate from our own house
but that place was heaven to her I realized, the carbon monoxide clouding her head
the grassy windows, the way the clothes shrank in on themselves, like lungs but
never actually breathing, just inhaling
I don’t think she ever knew anyone was watching her, but I always was.
I would wake up at exactly the time my father left for work, or what we believed was work
and I would take my red binoculars and glide through the living room causing friction
with every step I took, passing the rooms of my older siblings down to hell
opening the door carefully, I would walk down two steps and stay there motionless
pressing my eyes into the glasses and staring
These endeavors proved futile, and once I had the ability to leave the house I never
looked back with nostalgia, never missed the coughs or the curled fists
but in those moments, I felt  time move slower, I could have stayed down there
a shameless spy, a trustworthy confidante
But life had better things for me than looking in on death, thought it more
suitable to touch horror than to always be catching glimpses of something
As boring as suicide

There was a day when things didn’t match the rest
I can blame this on naïve intuit or the childish way I chose to see things
It was Saturday and it was the 14th of February
Normally, my father was home by noon but today it was different
the air was stale, there was no movement in the house
It was beautiful outside and the only rarity was that there was a
taxi car parked outside our neighbor’s house
I stood up, poised as ever in the middle of the hallway
Had I looked deeper outside I would have noticed a strange man
next to the taxi car looking into our house, nodding his head with the
Rhythms of the grandfather clock, but I didn’t and who was I to know
As I gripped my binoculars walking into the place I knew so well
I didn’t know what I was to expect, there was an uncertainty
Behind the door that I felt what I had never felt before and have never felt since that day
However the long pause was it didn’t stop me from opening the door
walking down two steps and peering into my treasured binoculars
I didn’t know who I was supposed to find

The man who wears a leather belt and uses sensible words
loves her in cobalt violet, in the streaks of a hazy violent sky
after a storm has passed and she lets him
he claims that the egg people are coming, they’ll bring with
them handful of gifts of glory, of the things people hide
in the crevices of sidewalks, in the spaces where identity cards
are devoured by the teeth of the unknown
the television is always on and the static that surrounds them
is the serenading music she listens to before she falls asleep at night
she pretends that love is painting one’s nails while the other
loses their mind
as he laughs at the invisible neighbors outside the window
his bones can smell the coming of the apocalypse
and it’s not in the form of a swarm, or a flood
it comes in the bodies of girls with strawberry blonde
hair and that’s why he’s so drawn to her
and why his mother was swallowed by the earth
she learns that illness comes in permanent mauve
the walls of her room are covered in that hue
the boy she sneaks cigarettes from at the diner
in his car the color is almost a tangible personification
the smoke blows out into the crisp air like a bag of potato chips
the lungs constrict and expand
the thoughts hindered from years of yielding to the yellow sun
with the ****** robe
the child, the woman, the human lives in ****
but the thinker manages to escape years later
and live in the suburbs on an easy paycheck from
foolish strangers that believe that gasoline is a cheap party trick
and a fantastic high
she doesn’t recognize touch anymore besides
the harsh graze of asphalt hitting her knees
people seldom realize that freedom is not in
the way your toes curl but in the way they finally unfurl
how curious you can spot patterns where there are none
to be rescued does not always come in the way of clean arms

She loved him in transparent maroon
the grasp of warm sand kissing you gently

you’re a shy hiss
her voice echoes, whispers through the
stringy hair of green overgrown grass
I’m not the sister you knew all those years ago
the gods have been dangerous to me
in the city of root rot in between the cashmere sweaters
you stole from heaven, from shopping windows
the harvest is unfinished, as the gladiolas bow in prayers
for the follies underneath my petticoat
you wanted the birds to sing but now they scream
for the arrival of summer in the veins I consider
abused blue but have always been crimson sugar
I want to reach out and hold your hand
but it’s foreign now, the youth like creeping vines
that we clung to have vanished
leaving residuals of a wasteland that we once considered
home, manicured to remind you the letters you
threw out of your mouth from the roofs of
sunset apartments
the drugs you hid in the eye sockets of boys
that would eventually be murdered in ally streets
in downtown LA  
adulthood didn’t come in a red box
it came as mother death, knocking her meaty hand
on the door, uninvited and unintentional
as she rubs her temples with the bones of
the misguided
I’m grown don’t you know, you exclaim
I know the difference between the red rose
and the sick serpent underneath it
sure the children would think you crazy before
but when you talk about the rats always clawing
at night at the ceiling of your mouth
you know to laugh, you know that the wallpaper isn’t
shifting for everyone but it’s the gift of
knowing that there’s always two sides of things
that keeps you grounded
in the ever shifting quicksand of this moderate
temperature room for the easy living

-I've learned to take the sheets off of the bed and wash them and if my hands were big enough I would curl them into fists and call you to tell you that your ghost no longer resides in here but I don't have your phone number anymore and I don't miss you quite as often.

