She has red roses as asterisks, the star-shaped things
that are just scar shapes on me

and with her, there is
pollen
that she'll drag her fingernails across. She will
sprinkle colors on your chewed up,
cratered lips, saying you

will look beautiful and
feel full again. Well, I'll be the one to kiss you next
with grains of sulfur glued to your cheek

the rotten taste
making it so your mouth glows in the dark. I
know where to kiss and never tell: I
am sure you must notice my cigarette burns when

the lights are out. I have lit myself
like a candle,
and say
I cough from the smoke because no one can know
that I swallow all your poisons for you.

I am a waterfall that's too happy to cry
and so it floods the river
which floods
the roads, I ruin everything
but pretend I am making it grow.

I am just god’s excuse to make a ****** nose
and bruises surrounding
eyelids, even when I get the perfect amount of rest

and when autumn comes
barreling leaves from god’s big sky
I am what catches the sand, blonde grains changing
the color of my eyes.

It is just as true that he cuts the tails
from mermaids and tells me that I can find girls
who would rather be a worm instead, my

flesh is already rippled
pale and translucent pink, the best of beige between

my thighs. Because one morning god called
and I said I would not wake up
and he said that if I did not, he would wring mud
from his terrible angels’ wings and I

still never woke from my sleep.
I am his gross girl, pleased to be the queen of slugs
as long as this is the worst my sins can do.

december 29th –  i was a blizzard
infant, had
not gained my first color until the new year

even my eyes went white, were made of snowflakes
even my heartbeat had
a murmur, landed on my ribcage like snowfall

and every three months i give myself
up to my childhood
dye my hair so i stop fading into my white sheets

their threads are stitched from
the breath of ghosts, my mother never called to say
she wished it were hers

now
i only ever believe i have skin when it is
not being touched.

The last time she saw me naked
I was a child

who would plead for forgiveness by cutting it into her skin
and who you could tell still walked barefoot
through winter and snow near
her best friend’s boat
to light a joint they would put out on her wrist.  

(She said it was beautiful
but I was destroying myself and it was beautiful
like the blood left on a train-track after someone jumps.)

I never wonder if he misses me
when my tongue still stings from the last time I bit it
pretending I could
bleed him out.

A better question is if he does not miss me, I
whose name is not attached to him
forever
and yet I took his like it were a vessel in his heart, like
when I added us together
it was only supposed to change me. I have

the remnants
of having him and I have the broken
shards of my heart burying glass in my palms: he has
absolutely nothing, I may ask
if he misses me but
mostly I just want to know if he is still empty.

There are some people who fill
other people when they cannot fill themselves, but I
have to wonder
where he bought all the rusted nails
that pinned me down so he could get inside.

Thank the ground for holding you up
and birds
for sharing their air molecules. I am the universe
because it gave me
its kindness, a tree because we
share the sun: I am a wall because my
skin is shelter from wind
rain sleet hail. Each *** of tea
has morning dust particles, from a day we both
awoke. It simmers
and we are
boiled into the everything sky once more.