She told me
she tried to **** herself three days before my birthday.
And ever since then, I wonder if
she raised a knife to her wrist. Or if she
swallowed a bottle of pills. Held a gun to her head until
she realized that there's so much more out there than
her brains littering her bedroom wall. Did she get rushed to the hospital,
put in the ICU?

These are the questions
I will always be too afraid to ask.
Suicide is more than your curiosity, she would say,
but she was the one who cried as she wrote
what she hoped would be her last goodbye,
almost left me alone in a world we were trying to understand,
together.

Stain me, because my birthday is no longer
my birthday. My birthday is wondering if
the world would have continued to turn if her heart stopped beating,

and the presents aren’t so exciting anymore;
the cake never tastes as sweet.

Dionysus,
god of wine,
presses glasses of whiskey to your lips, tells you
he’s here, he’s here, and
shivers shoot down your spine.

You crack your knuckles under the table--
expand the space between your bones,
you want to punch him-- yet
his hands still find their way to the soft, supple skin of your knee,
press, knead,  and you want to slither away like a snake, turn into the
perspiration that dribbles down his neck, but
his eyes glimmer in the darkness and maybe
you just want him to purple you,
ferment layers of muscles you never wanted in the first place,
bite your lip, smile like lightning,
dig fingernails into emptied hair follicles, and
he squeezes your thigh so hard you’re worried
you’ll break in half.

**** it,
your narrow beams of ribcage only bounce under
shattered glass, he’s here,
he’s hurting you and you’re bleeding and blood is
erupting
out of your throat choking you choking him everything is
red, purple; purple me, you’re saying.

The woman who stands behind you in line presses her shopping cart
against your hipbone until you wince and tell her to
stop. She makes a face at you as she pulls away. You sigh.
You stare at the magazines that surround you;
you read something about the president having a gay affair-
(That can't possibly be true! you think,) and even though you
know better than to trust the tabloids,
you're very gullible. God. The person in front of you in line is taking
forever to check out, and you're tired of reading, so you hum
Fritz Reiner's Concerto for Orchestra until a man behind you tells you to
'Please stop humming, thank you very much.’

Well, **** him. **** all of this. And you can’t help but
wonder why they only sell weight loss magazines by checkout counters when, really,
they should be selling Harper Lee, George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway. You like
Edgar Allan Poe, too, but you figure that
he's maybe a little bit too dark for the supermarket.

Ah. Finally. After what seems like forever,
it's your turn to check out your groceries:
you place your items onto the conveyor belt-- milk, cheese, spinach, bread.
The woman behind the cash register scans your
credit card and asks you for your signature. Your mind is, for some reason,
stuck on some poem you memorized in high school, something about
disappointment and depression, and even though
you’re distracted, you sign your name on the little screen in front on you.

For a moment, your life feels thready and
vulnerable. But the feeling soon passes, and then you're back to
carrying groceries back to your car. What was that
poem you were trying to remember? Somewhere in the back of your
mind, you can recall the feeling of a woman pressing a shopping cart against your
hipbone. Something about desperation and desolation.
Ernest Hemingway? You shrug your shoulders. In the end,
you guess,
nothing really matters.

kissing on your bed with you
listening to childish gambino
somehow
your hands find my face and
my skin tingles

but this isn’t love. last night you told me to
keep myself to a minimum suffocate
the parts of me you didn’t find beautiful and so
I did.

tongue tastes a lot like heaven
I think as you grab me in all the places
you shouldn’t and I’m still
stuck on the way your arms are

prickled like cactus. (stop
puncturing holes in me is caught in the
back of my throat
yet i say nothing.) you taste like a
volcano threatening to erupt

but I like the way you look when you’re
spread out on your bed eyes closed and sometimes
I feel beautiful

we’ve stopped kissing
my lips are chapped and
everything is quiet. including the way
my phone rings and mom tells me

she’s picking me up
we say goodbye.
we do not hug.

You’re afraid of all that river,
the way that it rains so much in Florida yet
the lavish deserts in California are dying. The way that
Juneau is only reachable by plane but
you can see it perfectly fine from Google Maps.
Really, technology’s a miracle, except when
robots look like people and one day we won’t be able to
differentiate skin from slabs of metal.

Wait. You’re getting ahead of yourself.
You’ve never even met a robot, though you’ve heard that
they’re out there, manufacturing our cars,
plotting an inevitable rebellion that will **** us all—

stop. Stop! Right now, your world’s peaceful.
You're fine. It's not like you have heart disease or, god forbid,
cancer, yet you still have this unsettling feeling that
the world is going to get hit by a comet,
and maybe this is it, darkness.
Maybe this is why

you’re so afraid of fire, steel,
of ambulances, thunderstorms,
roses, smoke, modern art,
the color red,