-You're white flag, your war-rage reverb inside a rib-cage and there's no microphone to mutter into. Slam poetry isn't your thing but ******* sometimes there's an itch, a scream half-muffled that wants to talk about your hair raining down on their cold pillows just before the lights go out.

-I've never owned an ashtray despite the chimney that mimics my mouth sometimes. It's telling your mama you made it for her birthday because you don't want to see her face every-time you check in once again for the last time into a hospital. Even if making it is keeping a plant alive.

-The scattered light rays that travel into your room in the afternoon when you're getting drunk alone again and don't you dare call me bad because baby, I was raised that way. You can't put a band-aid over a broken bone. There's a fire in my palms no psalm can actually pronounce.

-your writing career has plummeted so now you sit in a bus stop as people tell you their life story and you feel like a priest but there's never any relief and the confessions get more heavy so you write about it but there's never anyone to hear, and even if there was would it heal the bruises?

There is a man in my dreams, always. He is neither foreign nor familiar. He never speaks but on the occasion that he does he is not boastful;
His lip never trembles or bleeds.
"All my days are the same, except some" he whispers.
" I should've been a woman, I should've been a man. I should've been anything but solitary knee caps & jail cells. I've lived in nothing but crowded apartments, fed on the flooded chatter of open windows!
Those moments where your heart is a hummingbird & the girl you love keeps skinning her ******* knee & for that there are heads being scalped."
I never reply to these confessions. He could be a lawman or a taxi repairman & it wouldn't make a difference because his missing teeth that he covers with dentures & the eyes that never fully close tell me I don't have to. This is not my show, not his airtime on the television. There's never a punchline, you see. His sins are never absolved & the only redemption he gets is that there's never dirt under his fingernails.
"I have lived enough" he continues
"To know that the samurai sword you try so hard to use for defense is only a swollen reminder that you've always been background noise at dinner parties, you don't know where to go without bumping into someone; the time is not over yet.
"There is no romance in finding your war and conquering it. My mother used to kiss me on the lips & my father used to beat me with a stick. You'd think these calluses would turn into poetry people would never be ashamed to read but my hands never stopped touching dirt."
He believes I'm listening, believes I understand. Looks at me & doesn't see a child; doesn't untangle the confusion inside the pockets of my dress. This, is the only time honesty counts.
"Somewhere between the hangovers & choking on all the keys I saved in coat pockets I couldn't figure out whether this was worth remembering, worth regurgitating to my children or women on bus stops
"I used to beat my wives & pretended that god enjoyed these charades; that my knuckles wouldn't feel so delicate, wouldn't be this tough if I wasn't designed to be. I looked at their cherub faces & all I could smell was gun powder, for this I never held a gun."
I looked at this man, cloudy-eyed. This man who belonged to no one; who never blew the dust off my hair but instead flicked ash onto my shoelace. This man with no name who forced me to hate him and yet when I closed my eyes there was only tenderness.
I wanted nothing more than for him to tell me something that made me comfortable in my own bed again.
"You see girl, you soon come to expect rooms without windows, people like burial grounds, that the shimmer doesn't last forever.
One day it's 9 p.m. on a ******* Friday night and you feel like a hospital rug, like a ****** motel carpet, like all the floorboards where your wife said the money you have to offer is not worth to die for and then what do you got?"
I wake up alone.

Wash your hands before leaving.
Every afternoon the television would have a woman in tears
Spanish dialogue, pastel colored sets
Tongue in cheek, modern romance sipping iced tea by the pool
The antagonist wearing a suit and three rings on each finger
Pause.
Soap bars are made of fat, the grease found in
Breakfast diners and sweat off a teenagers face
The lipids turning gelatinous and all I can think of is
Jell-o; the strange colored dessert that doesn’t taste like anything real
My hands begin to itch and I stand up
Wash your hands before leaving.
My hands have become open desert, dry animosity
The skin around the knuckles is delicate, one clench of a fist
I am sure that it will tear, like the skirt of a girl I once knew
But there are creatures lurking everywhere
In the handle of the bathroom door, in the shake of another hand
In the touch of a frame, in the grip of a key
Wash your hands before leaving.
The scattered murmurs on the screen remind me its 5p.m
The women are arguing with their manicured hands
Their eyes all having the same spidery lashes, spiders
I feel insects crawling under my bones
Termites clipping at my heels as I sit in this couch of horrors
I didn’t know the last time it had been washed
It smelled of the 1970’s and I want to go home
The babysitter is on the other chair reclined
Snoring, letting out bacteria through her mouth
At 8 years old I should be on the floor with a coloring book
My lips are dry, the screen is too bright, I can feel the filth everywhere I turn
So I stay
I hear the door knock and it’s my mother picking me up after work
My lungs sigh of relief
Time to go
But first
let me wash my hands before I leave

