Breathe
2. Laugh
3. Keep moving
4. Color outside the lines
5. Don’t talk to strangers
6. Listen to your big sister
7. Don’t ask questions
8. Shhh
9. Read to escape
10. Wait patiently after school
11. Do everything before being asked
12. Keep secrets
13. Text back quickly
14. Your worth comes from your body
15. Lie better
16. Be cool
17. Be smart
18. Grow up
19. Don’t expect anything
20. Patience is key
21. Stop waiting for rain
22. It’s okay to be hurt as long as you expect it
23. If you want to change, you have to do something differently

After sending yet another 10 second video of my feet crunching through trails of leaves,
I apologize for being annoying.
This is the second time in the last week I’ve shot this same take,
A modern day “wish you were here” postcard on repeat.

“What?” he says  “Not at all, you’re so cute”

I feel my resolve break to a million pieces beneath my foot
as if the tree branch above me shed it too.

The first person who reminds you what it’s like to be excited for the morning
Is like the crisp air of fall.
Easy to breathe,
just sharp enough to remind you it’s new.
And maybe fleeting.

But then again maybe he’ll linger.
Everything else about him
Is opposite of the last man who made my heart race.
Which is how I know I’m not being stupid.  

He pauses between flirts,
Moves his hand slowly when he’s near me,
Casually asks for reassurance,
That it’s okay that he touches me,
That I’m okay with him liking me.

I’ve never been treated with tenderness like this,
I got used to being crushed between teeth,
But he holds my name soft on his tongue
As if savoring the taste.  

When the man from the past
Finds my number once again,
I start to shake.
I can’t tell if I’m angry or afraid,
And then I remember the leaves,
And the chill of the breeze,
And my cold fingers find their way to the block button.

“I’m proud of you for standing up for yourself.” he says.

Most mornings, I meet her in the mirror. I carefully brush through her hair, wetting her down, just to see her clearer. We whisper about what is ahead of her; silently lament about what is behind. Gentle with my hands but less with my mind. I know I owe her.

Know I own her. Know that even at my best, there is so much sorrow between us. So many unmeant apologies, unmet necessities, unmatched niceties. So many men I allowed to touch her, to toughen her, to tangle up her tenacity until it was treacherous. I feel I have betrayed her in the most vulnerable of ways. I feel I have run out of happy lies to say.

Most mournings, I meet her in the mirror. I tie up her hair, knotting it without care, just to see her clearer. We scream about what is ahead of her; daydream about what is behind. Brutal with my hands and more with my thighs. I know I owe her.

In response to Edge by Sylvia Plath

"The moon has nothing to be sad about,  
Staring from her hood of bone.

She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag."
-Edge by Sylvia Plath


The night drips on and on
As they all just watch.
Wonder what got her so far-
What's got her in knots.
This is how they wanted her,
No denying that now.
Perfection in her silence,
Her last breath,
Her broken vow.
The moon has nothing to be sad about.

She looks down on her with apathy,
Just another face in the crowd-
They watch her as she scorches it
All to the ground.
Her body a vessel for pain and for persons,
Her mind gone numb from being treated so worthless.
The moon-
Having seen this all before,
Illuminates the horror within that small home
Staring from her hood of bone.

Although not new,
It is still tragic-
To see such a woman drained of all her magic.
To have once brought life,
The same that she has taken,
And now on her kitchen floor they all lie
Naked.
The moon just sends them back
To the roots of being- for
She is used to this sort of thing.

Life here on earth feels particularly brutal,
Like there is no escape
And to dream of such would be futile.
Don’t let it get you down,
For it is truly just womanhood,
You belong to the silence-
To the frowns.
So tightly sew that pretty mouth shut,
Sworn to be either dead or gagged-
Her blacks crackle and drag.

I still catch myself dreaming
in the moments between blinks,
of a better time for love to have struck me.
A better place for hurt
to have wrung me.
And I can’t help but wonder
if he also considers us unlucky.

I had always wanted to love him,
the way that he deserves,
one that’s both unconditional and sublime,
but it was ripped from my grasp;
there’s always too much pride.
Perhaps we could’ve seen beyond the risks
in another lifetime

Because he sits among my ribs
heavy against my heart,
humming along making my head twirl.
Wrapping me up,
like his hands in my curls.
And it’s a shame that we’re not soulmates;
at least not in this world.

