I’ve always been a sucker for fate.
In love with the idea that the universe
has tied it's strings into knots with me in mind,
but forever skeptical of
anything that I couldn’t confirm.
How I ended up in front of a woman and her tarot cards is beyond me.

Between us is only a table,
The length of which makes a few feet feel like miles.
Distance is a funny concept,
Close enough to smell her perfume,
yet I feel
It would take an eternity for my hand to reach hers.  

When the card between her fingertips whispers to her
the potential I have in being a mother,
I want to leave.

It reminds me of when
My boyfriend tells me he can’t wait for the day  
That our magic comes together to create something worth stretching for.
The conversation leaves me with nightmares where I am alone and full with something that doesn’t quite feel like mine
And I leave him a week later.

All I’m doing is skipping the inevitable conversation
About the things I won’t give him.
Because between him and the woman in front of me,
I don’t know how to tell them that
motherhood is not something I expect within my deck.
Motherhood is a foreign concept that wakes me up each morning sicker than the last.
Purging myself of dreams of small fingers wrapped around my own.

I don’t know which combination of words
wraps the disappointment in pretty paper
And gives it over like a gift in the hands of my future love,
Allowing him to tear away at the layers until all that’s left
Is the box that I have stuffed this ugly truth into.

I have a list of names
Pressed into a book like flower petals that have been dry for far too long.
Like maybe some things are still beautiful after death,
Until they turn to dust.
Like maybe one day I will bring into the world
a child whose face fits these syllables,
Or maybe they’ll turn to dust.

See I like kids
And when people tell me that I will change my mind,
I tell them maybe.

Someone once told me that I was “denying nature”,
But it feels more like nature has denied me.

I used to feel so easy to love but maybe
I’m just eager to please
because no one thinks
to love the girl
who looks best
down
on
her
knees.

They step on my knuckles and it’s a compliment
to stand and watch me bleed.
Wrap my hair around
their wrists and smile,
fill my mouth
with
their
cursed
seed.

They tell me not to cry, or think, or speak, but I
have been crushed between teeth
and swallowed quickly
more times than not.
Scared to rot,
they
live
off
greed.

If I were to die he would write a character about me;
a girl he thinks he knows.  

Dream Girl would listen to funky music
and send him the ones with bass.
She would always pick up the phone when he called
and never cry to his face.  

She’d tend to every problem,
prescribing remedies in the shape of her best advice.
She would send him pictures
after only a couple days of being nice.
She would have been his;
only desirable when he decides.

This version of me lives within his head,
and in his phone at night while he
is between the cold sheets of his bed.

Dream Girl wouldn’t be lonely to the bone,
she wouldn’t laugh at his ****** apologies
or be holding on by her fingertips to anything
that feels like a home.

She wouldn’t be aware of his patterns,
like how the women he dates are thin.
She wouldn’t see him desperate to stand out,
but dying to fit in.
And she sure as hell wouldn’t be ******* a man
9” taller and 4” longer than him.

If I were to die he would write a character
about a girl he plays with like a rag doll.
Looking down on her without ever wondering
what could have made her that small.
Never to realize that maybe,
he never really knew her at all.

He asks me to open up
and so I do.

My legs,
my mouth,
my skin.

I offer up bits and pieces
of my flesh but
never myself.

And if he chews me to shreds,
I only hope that he likes the taste
of a girl half-dead in his bed.

I’ve always wanted wings to spread,
despite my fear of heights.
I’ve dreamt of color
and butterflies gliding through the sky.

But I was destined to spend my days
bolted to the ground.
Born of lead,
reality clings to me, and to it I am bound.

So I ignored when they warned me
about creatures of the night,
and never realized that I could attract moths
just from being so bright.

Reality is but fleeting moments
of lightness,
and now the places I’ve felt most free are tainted
by dead moths that deem me flightless.

I grow flowers on my tongue for you.
Afraid to give you anything but my
most delicate truths.
Let them spill from my lips like the petals
we once knew.

Am I pretty enough yet?
Would you kiss me in public,
or am I just your loneliness personified?
Either way, I tell you it’s alright.

Let your sugar-water words wet the soil’s surface.
Artificially sweet, never let it seep to the roots
because I’m worthy of love,
just not from you.

I remember being shorter than the shovel.
Jacket sheltering me from the cold,
but the wind sharp enough to turn my face pink,
and despite the fact that I waited for these days,
I shivered.

Teeth chattering against my smile as my dad sat in the doorway.

On winter mornings when we’d claim the house as our own bit of chaos,
we’d marvel together at the petrified drips of water coming from the gutters.
Clear,
and solid,  
I was sure the way the light danced through the icicle
was magic in the air.

But my dad and I do not make a peaceful pair.
I’d take the too tall shovel and swing,
the ice shatters around me,
raining glitter on my boots.

Ten winters later,
and our tradition has melted alongside my dad’s health.

Driving to the hospital feels like a death march.
The doors push through the parts of your life that make sense,
divide, and a rush of stale air convinces your eyes to close
like maybe you’re just afraid of what you might see.

I know these halls like the lines on my palm.
Each turn telling a different story.
The curved path to him resembles
the broken life-line that fate has cruelly carved into my hands.

Every visit the same as the last,
the years blur and I still have no idea how we are.
Time forever moving but never us.
Stuck in this purgatory between lives.  
Between living and surviving,
between home and hopefully a heaven.

But never with the icicles.
Never on the back porch burying our laughs into our gloved hands,
With the too-tall shovel
in the hands of a too-small girl.

Nothing quite feels clear,
or solid,
or sure.

All we can do is listen to the ice melt,
Drop
         By
              Drop
Listen to the birds cry their goodbyes to the glitter,
And hope that it means the sun is coming.