I try to tell my boyfriend that I am depressed
less than three times a day
after that
it gets a little depressing
like maybe it’s a ghost that if I don’t acknowledge
it will glide back into the thin layer between the underworld and mine.
I don’t know how to talk about wanting to die
without personifying it
addressing it as a pronoun
saying its name and capitalizing the first letter
tightening the slick leather collar around its neck that reads: “If lost please call…”
sticking its freshly birthed hand on certificate
but all I can say
is when I'm sitting in an all-white walled in 9 by 5 room
and the ceiling becomes latex,
seals itself a vacuum over my face,
all I can think about
is what a touch of cardinal could do for this room
but the thought of my brains turning brown and ugly,
after a few hours of the three people I cared about forgetting about me,
is enough to do nothing
until my sweat becomes comfortable with mattress
and out of necessity
I move.

A boy with bruises for under eyes in two o’clock poetry
stayed ten minutes after just to tell our professor
that he felt like a dead body
and when I went home that day
I laid in bed long enough to watch my plant
follow the grace of the sun
eight limbs strung wide open
a gradient of striped canary strewn across my bedroom floor
as it left me.
I thought
maybe the dead body boy
will schedule to be known as existing only to his bed
the same days as me
so that our agendas and the ******* Gods and the other planets
that are of no use to me
can align
and when I don't show up in the world for a week and neither does he
everyone will think there must just be something contagious going around
maybe there is—
Do you think that throwing your dinner away and smashing the plate,
allowing shower water to run cold over hot flesh,
and treating sleeping as an affair that I can only participate with eyes cemented open
is a new symptom of the next bat-**** virus everyone will lose their minds over?
Asking nurses if there's any way to make permanent
the needle still pierced through soft pit of inside elbow skin and spewing
the hauling behind you of a sweet 20 pound IV like a
dead
body?

When I wake up in the morning,

I don't

know the difference between dreaming in increments—
and being alive.