You were a foreign concept,
Before I crossed your threshold my passport was stamped with
The loneliness that only accompanies temporary rooms.

I was a small,
And distrusting girl who had never felt solid ground beneath her.
The Earth’s platelets separating me further from normality
At the beginning of each month.

Black trash bags of my belongings littered the grass of every previous rest stop,  
And I thought you would be just like the others.
It was only a matter of time.

You learn not to get comfortable,
Not to unpack the baggage that you grew up developing,
And who knew somebody so young could have so much ******* baggage.

We walked the streets with it dangling from our shoulders,
I was little, and felt like Santa.
Only I didn’t much like that man, he always seemed to leave us out.
Mommy taught us that most men are like that.
They promise all sorts of things,
And then wonder why you’re upset when your hands are empty.

What mommy didn’t teach us,
Is that it wasn’t anybody’s fault but hers.
She didn’t explain that most mothers don’t disappear for days.
Or that they don’t lock themselves in rooms with torches
And men who can’t look me in the face.

She didn’t prepare me for the days that I would have you.

You.
You saw more of my growth than she ever did,
Within your walls I first able to be a kid.

At ten I painted almost every piece of furniture in my room
without my dad knowing,
And it didn’t feel like enough until I scribbled my name into the wall beside my bed.


Marking my territory like
“I WAS HERE”
“I AM HERE”
“Do you see me?”
“Is this real?”
“If I chain pieces of myself to every corner, they can’t make me leave, right?”

When I was twelve,
I invited my best friend over for the first time.
I had never had a place to hold sleepovers,
unless the vacancy in the shelter was gone,
And a stranger shared our room with us.

But you made me feel ordinary,
Like I had a place in the world,
And wow is that a big feeling for a little girl.

And then came fourteen,
The world seemed to crash around me,
And like every fourteen year old girl
I thought I knew love.

But when that older boy turned out to be meaner than the streets,
You let me cry,
Barricaded behind your doors,
I felt safe.

I screamed so loud I could feel you shake,
The window panes glistening with rain,
I think you cried with me.

Sixteen,
And it was time to leave.
Our little family worked so hard for the opportunity to advance,
“Don’t worry kids, we’re going to a forever home, one that we can own”

I said **** that,
Sat on the floor until the last box left.
I never allowed myself to be planted somewhere,
But you stole the roots from my feet and tied them to your foundation.


Your walls had been drenched in my sorrows,
And in my joys.
I never would have guessed I’d meet you,
And I never realized how much I really needed you.

I’m eighteen now,
In college,
And still think about you some days.

I never got to thank you for your support that became my back bone.
It’s crazy how well you can pay attention in school when you actually have a home.

I’m here now,
And you’re there,
But you have to know
that I carry you with me everywhere.

Water runs in the same way she does.
Knowing they brought her gentle lies via guns
Barrels of bullets like music,
But they still wonder why she grew sick.

Salt dances on her cheeks and it is
Faulted for not one, but for all of the
Flowers that grew from her ears
In a matter of hours.

For the love of god,
Just skip the pleasantries.
Walk through the park,
Assign the guilt trip to your patriarch.
Pass the statues whispering ugly
Remedies in the form of an excuse.

The knife’s worn handle is solid against my palm.
Sharp edges, dull tip,
Stained with resin.
It has lived far passed it’s lifespan,
But it sits in my drawer.
I hold it some nights when
I want to feel the weight.
I use it now and again
When my scissors are misplaced,
But mostly it sits.
I wish you could see the life that I’ve made.

In early mornings and in the nights,
In the afternoon and the soft evening light,
Every cell of me wants you near
And I wonder if my whispered wishes
Can build and cross all these bridges.

I’ve spent my life
Hidden away
Buried in strife
Longing for easier days.

And although it was hard
Enough to steal my breath
I pushed through the dark
And my patience was put to the test.

I woke up one mornin’
In my own peace
Nothing was perfect
But it sure was golden

As the days inch closer
So do we.
He always took himself so seriously,
Even once we no longer did.