the girl with the cupid's bow lips whispering into your ear that forever is in the drink that you weigh on the heaviness of your palm when you feel nervous and you think no one can notice
but i notice
don't look back or you'll trip into the things you were supposed to be falling in love with
tell me to rely on blind faith and i'll make sure to keep my eyes open during your family's prayer circle during Christmas
i want to open all the fruits you accidentally let rot in your kitchen with my bare hands and tell you that things die so there's something to feel afterwards
i wish i could explain myself in the same way a hand that twitches might also tremble and the reason is never very important
i want to package all the poems and give them to you as forgiveness
as an apology on too many amphetamines
like the ones we took one night and ended up at a desolate gas station and feeling that in that moment
all time was spinning in a wheel waiting for me to reach out and disrupt the movement going on since i could speak
but i was too distracted on all the candied wrappers with my name written on them
so i spoke too soon and the cigarettes fell out of my purse and you said that life was in all the lines in our skin like that of a tree
spinning
spinning
spinning

My father’s name is Adam.  As in apple, the core stuck to a throat halfway, jutting seed.
This is the middle name that the business world has no whereabouts of. It was bestowed upon
him, this name, I imagine like all things; deliberately searching the scaffolds of the bible with apprehensive sweat trickling through brown sugar colored foreheads. However there’s nothing
biblical about this man. He has six children, the most unlucky of all numbers.
Thus, I have 5 half-siblings. Each with identically strange sunken eyes and tired skin.
The same kind of shared headache. Like being submerged for too long. Like too many mistakes and too little oxygen.
I am unlucky number 6. An omen-child. Not the settling of dust but of the silent movement before
it was ever frazzled by frantic feet. The calm you don’t want to realize exists.
3 daughters and 3 sons because he was compulsively articulate and clean; a nasty habit of OCD that was coddled by the women that washed their hands twice and bit their nails until they bled.
You see, I never speak of them because they do not speak of me.
Memory is tricky. Sometimes you remember the smell of fried pork in hands that have known hard
labor and other times you recall perfectly the pirated DVD’s sold for a dollar down the street of your neighbor’s apartment. The distorted graphics on the front, the headline in Spanish and despite how many people are there buying these illegally distributed films you wonder why you feel ashamed and embarrassed when you tell your friends, if you tell your friends but you don’t.
I know of their existence, of where they are located and could be found easily, their names and what they do but if one was to ask me, I would not know their personalities, how they react to bad news or if they are fulfilled, whether they know that our psychological genetics are cloudy and erratic and that is why Sundays always feel sacrilegious. They are faces in a picture that I never had a need to frame.
Despite having the same father, we do not call the same man, dad.
There is a brother that lives by the beach with a guy twice his senior.
They share martinis and aged bottled wine talking about social movements and Bill Clinton.
You see, he chooses to cohabitate with a man he knows is living his last few years and not a person that tied his shoes until he was 7 years old because he was too busy making time for other kids, stretching himself for everyone else that he had time for no one. There are certain unforgivable things a parent can do, like leaving too early, taking off 5 minutes before when he could have waited 10, turning the lights off when they should have stayed on, always. Yet there is a certain kind of pressure that is put on someone that is no less human than anyone else. Someone that can draw architecture and buy ice cream on days when limbs are too heavy to go to school can’t be all bad. Despite the entire trauma, you still pray and rescue wounded animals and that is something that can only be taught and not learnt.
So as these estranged family members disintegrated and gathered informative pieces about me through loose lips curious to see if I would fail, ravenous to know inevitable tragedy.
I unflinchingly understood the arbitrary imaginative reel of what is to be alone. To grasp all things violent and horrific to witness and endure it with closed fists and well-aware eyes. To go on vacation trips and enjoy the sunburnt noses of tourists waving their flyers in the air like flamingos flapping off the insects from their pink wings. Instead of playing in the sand with a second pair of hands and having inside jokes there was a long inspection of scars and the way adults consulted with other adults by trying out different words like masks hoping to impress and even humiliate the other with their colorful lyrics but after all only jargon.  
My father’s name is Lazarus. As in open tomb, cheating death with the sweet victory of another pulse.
I often dream about his funeral. The day when there is no father to blame, no man to pin my overzealous heart of anxiety. To face a family that is neither welcoming nor reproachful but is always silent. Just dagger glances, fang and hiss.  I wake up in sweat. Sometimes it is because I am there and the casket is open but he’s laughing and no one showed up, there is no wind and my legs feel like a tube of jelly, microwaved honey. I try to say the things I’ve always wanted to tell everybody that has ever had anything to do with me, the apologies I shouldn’t have handed and the truth I should have had memorized anyway. But I just end up spitting seeds, a million of them flowing out of my hands dragging me out like a million wingless flies rejecting the tears that I cried for all the wrong reasons.
Other times it is crowded with people I didn’t know about, wasn’t aware of like searching through a private drawer and finding *** toys or things you wish you hadn’t discovered and the casket is empty, there is an imprint of a body but no one resides inside until the floor drops and there are stairs I’ve seen before, somewhere at some point. When I get to the bottom there’s a whisper
“where can I find you if not in here, on skin that is my own, on a forehead where no one asks if it remembers Chinese food and the pinch of birth.”

