I have to stop saying your name when I wake up
and start saying it
before I lay myself to rest.

it is not immortal,

I imagine braiding our veins together
then using them as a noose,
feeling our pulses
compete
until they are too exhausted to continue and
              one of us loses

but what
is winning except dying young
anyway. I want to die

to the sensation
of someone tying and untying my veins,
thin bleeding strings, like
cherry stems.

I want someone to mourn me for my *****, I
want to seem as mountainous
as a knitted sweater
where my lovers would have gotten

        stuck in the seams and
everyone will know I am still pure.

your jaw is locked
in a way that tells me
you would rather
tear my flesh
than watch another man
caress it.

you will
keep my blood in a jar
keep my tears in a jar and drink them so
you can taste the pain I felt when
you left

sew a quilt from my dead eyelashes
and stain yourself
with my mascara, melting
under the hot sun of your hometown.

i dissolve in light,
becoming hardly anything
more than
a ghost

so
you will hold me as mist
then wring me dry

so
i can never rain
on another love’s skin
like dew.

we are building a bridge from my bones
just so we can break it.

i am a home for ghosts. they
believe
they are something else, something better, disguised
as the moon or clean sheets or milk

cloudy saliva,
boys dripping down my spine.
they cling to me until my ghosts escape

and enter through their ears, i am busy emptying
them from my stomach.

sometimes swallowing
feels like downing wet concrete that should be used
to build a tombstone – sometimes
boys who
try to fill me up never get a chance to leave.

we try to hang ourselves from our hair
holding hands
imagining
them shatter to broken bones

knowing that
this is something we should not be doing, me &
boys.

we deserve to have
our guts slip out from unnatural holes,
throats that my ghosts made it seem like we touched
slashed but not aching

because he and i imagined the entire thing.

i see
his body still thin as a stem
that even a ghost could fracture

and paint lies in blood all about lost love. and still
no one asks
                             if
it is me that is doing the haunting.

on the side, I began to lose years in my thoughts
wondering the naïve things: is this
***
or is it just someone
who loves me even when I don’t push
my **** together. is this *** or
am I fabricating
a poltergeist’s touch with my breath again,
is this ***
or something other than *** that I have needed – I never
believed it could exist. I do not know
of desire, yet am too of age
to be a coquette
anymore
and still *** is all I have ever cared about.
forever, I believed baby pink could
only be the shade of
color inside of me. now I
wonder
is this ***
or is *** not the only thing that can pollinate me

you promised
to introduce me to hell, linked our arms together
like thread through a needle
and i never considered that hell would
be living without you.

our
hours of bloodlust,
heavy breathing for the blush on
my cheeks –
the reminder of all
i could stain with the red beneath.

you knew
the best way you could take care of me
is by destroying me

you knew
i had become addicted to being
cradled by my pain
and
loneliness, so

hell was not a fiery gate opening, a wound,
hell is a door slamming in my face.

at night
i hide my head inside a pillowcase,
pretend it is his hair

and cry hard enough that
against his scalp, it would feel
wet as a french kiss

and
i suffocate and drown