One year separated by a handful of pills,
By the milestones he has missed,
By a new man in an old home.

One year tied together with tears,
And not a lot of hope.  
With laughter,
And really mean jokes.

You know what it is to lose,
And to be lost.
But most of all you know love
And all that it costs.

I daydream of swinging
Alongside you
I nightdream of falling
And slipping from youth.

I used to think you’d save me,
Swoop in at last.
Now I know that is silly
Because far too much time has passed.

Young girls on the bus compare knives.
New friends bonded by
The race to beat the school bell
And their parents.
One has blue hair,
The other, diamond earrings.

I hear them tell stories,
Diamond Earrings says she doesn’t have friends right now.
She did,
Until they all smoked a little too much ****
And another girl passed out.
Everyone runs,
Everyone except Diamond Earrings,
Who calls the cops and waits with the girl.
“I wanted to cry” she says to Blue Hair.
“I felt like a wimp”.

Sharing her fear,
Blue Hair insists that she isn’t weird.
“Anyone with a soul would want to cry”.
And I can tell that Diamond Earrings maybe hasn’t
Been told this for a long time.

They move on as quickly as the speeding bus.
And now they trade stories about the old men
That they recognize.
They loudly call them creeps,
Brave for each other.
Angry that they both have been touched
By strange men with gray hair on the bus.

I wish they didn’t have notes to compare.
And although it’s been years,
I still wonder about
Diamond Earrings and Blue Hair.

I check my dad’s breathing while he sleeps.

Meet the sun at the horizon and together we sneak
around the corner,
avoiding the floorboards that we both know have a tendency to squeak.
It’s in these moments that I love him the most,
when his eyes are closed and he’s almost at peace.
There’s still hope for the day so long as he speaks.

Or maybe he’ll sing.

Our lives could have been beautiful,
had he learned how to fight it.
Had he grown past the affliction
that left his own family divided.

And some days he tries,
although he denies it.
I know when he’s clean
because the come down is quiet.
It’s borderline silence
coated with the threat of violence.

On these days all I can do is try
my best to pretend I resonate
with this man from hell.
Not a stranger, I know him too well.
Sometimes I see his anger in my own face.

Desperate to escape his youth, he forgot about mine.
And I’ve had this nagging thought for a while
that he only loves me when he’s high
enough to look down and remember I’m his child.

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 was once so adamant.
So ready to deny the duty of somebody else’s war.
But something must have changed
Once the camouflaged man was through the threshold,
Because when he left the young man was no longer a boy.

I always pictured him as a frat type guy.
The one that ended every night with a different girl,
But always called his mom.
He wasn’t sure what he was doing after graduation,
But he promised me
Weekend trips,
And car rides,
And ice cream.

He spoke to me slowly when he told me.
Counted the benefits on each hand and was sure to highlight the safety.
He says,
“I just know you worry,
But there’s no danger where they want me”
His words dangle between us
And I swallow my heart.
I should be proud,
Or happy,
Or feeling something other than this pit of dread in my stomach.

He enlisted,
And soon after began drinking.
His breath now smelled of cigarette smoke,
And he was “man”.
But every time I tried to meet the boy in his eyes
He would pull away.
We haven’t spoken in months.
Until one night he calls me.

He spoke to me slowly when he told me.
His mother was sick again,
Only days before deployment.
He’s been chain smoking
And can’t sleep.

I hear the words in the back of his throat.
Wanting to escape,
But refusing to admit
That maybe he just isn’t ready to leave.
But the days pass fast now,
And it’s only a matter of time.

I don’t know when we will speak again,
So instead I have late night conversations
With the moon,
About the boy who signed his life away
Too soon.

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 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.

I close my eyes so that I may see him in the night and in the day and in the light of the refrigerator. I walk through the hallways of time, rewind, and look into his face while I try not to cry. I hold the weight of this tiny world on my hip and bring her to him so that she may know that he saw her. The world changes around me, without me,  because of me. We are not real, you and I. You and her. Her. You. Me. Anything? No air but not for lack of trying. I draw circles with apologies, and I take the blame for you dying.

