in the summer:
she poured peach wine down my body.
she folded her paisley hands into my hair.
I made art for the dead prostitutes and the dead carpenter,
and I made art for her.


in the nightclub:
when the floor was red with liquor and gunshot, did they know?


in my heart:
I’m scared that I’ll betray you when the rifles bring us down;
I'm only hoping my switchblade can protect us now.


a mass shooting in a holy place
in the summer
I heard bodies dancing and laughing
I heard bodies bleeding and dying
I heard bodies
I heard bodies
in the summer


when I taste like judas, will you tell me?
when we exit the tobacco smoke, will you tell me?
I’ll betray you,
I’ll betray you, and I don't want to,
because if I could only breathe in your daisy chain hair,
if I could only breath in your summer eyes,
if I could only breath in you,
I’d be singing of my revival from the hanging corpse life I have been living,
and my aunt lisa’s gonna weep when I tell her about you.

she left me with a wound on my tongue ,
which hasn’t stopped bleeding blue since i was four
(i can’t blame her for everything)
(only for a few sick days).

my blue tongue flings out words that shake like the world is too cold.
my blue tongue isn’t connected to my mouth and
you can find it if you look hard enough,
you can grab it if you don’t mind a loose barbed-wire fence,
easy to sneak under and tresspass and destroy with the right words that leave me a blurry brown.

these stanzas sing about new mexico as if i were a new muse,
neurotic with drips of life drip drip dripping out like a drum.

my blue tongue is blue.

my blue

tongue

is blue because i became a blue corpse when i was a bumble bee child,
stinging and dying and repeating repeating
repeating until i’m ornate like the teepees i visited, oh-so cyan, oh-so turquoise, oh-so royal.

oh-so

blue.

you sat above me, and i watched a song unfurl on your skin.
from your tongue, a pieta tumbled unto my knees.
i was cradling the mother mary who was weeping over the desecrated, emancipated body of her own, over the body of jesus.

the eucharist, the son and father and the holy fantasy of christ, it’s eyes bore heaven onto my shoulders.
a dead woman was burning and her son and grandson and great-grandchild cried underneath a divine weight.
her ashes were split among the men.
they took them home and placed them silently on the shelves while i watched and shivered, silent.
and with my quiet tears, jesus appeared in the crucifixes hanging ‘round all the ladies necks.
he looked at me, with red flowing from his crown of nails.
he looked at me, with the stained agony mary shared when she saw her young son.
he fell into my hands.
i was cradling the dying body of jesus.

i was looking at him as an old man, pained and continuously bleeding.
i was looking at him as a child, playing with sticks on the feet of god.
i was looking at him as the carpenter and as the infant; sweating or crying.
dying or surviving.
i was looking at him through my muddy memory,
through my grandmother’s wrinkled eyes.
i didn’t know know if he would love me like this,
as an open wound,
and infected and rotting and selfish thing,
and,
i wept.

degas’s dancers fell through neural skies,
i heard a song more dream than anything.
shocklines tore through my lungs,
my eye, it caught the sight of a beast.

let’s gift a narrative to the naive;
the sweet hollows of a saint that sings,
the dear juvenile darlings in dusk,
the broken boards of willow bark,
let these memories sway a cynic.

when the ones you love tear your home to pieces say “thank you”, bow your head;
only rest when they are gone.

your cousin creates ripples in your life that are angry and violent but well meaning.

you will lose two matriarchs and the sound of reified royalty breaks into low noted hymns.
they've turned to the death you sang about.

the kindest ghosts are the ones you are afraid of,
they only sing when you clasp hands over ears,
they only dance when you pull the covers over your head,
they only fade when you love them.

the ghosts whisper:

you have things to learn from broken hands in coffins,
that the world isn’t pretty unless you make it so,
that a home full of love means the same thing as a mansion,
that death looks like floral aprons and old mirrors.

van gogh though that he was a vile wretch,
and you think the same because

you forget that you can bleed yellow.

i let my mother lay in her garden,
an apron of floral gods shining underneath lunar light.

she was still laughing when i wept,
words went dry as they crept underneath my teeth,
and were flung into the wet night.

one “sorry” stuck in between three stars;
she dripped with dust that scorned my skin.

blood matted my hair and broke my soul,
my own bones betrayed what i praised;
blood of the covenant had been shed in a parsley field of bumbling hearth, and we felt nothing near remorse.

just great gore upon our hands that grew into chalices as we drank our guilt,
just the ropes that made our necks red and raw with wracking sobs.
when this is all you feel, remorse gets thrown to the backseat of a chevy,
and we’re reminded of a youth like yellow wildflowers,
but i also think of the girls i kissed and how they made their hands into knives that weaved through ribcages and spilt the contents of a soul onto indian blankets.
when this is all we feel, we don’t feel remorse because it is a state you live in and i can’t feel the difference between regret and love.

we let a mother lay in her garden,
her apron of morbid gods was buried by the mourning sun.

i am
angry.

i am
sick.

i am angry, and i am sick, and i am ******* tired.

my body is rotting,
my hands shake.
but,
i am Achilles.
best of the Greeks,
angry and righteous and terrible.
i brought the pestilence to your home- it will **** your sheep.
it will **** your flock, your herd, your crowd, your audience, mister.
after it’s killed everyone else, it will come for you.

it will taste like ginger.
like tumeric.
like sulfur burning your lungs.

there will be nothing to shield you,
no trust fund,
no banks,
no lying sons and daughters who feed only on your game.

the disease will have killed them,
it will be because of me.
the sun is mad, it’s betrayed you.
because of me.

when you look at your empire for the last time,
you will see me,
burning and rotting and

smiling.