what is an ugly? other than blood you're afraid of
bleeding softly from each crevice of heart pumps,
the gray side of the moon and the corner of rooms
undusted and disemboweled reluctantly.

you are so beautiful in bright rags of black and blue
and i'll stay half-hearted as you ask me to judge
your thighs (perfect) and nose (twisted) by the weight
of your meat and soul respectively.

an ugly is an analogy for discomfort and newness:
people are scared of unfamiliar but i find the sensation
of biting my nails off for sport exhilarating. your mascara
looks horrible today and i will kiss it to exhaustion

i’d love to sugar your mouth,
gumdrops a sour lipstick compared to
umami tongue flickering with laughter

your hands are like syrup around mine
and i find it fitting to drown often
infinitely into the parfait puzzle piece.

“i haven’t eaten in days” i breathe on your
face while we forget that the playstation
whines still. “me either” your eyelash falls
on my shoulder and we dine on eachother instead.

i don’t want to make art tonight.
i want to spray my walls thick
with blue, splattered skyguts
and beat my tears raw against my bedpost
(notch free because i count
with my fingers + toes)

love always happens by accident and i
never forgave anyone for stepping on my
red suede shoes just like my vinyl
told me to. the television is my real mom
the radio my nanny because i listened to
fake art all my life and now i dont know
how to not make it

i am pillars of saltshakers for flimsy arms
to give a last salute to my army of ants,
and i step on their heads on the way to my
chair of golden hairs from the head
of an unassuming mistress, the light of my
lions and fire of my letters

they say envy is a toboggan ride to success.
my mother cradled me in pasty poverty,
do you hate someone for filling your heads with
surrealisms and lion-headed daisies?

i was destined for better than You and you and
you and you but i get worse than everyone
i am the monster of want and you are just afraid

i have vivid visions always of birds with wings of glue.
whatever’s parasitic on me sticks to you:
you parrot back to me constantly, worms in your craw
with rhetoric unsightly and garishly raw

repeat the tele-v like a good birdie
does polly want a *******? have a drink on me
i pick your sort like dandelions puffed
ridiculously. i never really knew what death means
but i have an inkling
of a feeling

i'm not your lover or your friend.
i'm your crutch: your time machine
to tenth grade and dragons but
no dungeons, they didn't let the girls play

i knew our skins would absorb one another
and i never touched in fear for colors
dashed and blinding, killed.
i want to die an icecube, still

have you ever had a young love grow old?
your words are archaic and covered in mold
there's a hint of affection, still
i'm afraid that this time i'll ****.

i remember every headache reminiscent!
a taste of burnt oranges like little
flames of flames of oceans like vents
at the bottom of my Being that bubbled up
all stupid words and furrowed brow

i know exactly how much weight is in an “i love you”
and in weighing them obsessively 5 am with a bottle
of god-knows-who from dad-knows-where i realized
it doesn’t really matter as much as highschool seems.

don’t tell me i don’t know anything
my soul is older than
the bark of the trees in my backyard,
as i still hear them
flirting with the birds as if things are
possible at all

(no judgement. i used to do the same
boys and girls and cut and run
just toys that whirl with waterguns)

the baby teeth grin at you from your pockets
blood still fresh on them like the first wildflowers
of spring still blossoms on fingertips

i know you remember him, i saw you kissing the stone
wedged in the ground with his name etched
and a meaningless date because we all know
his lungs shriveled far before then.

you cannot hold onto the cold
he is a summer wind left to roam the world,
even if it is one under all that
we walk on if that is what you choose to see.

i want to taste the darkness
hidden in the folds of your eyelids

is it normal to want to consume someone wholly?
things rise so naturally in me:
urges to bite you til you break
and my throat yearns for your marrow

i bet you'll bleed wine,
and i'll hold your neck to my maw and
crunch the whole bottle,
cork and all.

i woke up gorging myself with whiskey and cheerios
i’m sleep-punishing again. mother will probably
threaten to call the doctor and forget.
dinner is on time as usual

your hands are calloused from all the nothing you've done today
and you are tired of looking when there is nothing left.
screaming these things at me doesn't accomplish much,
but we are a family, so i let these things vibrate through my spine
and i let them loose into the air.

'you don't have to take everything so personally.'
you're right, i don't.
i obviously choose to have my heart spew at the seams
from all the swelling, pride and sadness
engorging me and i'm always ready to break.
i do it because i love you.

a swing and a miss gives rise to a kiss
of pity and self-reassurance
just as nibbles on ritz are just dust to the rich
but a meal to the lips of the poorest

i am thirsty: for you, your ideas and words
and i’m slowly forgetting all that i have learned
your sermons can’t reach me so far from the shore
wedge the doors, sweep the floors, ask for more

i tried so hard to be a winter reed, mother.
tape didn't help--couldn't be a wallflower
despite a tendancy to make love to wallpaper
(something about the pursuit
of insulated happily ever afters)

i tried so much to be an iron fist, father.
i crumple like aluminum at schoolyard bullies
my baby instincts faulty, it's flight or falter
(if it's any comfort to you
i have no love. too unruly)

often you become bored with gorging yourself
with chocolate fingertips, preferring much her hand in marriage
but you never ask whether it be a digit gilded or cut
or whether the risk is for taking (i say **** up or shut up)

you don’t know the bruises of an ex boyfriend,
nor the shorthand breakup message she got out of the shower to:
picked up the phone and feel the blood rising only to have it all rush
to her stomach and push her lunch up