Curls frame my face the same way they framed yours, and now it is hard to look in a mirror.
Curls that you loved and
Curls that you made, you said I was a lucky girl to look like you. That truth
Curls around my throat and makes it hard to breathe. The way your arms would
Curl around me is no longer comforting. I mourn and I grieve, but never can I leave the
Curls that remain with me. My fingers
Curl around the bit of you that I have left. I hate admitting when I’ve wept.
Curling my pride, making it small, I hate more to admit when I haven’t wept at all.

Her eyes blaze with guilt,
and an outrage at being guilty.
Being caught.

I patiently wait for the crows,
who so lovingly printed their feet
on the sides of my mother’s eyes,
to swarm me.
Swallow me whole.

Even when I’m right,
I’m wrong.
But that’s just how it is with drug addicts.

I want to hate her.
I want to deny the human that is littered
across her hands and grey hairs.
I want to erase her from my DNA
and ignore her as she has done to me.

I want to personally lay the burden
of my addictions on to her shoulders,
tell her, ‘you did this to me’,
watch her knees buckle, and then
have the audacity to ask
why she has kneeled.

But I could never hurt her in that way,
so instead I choose to look her in her face,
and ask why she can so easily do this evil
to me.

As a child I would sleep
with my head on her back,
hoping that one day
I could piece her back together.
Love her enough to make her want to change.
I tried to hold her down
like the weight at the end of a balloon,
and yet she always managed to drift.

To this day she calls me ‘baby’.
Speaks in a play voice that tells me she knows she was absent
When I was small enough to look up to her.

She never would mean to hurt me,
But she fails to see the chain reaction.
By bringing drugs and a child into her life,
She made those two companions.

And in that garden,
I searched for love under every rock that I could find.
Dug through the dirt just to blow kisses at worms.
Soiled my hands,
Searching for stability.
For something.
Anything to hold on to no matter how small.

And everything was always so small.

This poem is a response to one I wrote five years ago: https://hellopoetry.com/poem/2605739/in-which-i-am-brutally-honest-about-my-mother/

My eyes blaze with guilt,
and an outrage at being guilty.
No, at being wrong.

While I waited for the crows,
I was devoured by the chasm
between my father’s brows.
Felt my stomach drop
as I fell into the ground.
Even when I’m right,
I wish I were wrong.
But that’s just how it is to be the victim.

See, my mother was played with by god.
She’s quick to love only to be abandoned.
I remember her whispering to us,
in the middle of some nights
as if we were the daughters of Medusa.

My mother was hurt by god
She did not create sin but
she’s spent most of her life running with it.
Running from it,
running to it.
And I think at some point
she felt too distant to be worth it.

I thought I wanted to hate her,
but it’s impossible to deny her humanity and
to keep trying would only end in tragedy.
I know I’ve ignored her and
I know that worsened the distance.

I want to personally lay the burden
of how I love onto her shoulders,
tell her “You taught this to me.
I watched you love others from the mountains to the sea and I’m

sorry for the years I didn’t let you love me”.

But healing happened in a crockpot,
that wasn’t plugged in.

As a child, I felt so betrayed
because she was my favorite,
and yet I felt so alone
on nights when I couldn’t use her back
as my pillow.  

I tried to understand the kaleidoscope of her broken pieces,
and yet I wish I persisted as I got older.
I thought I protected my peace,
and maybe I did,
but it took me ten years to warm up
my shoulder.
I was sad about the absence,
until I became mad and indignant.

A case of unrecognized bias.
By having two drug-addicted parents,
and a lot of black-and-white thinking,
One had leaves, so the other was poison.
Two different flowers in the same garden.

And in that garden,
I’m weeding out the past
and digging in the dirt using only my hands.
Creating stability and forgiveness at that.
Forgiveness for my mother, who has grown despite my doubt.
Forgiveness for my father, for dying
at the hands of the devil he couldn't live without.
I am perpetually digging even further for hope.

And there is always potential for hope.

She must have been *****.
Must have made you dizzy
in all the best ways.

Her tongue was sharp down your throat,
But you just couldn’t stop taking gulps
of her air.

As she passes your lips,
you are filled with warmth
of another world.

Of a world where everything is numb,
except her.

But don’t you see,
it’s all a part of the appeal.
She will hide things from you.
She will convince you to say yes
to her every word,
just for another sip

Every time you step away
her bottle shaped hips sway to you,
beckoning you.

