hand around stomach, she thinks
(this cannot be right) the way
his hands feel like they are burning
holes in precious porcelain skin she
promised she would save, maybe to
never give away. the way her fingers
begin to web and her mind goes
fuzzy and he’s still reaching
for her, all bone-finger and
finger- bone. maybe this
is what it feels like to
grow into the ground.
feet slide into fertile
mud (slides up her
legs past veiny thigh
purple lines trekking
below soft skin)
branch explode
from arm
waist slim
to bark
eyes rose-
petal pink

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.

The woman sticks her head out the window
and breathes in heavy air,
fog swimming down her throat into
unsettled stomach. Grumbles and groans
under the weight of morning dew. She can almost
taste the grass from here, imagine the way
it blows in a breeze she hasn’t felt in years.
It used to move her, slide her hair down her
back and now she always wears it up, those
bright red locks tied away where no one can ever
find them. Wet hands glide across glass pane and it is only
now that she realizes her head feels a little too heavy
on her neck. Necklace throbs
against collarbone and maybe
it’s the loneliness, she thinks, the desperate
way she hears the birds chirping
in some unknown distance and she wonders
what it would feel like to move.
She takes a step
away from the window.

one time, when you were six years old,
your parents took you to the alligator farm,
which is exactly three.02 miles away from the beach, and
your father, with his beefy hands, lifted you up in his arms,
let you peer over the safety railing at the scaly green creatures
below you, and sometimes now you wish he would have
dropped you down. maybe you would have died. or maybe
you wouldn't have, but at least then you would’ve had
a survival story to tell.

perhaps the problem with
starting poems off with a trip to the alligator farm is that readers
expect you to get chopped into sixteen pieces by means of
teeth larger than hands, break your neck, but
there’s no conclusion to this story other than that sometimes
you wash your hands until your knuckles are bleeding,
and that’s by far worse than being swallowed by a reptile,
clawing out your own vocal chords,
dying,

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.

In the past five years, you haven’t
stepped foot into a hospital. Unlike your best friend,
whose father had cancer, and unlike your grandmother,
who slipped and fell and broke her hip and
you were vacationing in Ecuador when all of this was happening,
unable to escape from the tropical rainforests to visit
the sick and dying.

Your friends tell you that you’re lucky,
that they’ve been to hospitals twelve times since their birth,
but at this point, anything would be more exciting than
coming home and falling asleep. Even your favorite TV show
can’t keep you awake anymore, and instead of being in surgery
or giving birth,
you curve your spine into a C shape while trying to finish homework
that will never truly be done.

But if you really cared about any of this, maybe you
would drive to the hospital, take a stroll down the maternity ward,
though suddenly you’d remember
that you don’t know how to drive
and maybe you’ll never get out of this place,
maybe this is all there will ever be.

In this story,

she’s made of only blood, flesh, and bone. Her pair of
white-hot eyes trail down polycarbonate
bodies like liquor over skin, yes, I’m moving to
New York next weekend. Yes, I’m very excited. She’s a
simmering bowl of office clerk and
caesius veins, swimming, always swimming.

It’s not like she has a lot of *** or anything, though she
likes bodies against bodies and the smell of
salt and sweat and gasps and heaves and
the thrill. 40s jazz and pill-shaped
freckles; she pulls her sweater down over her hands,
tries to calm down a heart that'll never stop
beating.

God. Yes. Yes to whiskey, yes to the new car, yes to falling
asleep without eating dinner. It’s about the new, the news, the
ivy and the flowers and the way that roses are so beautiful and yet they are
covered in thorns and green is a very pretty color until
jealousy turns everything brown and rotten and it’s all about the

way Venus fly traps are so wonderful and so so cruel.

Your greatest fear is of someone yelling
Fire! in a crowded theater, of the cries of children,
the way popcorn would be dropped, scattered.
Perhaps—if there were a fire, that is—
your body would lock into place,
like ceramic, like a doll,
and you would be able to do nothing except sit there,
heart pounding, blood flowing; perhaps you would press two
fingers to your veins, let the sound of your
adrenaline overpower the way smoke that
doesn’t exist floats through the air, into your lungs,
suffocating you.

Maybe if you try hard enough,
there will be a Fire! in a crowded theater. Maybe, sickeningly,
you want to watch the way mothers would
throw their children over their shoulders, race to an exit.
Maybe you’d rush to an exit, too. However, there’s a chance that
you’ve just normalized death, that you’re afraid of
fear itself, the crackling of flames,
the smell of burning plastic, the color
red,

You were six years old when your parents took you to the art museum
and you almost died. Fell down four flights of stairs,
yet stood up with nothing more than a scrape on your bicep.
Mom will call this day a miracle, the day her daughter escaped
almost certain death. Sometimes, though, you wish you could have hit your head
a little harder; chomped down so ******* your tongue that part of it
could have fallen off (and maybe then you could be beautiful.)

The problem is, your mom tells her coworkers that it’s
God’s Gift of Life that you’re still here. Sometimes she squeezes
your hand so hard you’ll worry she’ll break your bones,
which are already so thin, just the way she likes them. (Because
a near-death experience does not justify something like
chubby fingers.) (Even to your mother, who held you in her arms
as you whimpered at the bottom of a staircase and kissed
your forehead as she told you it would be okay.)

Your friends tell you that you’re meant to be here, and they
love you, they really do, and your tongue tastes flat and boring
in your mouth as you clamor for an interesting story to tell, a tale
of survival that will make them miss you
even when they have you, and yet you find
nothing: nothing.

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,

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.