every time i open my mouth to speak
my tongue tangles up in the branches and bitter blooms.
long limbs knotted up in christ and the
front yard of my childhood carry
green suns instead of rib cages.
i have called you a ruin!
i have called you the home i was torn from!
now that i can only speak in flowers,
can you hear me?

the orchid bears my naïveté
the rose my wounds,
the dying nettle my tenderness.
what if i am small forever? will salvation reach for me?
he sits there, on the willow with the broken branches.
and my mother, she asked him this one sunless sunday:
how can i help her find the light?
but i have already done it all. i have
torn out all my past lives from under rotting floorboards
and i have cut off all my fingers
(i cut off all my fingers just to touch you!)
no, mother. the question is
how can i help the light find her?

salvation spits on my grave.

every evening i slaughter the sun.
every evening i cut her up on unforgiving mountain peaks
i dip her blood orange blistered flesh in saltwater;
i do this for the moon.
the sun gurgles as she drowns

will you love me?
will you think of me next sunday evening
when the newspapers are gossiping together on your front porch
as i birth life into the rose buds growing six feet above me?
my darling, you are the georgia sun

and i loved you even before i felt
the luminescent fingers of god
sifting through the morning dew
beckoning my every root and stem
to embrace your september glare above the fertile darlington soil.
will you love me? will you love me then?

i wake up to your warm gaze upon the pink hues of my blistered skin.
i am alive and, with my finger, i trace the poison ivy
that has managed to make itself a home in these cobblestone ravines.
the grooves in the path cling to the soles of my shoes as they try and change my mind
but every sunday afternoon your remnants in the ashtray tempt me closer
i stand on the edge and etch saltwater confessions into the dying moss below me—
your memory creeps up behind me and pushes me off the bridge.

it's always sunny in darlington

when all the birds have broken their wings
i will find comfort in the warmth of your blood on my hands.
time tells nothing
i reminisce about torn seams
and ***** dreams
as i scrape out remnants of the
purity trapped in the mildew under your floorboards

O Hearken! the lilies are singing to us!
(forever entranced by the acacia with the broken branches)
i have swallowed the frail bodies of the nightingales
and i have promised to protect them with my own flesh;
put your hands within me and you'll know the breaking of their hollow bones

Our God sees everything! how could anyone have a mother?
your ivory rib cage shatters under the weight of a thousand Saviors
as the unforeseen expanses of the universe
blot out what was left of your conscience
(snapped like a toothpick in His holy fingers)
just like those bitter nights when i hear
cassiopeia screaming to be freed of heaven’s chokehold.

O Hearken! kneel for The Great Reprieve!
when all the birds have broken their wings—
oh mercy you, oh mercy me

lying facedown on the train tracks;
home is where the heart is.
i sharpen my alibi on my mother’s bones
blink blink blink
the rays of the sun gouge my eyes out and
i blink, feeding on her conscience
through roots in the dirt.
regret metastasizes inside of me
like the very consumption that killed her

i found a way out, what now?
the daylight picked out my ribs one by one
the moon died and i buried her in the flowerbeds.
brave molly, come save me, the train's at the station

maybe today
i can talk to myself
out loud on the way there.
primal scream therapy.

(in between bittersweet fragments of memory
i can say your name without—
gangrene makes a home within my brittle skull.
cyanotic lips preach to me the
everlasting weight of my sin)

today
i’ll talk to myself out loud
on the way there
and maybe the echo won't
sound so **** scared

were i to eat the sun and become
like gods in high and low spaces
would i enter a new room and dine
with others like me
or with others above me?

what it was to have no one above
with the truest of spaces in halls and windows
my mind reaching the edge of space
losing it ever since

i, in an emptiness that exists.
linger on corners in my boxmind,
it is always the same when the
antipsychotics wear off—
good good goodnight

cough cough inhale
choke sputter foam gargle;
two months and thirteen days,
choke it down. don’t stress it
i had another seizure last night
mix red and white into a pretty pink
go envision a ****** massacre
in your head, but it won’t fix
a single thing now will it?
the mother cries for her son.
sorry for giving you something
i didn’t have