Just one more drink from the rim of her mouth
has you begging for more.

She will leave you the next morning,
questioning all your decisions.
You will curse her name
with your head hung.
You will tell yourself,
you can not do this again.

Come night,
her aroma will threaten your senses.
And she is back in your arms.
Invading your veins.

You know she is bad for you.

What you don’t know,
is that I am a different kind of moonshine,
that will get you a different kind of drunk.

I do not smell like regret,
nor leave you in pain.

I will light up your darkest hours,
show you everything you missed
while she was in your mouth.

You will never have to feel guilty after a night with me.
You will be gazing upon the stars,
and not the sloppy ones
she convinced you to paint into your skin.

You do not have the option of drawing blood on the glass of my body,
I am more substantial than that.

Maybe you like getting drunk,
but my love,
if you ever decide better for yourself,
you’re going to wish you did it
while my light was calling to you.

It’s too late now.

Your head hurts
and you have nowhere else to turn.
One day you will see your error,
but until then,
have fun letting her destroy you.

I hide my eyes behind the hood
Let the light bleed through the thin
Fabric and the thick skin
That holds me.

I’ve grown accustomed to
The way it feels between
sharp teeth.
Digging into me
Is far too easy.

They let the wolf
Swallow me whole,
And now I will spend
Lifetimes in his belly.

I long for you in the morning
When my eyes are still shut tightly
And your scent lingers in the sheets.
I long for you in the morning
And again in the lonely nights.
You softly whisper in my ear:
I long for you in the morning
When my eyes are still shut tightly.

They say lust is one of the deadly sins
but when his lips travel from my own,
down my neck,
exploring uncharted territory
it feels more heavenly than anything offered in the pages of the bible.

I don’t necessarily believe in god,
but I do believe that his hands are my welcome to the golden gates.
And if god is real,
She would want me drown in his embrace.

She would tell us that this,
this thirst that we have for one another,
is natural and as close to divine as we can get.

The frantic desire to be closer,
despite being on top of him already,
is a testament to the power She gives us.

A verse hidden between the lines,
She whispers about the apple,
and how the hidden knowledge Eve was granted
was never really a secret in the first place.
but instead,
a test of curiosity,
She dares us to explore.

To take a bite,
and savor the sweetness that we sink our teeth into.
never more alive than in the moments we are gasping for air,
trying so hard to breathe one another in.
Unsure of how long this night will last,
or if we will get another chance at being this bold.

Holding hands,
and throats,
exchanging smiles
and grasping on to anything we can wrap our fingers around.

Shirts,
hair,
sheets.

This is what She meant when She told us we would
long for the lewdness of our youth.

If god is real,
She would want nothing more than
our laughs and jokes to break up the intense reality that we are in.
She would send music down whenever he asks if I am still okay.
She would brighten the moon in glee,
because what could be more angelic than the halo
of hair spread out behind me.

What could be more holy than owning your body
shamelessly.
unbothered by the wind whistling,
cheering us on in this moment.

They say that lust requires a penance,
but if god is real,
She is proud in this moment.

She has granted us the tools and the instinct,
lust was never really a sin.
We don’t need to ask for an absolution,
She grants us pleasure,
whispers that we don’t need to be forgiven.

There is something so humane about
the animalistic sounds clawing their way from his throat.
At the end of the night,
I find myself praying,
thanking Her for each mark on my skin.
Never asking for Her mercy,
this is heaven on earth
and it was She who created it.

Dreams are said to hold secrets of the subconscious.
Messages relayed from the brain to remind us of unresolved issues.

I have a collection of recurring dreams like others collect movies.
Mostly there to provide a resting place for the dust in the air,
but sometimes they are projected in the night.

Tonight it’s the one about teeth.
It usually starts with me standing in a public space,
most likely being looked at,
until my teeth fall from my mouth
one by one until there is nothing left.

A quick google search reassures me of three things
1. this is a common dream for others as well
2. this must mean I am anxious over things out of my control, and
3. that even in our worst fears we are not unique.  

I think about how people are a lot like teeth,
but I’m still learning how to lose people.

