broken glass and christmas lights that don't light up anymore, i hung you about with glitter and gold, called you art, kissed your face. there were tattered things on our clothes, i spit words into the gutter and they ran down the stream into the ocean where the letters got tangled with a sting-ray, a clown fishes fins. tiny fawns painted themselves across your palms, they sung me to sleep at night, wandering down my back and across my nose when i couldn't breathe because there was something knotting my veins into pretty patterns, stopping the bloodflow and shutting down my liver slowly. ric-rac danced two-steps and alcohol-drenched cakes infiltrated tea parties where lace was all the rage and ladies always wore gloves, *** was a thing never spoken about. the fifth most dangerous city in the us took me under its wing, tucked me into train station corners while paedophilia took hold of the government and shook us soundly. people held candles into the night sky when the family was killed, when the police asked if they were involved with drugs, when tiny bodies littered the basement because they were old enough to identify the killer. notebooks and traced fingerprints hung on the walls like christmas decorations before thanksgiving, pictures of you taken in secrecy, dipped in fluid that looks black in the dark room.

i knit sweaters. they have rabbits and bears and deer on the front.