I love my father but I would never tell him no not directly.
I love him to death and am relieved to know
I will never be a dad.
Never be a forced hero.
Never proof of something that wasn’t trying to hide in the first place.

This is a letter to strangers, a dissertation, repertoire
to people I have known but have not fully held
to the ones that I am bound by blood but would not
recognize in a crowded room
out of all these ambiguous characters
I am unlucky number 6. An anomaly of chance girl. Not the settling of dust but of the silent movement before it was ever frazzled by frantic feet. The calm you don’t want to realize exists.

I never meant to be wet cement
because you gotta understand that sometimes my hands are
earthquakes and there's no reason behind it and you just have to understand
I tell you baby, I miss you
and you say learn how to zip up your dresses for your own good
See, we grow up
we become atheists and we wish on stars that are dead
we do illegal things but we apologize to our mothers
and this is being okay

soup in the spring
I can taste again
there's a photo of me riding a horse
but I wouldn't be able to describe the feeling to you
always the horse
never the horse girl
he kissed my hand like a gentleman
and I fed him an apple
coming back home they ask why my knuckles are bleeding
I say I got too close and a kiss sometimes involves teeth

morning light is always the most beautiful
there's a kind of tenderness that borders on pure naivete
an inexperienced fracture of grace that
unfortunately the sunset does not contain
although i am never awake for it
i am acutely aware of it behind closed eyelids
There's an optimism I've never felt on the creases of my palms

i wish i could explain to you
how boring that art gallery was
i can't remember what color shirt i was wearing
there's a lot of things i'm only half there for
i'll drift to nowhere precise and my eyes will get that faraway glow of a look and you'll think i'm in love
but it's just my inattentiveness to stay in my body for long
i'm less devil may care and more jitterbug hiding it's own epileptic seizure

i guess it's all about forgetting things and then trying to find where you put them
sometimes you stop looking altogether and come to terms with the fact that some things want to remain lost
morning light is always the most beautiful

Suburbia greeted me with pale hands in my late teens.
She was a wasteland in a mini skirt; in its’ own right it could be called a Cave with Plato egregiously driving his brand-new Prius 90 miles an hour saying “this is really living as long as you don’t look back” and all you can do is nod your head vigorously because the twisted **** that had settled surreptitiously in your baby lungs was giving you daylight hallucinations. My endeavors didn’t end there when they should have.
There was something uncanny about the way streetlights gave you the eternal glare. Of creating ordinary neighborhood streets appear like you’ve been there before in a dream, in another body. In a dazed stupor the sounds of a television and a light coming from a garage is forgiving in your misguided attempts to be comfortable in a foreign space. It could almost feel like home when your repressed trauma keeps resurfacing while you’re trying to introduce yourself. Almost.
In these polite badlands with everything uniformed the people I met were always trying to stand out from the serene landscapes. Sitting in plaid couches I was giddy playing the nihilist. Rerun episodes of Portlandia playing but all I remember from that smoky room were brown pants that looked extremely crisp to the touch and I wanted to reach out my hands and see if they would crunch under the paperweight of my heavy palms. I didn’t but I’m sure they would’ve emitted the sound of potato chips being eaten in a frenzy.
When I wasn’t walking through dark rooms feeling through what could have been hallways, a family’s living room or the cool gates of hell I was meandering my way through drowsy parties where boys with the names like Dusty and Slaughter were prevalent. Each with their own bizarre story about how they stole their parents’ money one night and took off spontaneously. Driving all the way to Nevada with nothing but half a tank of gas and one pack of cigarettes. You could almost pinpoint their personalities by the type of cigarettes they smoked. Most of them holding different colored American Spirits. Had I been smarter I would have asked for a light and a smoke. Never mind that I was always deadly afraid that I had some undiagnosed lung disease and that asphyxiation was my biggest fear or that I had a pack of Marlboro black menthols in my purse that were over a year old. I found my corner sitting in a worn outdoors chair. The ones where the armrest comes built in with a cupholder. My beer ice cold sitting awkwardly sideways while I tried to consider why the host of the party was wealthy yet so hostile. My favorite party game was the one where I took hit after hit of joints being passed around until I was crazy glued to my chair and my brain started to feel like a lagoon that continued to melt into a Campbell’s soup I once had as a child. Everyone completely unaware of the horror that the house had become to me. Somewhere in the distance I was acutely aware of who I would go home with, why my ventures into the suburbs had sparked my intrigue in the first place. The only reason why I had endured feeling like a spider watching a **** film and why I had lost my virginity just a day before. I was a displaced specimen thinking about her ***** in a room of 30 people or more.