About all the ways I’ve laid myself out
as a welcome mat for whoever decides to clean their boots while passing

I am trying to remember that sometimes it’s natural for things to fall apart,
but no matter how much I think I understand what it means for someone to be gone,
I still find my tongue running over the gap.
The space that he should occupy,
that any other day he may have occupied.

His absence is slithering it’s way into my speech,
my voice stumbles around the syllables of his name
as if I must relearn what it means to live with a mouth without him in it.  

Missing teeth.
Like a black hole.
Like maybe you never belonged there in the first place.
Like being six years old,
and learning for the first time
that when something you thought you needed decides that you don’t anymore,
it hurts.

But when you’re six,
and you lose your first tooth,
you celebrate.

The magic of growing up makes the blood look like strawberry jelly,
instead of something to cry over.

But now I’m 19,
so the magic had worn off years ago
and the blood is just blood
and I still don’t know when to give up.

I choke on the word goodbye,
savoring the way it feels on the tip of my tongue,
like it could stay there forever,
instead of leaving my lips to meet him for the first time.

I’ve come to realize that this is less about him,
and more about the ways I tie myself to smoking houses
and refuse to leave even once the flames have began to lick at me.
More about the way I avoid commitment,
while sneaking off to hold hands with attachment as though the two aren’t related.

So I sit,
with gaps the shape of people in my mouth,
and I swallow the goodbye,
tucking it away for another time where I won’t be able to say it.

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 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.

His palm envelopes my fist,
Folds over each finger,
Swallows my wrists.

His palm enveloped my fist,
Folded over each finger,
Swallowed my wrists.

When the earth swallowed me whole
I remember thinking,
“Nothing will ever be the same”
And I was right.
His possession became an obsession
And I was trapped within his walls
Decorated to look like my childhood room.
I felt sick.

How dare he take the most innocent parts of me,
And taint them with his hellfire.
How dare he steal the most delicate parts of me,
And crush them between his teeth.

All I wanted was to pick flowers.
To sing and dance in the breeze.
How dare he choose me.

I starved in silence
Until I couldn’t feel anything
Except the rumble in my stomach.
Numb to the screams around me,
Paralyzed by dead dreams.

I wish I never went outside.
I wish I never smiled.
I wish I never was born.

As the moon washes over me,
So does your face.

I try to hear your voice-
Try to quiz myself.
Like you were once my favorite meal,
And now I can only somewhat remember the taste.

I try to rest longer-
To rest more.
If I could only live behind my eyes.
Then I wouldn’t have to miss you, and my grief would be done.

But instead, you slip away each morning,
Creeping out with the sun.

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.

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.

It’s nights like this,
when the loudest noise is the ticking of the timeless clock on my bedroom wall,
that I wonder if anybody has ever loved me.

They have loved the way I float across waters while they crash with storms,
bringing their bodies safely to shore
as though the waves aren’t slowly seeping in,
rising to the top until I’m sunk in the sand.

Making castles on the ocean floor,
maybe they only ever cared for the habits I developed
trying to survive in a world that never wanted me.
Because it’s easy to benefit from someone so eager to please.

Longing for the day that someone sees me
rather than what I can do for them.
Rather than how small I can become for them.

Every night is like this,
because the loudest noise is the ticking of the timeless clock on my bedroom wall,
and I wonder if anybody has ever loved me
for any reason beyond knowing that
a shrinking girl fits in the palm of your hand
just so long as she is wrapped around your finger.

Dark and dreary are my favorite nights,
Hiding me amongst the stars.
I dance between realities and
I gather notes left by Mars.
I allow them to hold me whenever I tire.  
Your future I could tell you,
But you’d rather not know,
For you were not made
For something so dire.

The Greeks say that when the King of the Dead
Laid his eyes on Persephone for the first time,
He was struck by her innocence,
Her simple beauty as she tended to flowers.

He lured her in with an enchanted daffodil,
And when she drifted towards the small petals,
The earth opened its ugly mouth,
Swallowing the child upon Hades orders.  

She may have been the first,
But there’s no such thing as a last.

Girls have grown up seeing the look in men's eyes,
When they realize how
Fragile.
How his heart softens when he sees her.
As though her innocence
Could cure him of his sickness.

