my heart is dotted with ghosts

I walk in the direction of a cemetery because I have
no choice
all my friends live there

everyone who hurts me pumps

air through their lungs & are not sorry that
some cannot feel gravel between their toes or have
dirt for hair

because
after a while, you become where you sleep.

I lost my final baby tooth at age thirteen. A man came
along to pluck it out of me,
pried my chapped lips apart and said
it might hurt a lot. It might even feel like a worm, like my belly is
bloated with bottles of water or bags of blood.

But I was only reminded of
needles, the thinnest cylinder of an off-white substance
developed to cure me from my childhood.

He gave me acupuncture, he left the needles in my pocket after
so I would never forget what he gave me. Not what
he took, just what I needed
to remove the *****, size seven footprints from his floor.

I did not keep the paraphernalia,
just grew my adult molars, had dreams about crawling after him
feeling tentacles swim in my mouth again
and biting down so hard I could fill bags with blood.

I am almost eighteen and soon
he will know how it feels for someone to see what is inside your
body, then take it without your permission.

i. you took the clouds
and dyed them, used droplets of food coloring
so the sky would almost always
look like it was in mid-sunset, aching for the moon.


ii. tomato vines, tomato vines
tangled on you
and you are not even mine.


iii. songs that stopped being beautiful after you left me


iv. they named cottage cheese after the
first place we watched the food
network and
pretended to make a casserole for our family of six.

I imagine my friends as walking holidays, days that roll off souvenirs like sweat
and become keepsakes in a suitcase that breathes sunscreen
onto my white, hopeless skin.

Green grass is Rachel. When I want to invent
cloud animals, I think of her old backyard, five miles down the road
because it was good for such things
the kind of things that open your pores and your mind and your chest all at once.

She would draw on my eyes
while we sat knee to knee, or knee to something else soft.

I would try to become a model for the world as she understood it, wanted it
and hoped she saw the sky on my eyes,
tinged with magma when I got sad and could no longer take sleep.

Then, there was a day in the alley. A murky place
with brown weeds between concrete, and she was there, too, but she was not a
part of the memory I have somehow –
she only fits against the sunshine and clear air. I remember her most

when I want to lay down
on a blanket without needing to rest and grow a garden without using my tears as
a fertilizer for the only beautiful things I have ever created.

The first fourteen years of my life
were spent worrying that I would fall in love with the wrong type
of person –

a man
who splatters red paint on black and white photographs of
young girls

the young girl who
is brave on public transit, does not even hug the poles
when her train has very near collided with a second or third nearby,
not necessarily proud. I am just so

terrified that I can love a person who does not
care about anyone

or anything
because nothing or nobody, not even camera lights, has given her
a touch she did not ***** breakfast on.

Because that would be me – I am a girl, my age is that of
breakfast

and my belly once spun like scrambled eggs
when I thought of falling in love, needing what others called
a nameless sensation
but it could be calm boys

men who never care, until you run
the back of your hand across another’s beard when he can’t sleep.

I fear I use my five senses too frantically, like they
will leave and
the souls of people I adore can be shoved into my fingertips.

i worshiped myself on the date of a full moon
removed the cobwebs, swept spiders
with my intestines

laid snails on any holes
got patched up
so the new moon would fall in love with me.

i reached inside myself, found the
warmest atmosphere
and glitter where my blood is supposed to be

and am now
officially a part of the goddess movement.

you left, and I kept your pillow naked in my bed
for me to kiss and hum on

its case
stuffed down my shirt like a training bra

wondered if
blankets and beds understand what a touch is