Beginning with the swagger of my palm to the squeezing sensation in my ribcage
I realize that the modern woman is alone among everyone else
from the creative orthopedic doctor whose joints resemble that of an
air craft plane your father designed in 1953
to the zany business owner that counts their own steps and
watches the calorie intake of the television dribble
there’s a bit of resentment on her polished fingernails as
she watches feminist prose on stage of a bar with no name
and she drinks cordially, the same intake that a midnight taxi driver
takes to keep his sanity, just enough to recognize street signs
and forget people’s faces
she sits in her dining room table and admires the lump in her throat
never feeling at home with dinner guests so she invents
party games that freefall off her legs into the carpet
that used to belong to a woman with no legs and a smoker’s mouth
but she doesn’t know this because she got it for three dollars
from her neighbor who isn’t alive anymore
and the blood stains of the old woman’s breath have long
disappeared and it’s appealing, yes very appealing
the modern woman is alone among everyone else
that comes foremost, thus the shy boys become isolated women
and the cycle of who is who begins to spin but the laundry won’t stop
piling in a corner of a room
and as soon as it stops the clothes drip from gender to gender  
between the tiles of the convenience store, between the
local gas station where men sit in their pickup trucks staring
at the spit on the ground and wondering whose mouth
it regurgitated from
and the lights become more fluorescent, more menacing  
so the solitary companions start coming later and later
until the sun sets and the lights are off and the only way to
know if another heart is beating is by crawling on the floor
hoping to find a pulse instead of an unsteady table, or a broken
chair or window howling but one acclimates to such conditions
while the modern woman is most intellectual of all
there’s a primitiveness, a strange longing to look behind her
to continue with watchful eyes darting long glances at the past
and sighing with relief that this is now and the future looks down with
convincing not conniving glares but still she falls into the
pit of her own stomach and memorizes the world upside down
the words jostle about,  the approaches of curious hands
become welcoming and the universe that once was an oyster
melts into a pearl with a sharp edge, a tooth made
out of pretty godforsaken, the speculated
creation of something eternally ****** will always be ******
but you don’t have to agree with it, there’s no reason to
shimmy into a container of shouts when you could
easily assimilate into a vat of unknowness, to
belong to something so you don’t have to be anything
yes indeed the modern woman stands alone in these dark ages
but the swagger has been reduced to a soft calamity, the
squeezing sensations in my rib cage have been swallowed to a
slow pull, grasp, released clench of a heart

“Have you been to the Melrose café?
I heard they have the best lunch there”

“I always go downtown for coffee
helps you avoid the goons
and the smell of trash coming in through the door”

