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

when i was ten my sister tried to drown me because
she wanted to cleanse me of my sins. they said she was
schizophrenic but
i think she was right

when you died
i turned to him and
then i realised he
wasn’t there
either

morphine. i found ashes in the pages of the photo albums under
my bed yesterday, leaves turned red pages to the colder chapters
and i thought you could still grow a rose this time of year but then i
remembered when we used to make flower crowns in sixth grade so
i took some morphine;
it helped with the pain

the night is younger than ourselves and we run through breakspears road shattering the lampposts with our bare hands, yes we are the new generation! everybody knows we aren’t scared of losing the pieces in our own, we just want to see the skin pulled off the tips of our fingers! (when you’ve been feeling the blunt edges of scalpels and needles all your life walking on glass starts to feel like heaven)

codeine— hell is getting hotter! she took to the clouds and the glass
shards wrote crimson sonnets on the bottoms of her feet, marietta i
trusted you i really did, i made you promise
that you’d stay; not with me, of course
(some things are more important in the end)
i wanted you to stay here.
but you wanted to see the stars so
i choke down the cough syrup;
one ache distracts me from the other

dear marietta,
the light distorts so strangely here in the water.
this is how i want to leave this place

the funeral was
in his bathtub. a single
guest and he wore red

leaves roll in my parents’ yard
another day watching your
photos from london develop
red leaves and plain drawings
litter your apartment floor

a repeated phrase
pitiful and rich
broken glass
casting rainbows on the porch
a cigarette burn
on the left hand from the right

your love sits uncomfortably in my gut

knocking on hell's gate—
heaven isn't open on sundays

cold skin; feet underwater, turned
inward and i fall forward. cold feet, cold
feet and blue skin, straight lines and
blurry vision, clear skin
red water

(inertia is a property of
matter;

why did i fall towards you?)

i think i saw god today, i saw god today and
his eyes stuck to me the way the telephone lines
stick to the sky, i gouged them out
and hung the pieces to dry
on heaven’s door, his blood
was all over me, i wish the
look in his eyes was as
warm as his veins, i asked for
forgiveness, you promised me
forgiveness but your pulse counted
my sins—

i thought believing in you was all i had
to do but there’s a whole book about you.
verses after verses, my mother killed
me because i burned the pages, and now
there is only the cover left with the
seams undone

heaven was a bit cold anyway

when the moon
blinked, he saw

me, angry
but not mad. i

have stars under
my tongue.  i
won’t swallow

and my bones
scream to be let out
from under my skin—

they are the fire
on the surface

the clock's tick burrows
holes into my skull. the day
goes by too slowly

death is not knocking
on my door;
i am knocking
on his

cosmology teaches us
that we are not the centre of
the universe

my hands and
feet are
bound;
only the shackles
cannot be seen

i’ve been
praying to god lately
and i’m not even
religious

no
scratch that

i’ve been
praying for god.
i’m praying that
god can
find a little
bit of humanity
in the humans
he watches over

you are beautiful
but are you
art?

when the sun dies
and the moon is born;

the memories
refuse to sink below the horizon
never fading
with the day

i wish i could
turn the thoughts off with the lights

you touched every
inch
of my body
except my
heart