As if breathing her bubble gum air
Will somehow make his life pop.
The ends of her bows tying knots
Helping him keep his **** together,


She becomes a savior
Before old enough to become a woman

He wears her like a bruise,
Privately poking as to see the shift in hues,
But in public who would have known.
They also say that her mother, Demeter, went mad
When she couldn’t find her daughter.
And even more so when she did find where she was.  

The Goddess of Agriculture killing the crops she planted,
Starving the people she created,
Raising hell up in the heavens.
Her anger was said to scare Zeus himself.

So when you,
As a man in your friends passenger seat,
Decide to open the earth,
And allow it to swallow somebody’s child whole,
How mad do you think her mother would be?
**** it, how mad would YOUR mother be?

I wonder if you have a sister,
And if you heard the way strangers speak to her on the street,
Would you still be laughing?
I wonder if you can smile more.
I wonder where you’re headed looking like that.
I wonder who mislead you.
Who taught you that this is what means to be man.
Who forced the human out of you.
Mother Nature was willing to destroy the world due to one monster who felt entitled.
What makes you think she’ll spare you?

I wish we could go back to that field,
Back to when Persephone was chasing her friends,
Before the flowers wilted from her disappearance.
Before the six pomegranate seeds that bound her to the underworld every six months.

I at least wish we could tell her that
One day, she’ll grow up.
She’ll move as far away from the past as she can get.
She will bloom,
And smile again.
Her roots stronger from the wind.
And Spring will fill the air as she passes by.
And he,
Will spend all of eternity burning in the fire she sparked.

“The brain protects itself from trauma,”
she tells me
“It shuts off corridors full of memories in order to allow you to continue living in the house.”

The house,
which may or may not be a crime scene,
feels like a maze.
Like despite living here my whole life,
I’m not sure where certain hallways lead to,
or what that door opens up to display.
Like walking in the pitch black,
your hands dragging against the walls,
hoping you’ll end up somewhere familiar,
but there are more locks than entryways
and I just don’t have the keys.

“It’s to be expected, you know,”
her voice breaks me from my journey.
“Normal that parts of you are a mystery,
and I just want you to know,
there’s no guarantee you’ll ever get the answers you’re looking for,
but that doesn’t mean we can’t try”

I can hear the words hidden between her teeth,
a soft suggestion,
reminding me that these parts of my history are gone for a reason.
That maybe,
behind those doors is a monster that I don’t want to meet.

“The brain protects itself from trauma.”
Protection like this can sometimes feel like
you’re keeping secrets from yourself,
like somewhere deep down there is a child
who draws pictures and burns them before anybody
gets a glimpse at what her eyes have seen.

Sometimes I don’t care
about the past.
I wake up in the morning,
look at where I am now,
and can almost convince myself that it’s outside of me.
That I’m not affected by what I can’t remember.
I bask in the denial,
in the fact that I can’t be called a victim,
if I don’t recognize the violation.
I can’t suffer at the hands of a faceless,
and nameless atrocity,
only at the impact.

At the ways my hands shake when he moves too fast.
At how, as an adult,
I’m just now learning what it’s like to feel comfortable in my skin
and in others.

I realize I’m poking at a monster,
like every white person in a horror film,
I am investigating the basement when I should just move out.
but when your body is the building,
you have limited options of where to go.

I have ran in the other direction for so long,
and I’m so tired of the unknown.
If one day this door does open,
I don’t know what I will be confronted with.

But I do know that I am stronger than whatever it is that dwells here.
So when I can hear the door **** shake,
I no longer tremble with it.

I have learned to hold my ground,
to move towards the sunshine,
towards the garden,
to water the flowers there
and enjoy the growth.

The creatures that lurk in the night
Cover most of the road, unless you have on your lights.

To save ourselves from the river,
Everything takes effort.

Nothing is given to you,
But the ripples around rocks
Pointing to drowned dreams.

I need to do the dishes.
It would take me fifteen minutes tops to do the dishes.
I would feel so much better with a clean kitchen.
I would make dinner.

-I would rather die than do the dishes.
-I could spend those fifteen minutes thinking about playing Pokemon on my couch.
-Not playing Pokemon, because that would require too much work.
-I would think about it, though.