Francis St.
The neighborhood with the crooked spine streets, the intolerable hunchback it was in the armpit of Korea-town.
The snake stealth slither you acquired to get to the 7/11 down the street without your teeth being pulled out by a gun. In the 80’s the back wall of that convenience store was littered with
no-do gooders, the typical teenage gangster with ironic ****** white shirts and a mouthful of *****. An army with no motive.
Buzzards learning how to haunt instead of hunt.
In the afternoons it was speculated that they melted into the hot cement, an intimidating presence that smoked marijuana and made their cars jump.
With fear?
warmth?
happiness?
Who’s to say.
But times have changed. The hungry graffiti on the wall became the emblem of what had been, and what had survived. It was no longer us vs. them, it was me vs. you.
There’s a hostility that sinks into the earth and made the children more aggressive in playgrounds that endorsed healthy living; a melting *** reserved only for the diversely attacked and passive aggressive scrutinized bunch.
I lived on that street in the peach palm, salmon slapped building where I witnessed a domestically abused woman with a shattered nose smear her blood across the windowpane of the front door while I checked for the mail. Her hair was bleached and it hung dead on her scalp like sun rays that had gotten seasonal depression. Her face was a gauzy mess of a nosebleed. I felt for that woman the same way I felt for the slugs that people threw salt at. A sadistic addiction for soft things; There were bruises where there shouldn’t have been and I felt like the imperfections on the wall looking but unable to be seen. And I wondered if she could see me. She crouched on the corner of the steps and waited. I didn’t know what for. I could hear sirens, I could hear footprints of her abuser coming closer and picking her up like a rag doll. Opening the door and disappearing into the night with the sound of high heels slowly going mute. I stayed there until the blood dried. The next day the stain was gone and I wondered about all the other blemishes around the building and if they had the same disgust to them. Were the discolorations on the carpet of the hallways just violent memories?
I could smell the poverty inside that apartment. It clung to me like it held on to anyone.
I was guilty of it creeping into the beds of my nails while I tried in futility to wash it off.
Despite all the books I read, all the times I refused to step out of my room in fear of experiencing too much I was not saved from observing a lot of things. There was a cathedral church a couple blocks away that you could see outside the living room window and when the sun set. It almost felt like the presence of god looming just beyond, always assuring me that yes, I had not been abandoned but it wasn’t abandonment I worried about but about becoming what was inevitably seeping into the tap water, into the people with the olive skin that can’t unlatch their own cages.
Of becoming the shadow of a civilization that revels in the darkness.
I wanted to be a pageant queen on television with the pink lipstick instead of a statistic on the news of most likely dropping out of school and hiding in the crevice of welfare.
I wanted the palm trees without the choke-hold. I wanted the cool California weather without the open fires on July 4th, the firework setting flames to nearby homes telling me that this was the hell that came with freedom. The American dream was served in the oven and why won’t you accommodate to these standards you ask me and I don’t know how to reply.
While other kids played in their backyards and learned how to ride bikes, I learned how to survive, how to walk the streets without being murdered. These are good skills that transfer into college resumes.
So the roots of trees would come out of the ground like fists and demand reparations, they would sneak into the pavement and break car windows with the intention of stealing radios that they sold for a good penny. They carried knives and cackled at the neighborhood watch because all eyes were on them and yet nothing changed but I want to change, I want to change you chant.
Nothing will be the same since I lived in Francis st.
Named after the saint with the smugness in his smile and the gluttony blistering out of his dress.
Will you comfort me in my hours of need oh gracious one?
will you drink these sins like Catholics drink Jesus' blood on Sunday morning?
Is this blasphemy a reason to instill death between the hours of 2 and 4:30?
I’m always chasing on my knees for the knowledge that is taken away from the destitute culture that the ghettos become. I wanted to go back to the mud and dig all those lives that crossed mine and tell them that they could run after their intelligence. Save them from the quicksand. That one doesn’t have to be shot at a party for being raised by criminals. That cars that drive slow at night don't always have bad intentions.

But if I do, I’m afraid I’ll sink


I’ll sink

When my hands were the size of apricots
my tongue always jumping through hoops
as I read words that were dusty
a book covered in pretty plastic
from the local library that smelled like a grandfather
if I had a grandfather
I read Corduroy, the story of a stuffed bear
in the Laundromat
the sun sweltering outside
melting the story with me
like a swirly ice cream cone on the side step of an apartment
or the slushy ingested combined with
the acid you were so prone to tasting in your throat
reflux, like a memory that just won’t go away
leaving the residue of remnants you wish your brain would just spit up
this ordinariness of abandonment
feelings washed away like the mud stains on your uniform shirt tumbling in the washer
the soap bubbles punching the glass window in unison with all the rest; a cleansing of spirits
a lot of people go to church
but for those that can’t afford it, the laundry is heaven with a vending machine
I felt for the stuffed animal rejected for missing a button
because I knew children with trembling knuckles
turned into adults that got lost in the escalators of the world’s mall
wandering ghosts with perpetual uncertainty whether they should
buy the coffee set or the patent leather shoes that will balm over the calluses of their feet
in the loudness of the fans redistributing hot hair
I was in limbo, the rigid seat sticking to the back of my thighs like caramel
sweat almost hard to ignore if it wasn’t for the luster
of all the women inside, their shoulders broad like those I
only thought of in lumberjacks
burly burlap sacks over their shoulders
swapping stories of childbirth as frequently
as they ordered a pound of red liver chunks from the grocery store next door
like animatronics that learned to harvest a genuine laugh
their nail polish never fading despite the gruesome biting teeth of Clorox bleach
staining the skin on their hands
they were warriors, lost and unsure of in a world that didn’t look them square in the eye
much like those camo toy soldiers you won if you gave the machine a quarter
unwrapping it from its’ plastic cage, growling for the neglect of their maker
who decided not to give them pupils at all
senile wrestlers sometimes forgotten by children in the middle of the walkway
so that they could be stepped upon, accidentally
these women with their chocolate complexion and romantic gold hoops, accidental
unrecognized by their country, banished by their family
isolated in a land that shows mercy to those that only help themselves
no refugee whose blood could compare to oil
these women who weren’t missing any buttons
would congregate inside this Laundromat hoping to remove the stains
wishing that their clothes would stop smelling of unpaid labor
that they could stop calling home a box inside a closet of more stacked boxes
they can hear those around them, elbowing the walls like multiple hearts in a rib cage
the world glimpsing in for a second, just another spin rinse cycle
repeat until all color fades
I too find myself  stuck inside that Laundromat, I realize
except I know that I can leave, I know I can walk out with my book in tow
open the door and become another spectator if I wished
which is more than that poor toy soldier can say