“she” is not me, you can’t treat her like
a paper bag practice round this time. treat the girl like fine ribbon
that tears at the slightest snare and melts at the longest stare
be not aluminum. be concrete, deliberate and always

how dare you wipe your tears with my paycheck.
part of me thinks i deserve to be greedy with
my own blood (after all, i grew it myself)
even a bleeding-heart should be able to clot
every wednesday and again when it’s time for dinner

if you choose to destroy yourself i am not going to stop you
even if my shoulder is both your podium and kleenex i will
love you endlessly for who you are rather than what,
and if that’s not a friend then i don’t have any at all

by now i understand you cannot own a person.
there is dust left on a pedestal i saved
for someone whose eyes were less
crystalline than mine, whose affections
were not bogged down by sewage

the ghostly coating layers itself like cheap paint,
boldly going where no one wanted to go with me.

i crack like a pistachio nut under the pressure
of the shadow you left behind. why?
you're hopelessly mediocre and yet your down calls
to me like a baby bird's silent squawk.

i am evolutionarily compelled for my heart to jump
through my skin to get a better view at you.

i try to wring my veins of all starlight
to sweeten your tea with, but there’s simply
not enough andromeda. i am unchained of rock
whittled slightly but never disdained by crashing wave

vous voulez un petit fleur, no es como yo
i am not to be picked and toyed with. i lay cards on
mats but they are not for the future, only for a self
fulfilling prophecy of broken bones and soot

i’m sorry you don’t have perfection with an apron tied round it.
sorry enough to lay salt on your grave so no green grass
ever grows, and dance on it to punish the crystals
deeper so you can feel it where you are

i'd love nothing more than to unhinge my jaws so i can
capsule your heart mid-beat between braces born of
steel and ownership. i don't write love songs, i can only
shriek about how confused i am that you are for keeping

they always scream at me for playing with the kids in
the sandbox next to mine. "you break it, you buy it!"
i'd take a poem as a pestle and an aquarian jar as mortar
variety is the spice of life and i want your veins in my soup

i never really understood why you smiled at me that way
from the frosty shoulder to the halved heart, i assumed you were
sick in a way i could understand

wasn’t aware of what i was looking for when i showed you
my papers, my precious bitten bitterness. you said it sounded nice but
really i’m hardly a “genius with language”

don’t know why i dreamt of abandoned movie theaters.
we’d tear the chairs and make forts, protecting ourselves from a vast
emptiness but really i just felt trapped over again

a valentine’s machine. you wrote to me, “you looked just lovely”
was it hard to understand that for once i just wanted to be ugly?

“rid me of the pain of being a beast, please”
the leaves don’t rustle even vaguely in my direction
since i fried them with a magnifying glass.
i wanted some sort of revenge to remind the soil
how it had given me the wrong body
with no claws and teeth plateaued oddly,
and no liquid through my oddly nonscaled hair

i didn’t mean to take out a missing piece on my own birth planet
but i can’t help but feel a bit wronged in this situation—please
drive me home now i would like to leave, the music’s too loud and
i drink drink drink myself to home and back but i’m always dry, i am

a rolling stone gathers no waves
to beat against mercilessly, smoothing
all the tough nights (spent on hotlines
because there were thousands of others
but none that called you by the right name)

don’t feel bad for escaping to your own
bat-infested cave. it is dark and your heart bitten
still better to bite than bring light
to heart-stalagmites

when i stopped answering your calls i heard you
bitterly projecting over to where my friends sit
(my concrete friends not my real ones) you scream
“it’s no big loss
she had daddy issues.”

i remember that you didn’t floss your teeth
because you hated looking at yourself in the mirror,
and every night you would tuck in
your television instead of your baby sister.

i have issues with life: they tried to purge my very being
with fire and locusts, everyone involved too stubborn to win
i appreciate your efforts only in blood. please do not
boil my mistakes to a precipitate
of the fist that feeds me

i leaned my head on your shoulder while you told me
about "those lazy wetbacks" again, the ones you ran into
at the bank (with your car) and i laughed because
i didn't know how not to.

i grew up a painted-white fence. wood naturally brown
i drowned myself in bleach so my words would be pure,
burnt hair my fault. black eyes my bad
for being born, i am sorry

we are taller now but never any smarter: sure,
we act empowered but really there's a pacifier there who
just wanted a face like us to say
"you're beautiful, not burnt"
i pretend it's a lesson learnt

i sometimes gouge my mouth with flowers in a strange attempt to give myself roots
i want to feel full, like blood under fingernails and skin on the table
all life is a crescent moon anxious for the next full,
the best you can do is to plant and pray and let it grow but
i sometimes wonder if i am pulling myself apart or putting myself back together