******* just do the dishes.
We went to therapy and talked about this.
Not the dishes,
But about the millions of microscopic steps that everything takes.

-I don’t NEED to do the dishes.
-I can eat off this napkin or
-Maybe I just won’t eat at all.
-Everything is such a process and I hate it.

The first step is to just ******* do something.
Anything. To keep your brain from self-destructing
Over something as small as starting
Any and every task.

-I would rather rot on my couch
-Than do something. Anything.
-And maybe I would self-destruct,
-But honestly, it just sounds like too many steps.

He sits,
silent for a month now,
a silence that fell upon my request.
It was my hands that placed the tape upon his lips.

His lips which I kissed with a fever
I haven’t felt since I was thirteen
and woke in the middle of the night only to find
that I hadn’t slept at all.

It was my hands that bound his.
His hands that wound me up
until all that was left was the desire to be his doll.
Something he could pretend to love,
without the responsibility that comes attached to it.

Attached like how he claimed he was to me.
Pretty words
like cobwebs in the corners of my room
that I can’t quite reach.
Can’t quite clean.

Clean like the white lies he adored so much.
The white lies that split my skin in two,
allowed him to crawl passed my barriers
that I had spent so long building.

A sad and foolish boy who mistook my body as his home.
As shelter while he felt weak.
Something to use.

Apologies in the form of an excuse,
and I can’t help but pray for the woman who allows him to speak.

She grew amongst the twisted branches of the tallest trees.
Tried remembering the days and nights
that often felt like dreams.
Sounded like war.
Smelt like smoke.
Tasted like powdered milk.
Looked like lies.

She ran her fingers along jagged edges,
Following district lines like she followed Brandon.
A peaceful life,
Full of truth.

Truth spirals out of control
When you can’t tell what is truth
And what is a dream that lives
Out of pocket.

But she lived,
So it must have been a good life.
Unable to change the situation,
She tried to change herself.
The loneliest Willow of the trees.

She was manmade,
Formed by the hands of people
Who were just people.
And so her twisted branches tied knots among her roots.

1.a special handshake between the two of us that he would accidentally try with others.
2. his favorite cereal bowl. a pink egg with a bunny painted on the inside.
3. the reality tv show we’d watch for hours, just to talk **** about.
4. a crisp hundred dollar bill.
5. the van that he sat in for hours.
6. a 47 second phone call to tell me he was proud of me and my poem.
7. not enough pictures.
8. his hair and face staring me down in the mirror.
9. a lifelong aversion to drug addicts
10. the van that held him as he took pill after pill in a parking lot.
11. an empty feeling home that was once filled with him.
12. a little sister who saw too much, who feels too much.
13. his anger as i watch my mother move on faster than i can fathom.
14. $85 a week in therapy bills.
15. a lifelong attraction to drug addicts.
16. dreams like my subconscious is testing to see if i remember his face still.
17. not enough videos.
18. a loneliness i couldn’t have imagined.
19. a big sister, full with the future that he was supposed to love.
20. the answer to my lifelong, unasked question.
21. guilt.
22. a little green jar that makes me feel more hallow than not.
23. not enough.

they carried the insufferable weight
of invisible sins
on their backs and we worried
about our own suffrage.

we demanded to be seen
as strong
while refusing to let them be
seen.

we were coddled into submission,
baby-talked into babies,
and cried for our own injustices
back turned to our sisters
who needed us most.

and even now,
with this poem written in past tense
we still look passed the tension
yelling in our faces.

we chase after self,
celebrate “progress” in the name of
white accomplishments
and most belong in hell.

we ignore the truth of our history
hide behind the riveter
for stepping up to the jobs
that black women were already working.

inlay of shimmering white guilt
denial saves us from remorse because
voting is to a white woman what
blinders are to a horse.

I am a daisy in the dead of winter.
Upon first glance,
my petals blend into the snow as if they are one.

Gentle,
and kind,
my vernality becomes a responsibility.
Stay warm,
Stay pretty,
Stay sweet,
No matter how cold the snow gets.

Vulnerable to anyone who may decide to rip my roots from the ground,
I savor each moment,
try to bask in the green of my own leaves,
and remain soft.
Remain alive
despite existing in a world
that would rather see me wilt.