there's a bed-frame with names carved into them
slightly-askew and frail
a heart at the top of every 'i'
all my underwear has blood stains on it
it's a lovesick reminder of everything I can't control
I yearned for my mother to put my hair in braids instead of a ponytail
so I got a friend that could
my hands would sweat as I wrote about her in my diary
the one without a lock
the one that was covered in DIY glue glitter
there was a summer that I wore all pink
my strawberry ice cream melted all over my polo dress and no one could tell the difference
it was my secret, sugar sweet on the lapel
beating heart for all the Lisa Frank I didn't own
a boring folder with all the scary stories I had memorized
until I myself became the ghost girl
sucker punch me in the last bathroom stall
for neither liking leather or lace

There was ink in his mouth and it was Monday morning, doomsday morning.
The comparison of both these seemingly random attributes could mean nothing at all
to anybody else but they came hand in hand for a man that always walked with his shoes untied
and while the rest of the world chewed tobacco; he chewed cinnamon sticks that he would grind
to a fine powder in his mouth spitting it out at nearby ant mounds and by the nests of bumblebees.
This nomad’s of nobody’s business would wander the streets of his hated town, the world’s armpit, the city of fire and angels and whatever the hell else.
He would walk Pico Boulevard all the way to Wilshire Ave., towards Venice and then crookedly stumbling to Van Nuys but he didn’t know his bus routes and his mind was always swarmed by imaginary bugs that he picked up from old soda cans.
What he loved most of all was stopping by the bridges of highways and looking all the way down to
the cars below swimming past in a hurry; the sky dark blue and the headlights like light bulbs
almost running out of their batteries. He saw this as cathartic as most people saw sunsets or a pianist
shaking his head violently to his own tune and it was true. This simple man was born, some say, out of dust, car exhaust and the lost ID cards of peoples’ whose wallets were stolen. However intriguing this could be it wasn’t so.  He was born in a hospital in Chinatown and his mother had gold teeth that glistened whenever she drank too much and how often they shone.
You see, I knew this man long ago when my hair cascaded down my back in fine strokes and my lungs
weren’t yet tired from the things I chose to inhale. For all my purposes, this was the only person I wanted to talk about, to spit and screech whenever I heard his name and I didn’t even exactly know his name; The poor imbecile. He went by different pseudonyms and I suppose I did too but I had a name that most knew. Carmen and Leopold. They chose to remember it because it rolled off, it clawed at your teeth as you said it.
But Monday mornings were a specialty. It meant that he could go and see his brother who lived across town, the one who sang at fancy pubs and refined restaurants, where people didn’t have to yell to admire you, but slowly clapped, a soft hum in a room where everyone understands and doesn’t have to make up for it in the way they whistle your name. He always shook his head at this profession.
“You’re an animal to these people, an exhibit they can safely see from their auditoriums and then go to sleep without having to take you home. Your last hurrah will come soon and then what will you do?”
He didn’t understand Leopold’s hostility. This art he was drawn to. This voice that could have been
given to anybody but it was given to him. Deep down he knew he would never be a big star, he would never leave the place where he born. He would die close to where he went to elementary school and what a big sham, the whole big world so big and he would never see it. Never unfold, instead slowly
crumble like the crust of cakes he stared at through shopping windows.

watching the same collage video on a loop of
leaves drying up
snow melting under the surface of a sweating floor
you leap up to grab me but there's only a cloud of moonlight coming through your window
you feel the arresting tackle of all the butterflies leaping out of your chest with rapid eye movement like the eyelash kisses you would give the mirror
the fluttering turning their wings into  heavy blades that leave a pinkish glow on your chest

my name was worn out that spring and you never learned to turn the light on at night

you're not alone
touch the ransom note
i have learned to become un-lost
the art of demystifying the weird ways that you can become kidnapped by yourself
you peel your layers
leave the doors open as if this world is not cruel
danger is a middle name that your 3rd grade friend once gave himself
things are different now, the stars
                                                        don't
                                                                ­sink
                                                            ­          in
                                                    ­                    a pool of
                                                              ­    d  a  r   k               
                      it was once so terrifying to imagine
what lays underneath and above
but you sleep inside of it, always have

when i was ten i discovered these books about summer
it seemed all the chapterbooks were filled with strange stories of girls finding their destiny by the sea as their whole life changed between boardwalk adventures and family urgency, like melodrama in small increments with too much sunscreen
something about one of them specifically stayed with me for years
the cover was of the shore and the sand dollars lined in a row as if waiting to be picked up or maybe had just been put down
something about them gave me the impression that this could be my life
an eternal summer that i didn't have to abandon, the book i didn't have to close, look into the sun and not have to pick my body up from the water
it seemed agreed upon that i could live in a continuous day
nighttime didn't exist and the moon was a name given to my mother's friend
everything was promised warm, my feet would touch pavement while my hair was permanently bleached
but the sunset came and shook my shoulders

2.
i stand in my bathroom
cold and harmless
the window is fragmented so no one can look at your naked body but it makes everything outside look like when you didn't realize you needed glasses and once you did every memory was post foggy
i could be a dying star or a sun brushing its' rays and you'd never know
sometimes my hands are so clean my nails taste like soap and there's no way to go about it but accepting that

3.
there used to be a fire
and if i had to give it a name it would be Frederick
i don't know when it disappeared or how it even started existing
one day someone asked me if i knew how much wholesale toothpaste cost and my feet curled, i bit my lip so hard in fear i would scream until my throat bled
but that didn't happen instead something burst, not a vein but a sentiment
there were theories i used to develop while i went on dinner dates
i remember thinking of what i now reference as the sangria theory
while we sat and ate pasta and i could feel my head drifting while his eyes sank into the bottom of my shirt
i thought maybe all the people that you meet have no chance but a say
all circumstantial until you find something that harvests your attention
until you slip past the underwear and then nothing feels important anymore
was it ever?
you go separate ways, separate directions
as if in fear of finding something too close to whatever it is you're trying to find because then what would be the point of looking?
there was a fire and now there's a glow and i can't tell which one i like more

can you hold it in your palm? I can't stop talking about hands.
I don't remember the last time any other body part was that important but the one that slept next to you out of necessity instead of loneliness.
There's a problem, like a rock skipping into my neighbor's pool but it's not my neighborhood and none of the houses remind me of home. A solitary moment shrinking in shrubs when you know that the cars are passing by and you have no idea what direction anyone's going. Where's the destination and will they get there like you?
Muddy lawns and soaking sidewalks is everywhere you've ever been but you don't talk much about that anymore. Some kind of selective mutism that gripped you when you were too young to make decisions, just a bad joke played well on yourself. Drifting from window to window to see if my fingerprints stay there, if the future will break down the door and trip me with shoelaces that were worn by me or my best friend or by nobody and I think I'll understand then the most significant rule, you can't be in two places at once.

where do mattresses go when they leave your home?
do they hitch a ride back to Oregon
that place that you only pitched as an idea for a funny road trip
but never actualized
instead the map with all the pins of the places you've visited
has become the places you'll go and now it's slanting askew  
because your sense of perception is always a little crooked
do they sit by the curb of a dilapidated 7-11 and watch everyone
give them bedroom eyes
is there such a thing as pining or are we naturally drawn to the new?
something foreign that can be learned with time and patience
but the patience runs out like the water in the bag where that fish you won at the fair came in
and when you got home there was only plastic and the rubbery upside down belly of fish scales in an airless vacuum

do they enter through the window and shimmy under the
other dusty things in the attic?
Do they make themselves at home telling you stories of
everything they've seen and don't you wish that
the guests always stayed longer than you could hope for
but forever is not in your cards, it's not even in the receipts
you horde in the kitchen drawer
forever is stuck under the couch but you never check
because it's easier to just sit and think about it