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.

I have let others be young for me
and swallowed years through the saliva of
grown men,
aged to twenty-one
after my first sip of something strong.

The stars
taught me to stay quiet: the brighter I got
farther I had to fall down
(four feet, five feet, five and half).

I never needed to grow up
ached for ancient paintings and literature
in case it would
help me to grow down. Now I am

just two months away from being eighteen
already holding more than a
hundred years
worth of other people inside me
(fifty, twenty-five, fifty-four, thirteen).

the weeds are dead, my cheeks are pink

-

when i put things in my mouth
they become alive

grow

-

i
bleed just so the world can retain its color

it began when he cried

"i am on fire,
i love you.” and suddenly i was water

-

i used a string
to pull him out of my belly so
that he would not drown
-

i can’t
help but think there is too much life in me

he said
girls like me should come with yellow tape
police property, do not cross

and if that is because I am *******

I guess now
my skin should say: crime scene, do not

touch

because I am crying over men like they’re
still just boys.

The shadows make swans
out of our necks when you sleep in my bed, the
only hour I do not feel so heavy
as after reciting poetry to a fallen star
or finishing a conversation without some goodbye word

leaving spider webs
in my mouth while my lips wait
for the cue to close, a signal to move on from whatever
happened and left without departing.

Saliva strings out from your cheek like spider legs
and I like this so much more.

We condemn bugs,
those icky things, for daring to sleep where no one else
does – but does that not mean that bugs
never want anyone to be lonely?

when morning no longer opens our eye sockets
snails will use their glue

when the sun stops loving the moon
I want to take your hand, and be light, and fly from the
bottom of earth’s oceans
all the way to the astronomies, we can
be the insects keeping the moon and stars not lonely.

there is a small thing, a paper cut
in my window screen
and for days now I have used it to ask every bird
every bumblebee every animal with wings
if they have met
my dead best friend in the sky
because I see her hopping from cloud to cloud
on my way
home from school all the time
and want to know when she's learned how to fly.

I am not your savior, I am
not god with **** and small hands and a girl’s moan.

The good things about me are not here
to redeem you
or be your solution or stand in the exact light
less nice women would not flock to
when you said the lightbulb
was shattered by a ***** with razor sharp claws.

I learned this
with rope burn breathing on my wrists

and biceps screaming at me when they flexed, they
could have given me a black eye
but now I just have
a black heart
mourning the family man I could not rescue.

I tried to chain myself to him, be
the good girl who woke up a child and laid down
a *****
hiding his tears with the dampness.

I did this so well I
never knew I was hiding my own, becoming a pink
orb of plush, sponge, a ******* machine.

It did not put a baby in my belly
just a ghost in my womb
of everyone’s sadness and pain and large hands that
are believed to protect
when a shadow casts from your bed at night –
see, the same shadow casts over mine.

Tell me cheeks like mine
are made for smiling, and I will tell you to go find
a ******* smile
of your own if you need it so badly.

if we were a park, you’d
be the cobblestone next to the grass
and i would be
all of the nature killed to
keep you beautiful and weeded.

i have flashbacks
of you
trimming my bangs on the lawn

then
making me dig them up years later to
prove that i can decompose
like anyone else.

our bodies are water
and I never get my hair wet since I
hate myself and you run out

in storms
because you love
how you can both **** things and

make them grow. when
anyone tastes me, i am flavorless

dewdrops of memories that
never happened
but continue to sink stones anyway.

the insects have chapped lips

calling for their
loved ones across the concrete
and i have chapped lips
screaming for you to come back
with a little bit of mercy, please love.

All the bricks I have thrown at cars in the past week
seem to be transparent
and as weightless as an opal –

I wonder how it is that something so
beautiful and alive
can feel so light, hardly existing except to the eye

but
then again, I have known too much death to believe
anything good is meant to last.

I think that candlesticks
grow from out of the ground and believe that

I can reach starvation by not going
out dancing
for two nights in a row. The sunlight makes me *****
and undeserving of his love
because now everyone can see why I am

not good enough.
I created this loneliness all on my own,
there is a gap between the ring and my finger
second farthest from the left –

men put so much weight on whether or
not my ring finger
is metal plated. I guess I do, too. My hands purge

after they have binged on him
and when I promised

all my lovers that
I would get lighter for them if they wanted,
he bought me a white dress
which lights me up like a match or shooting star.

His naked hands, so cold
I become lavender

sticks poking from lace sheaths, wanting to
be a wedding dress
or just a piece of someone in love

the powder, aroma of a man
who forsook his lover last spring.

Her tomb is just a box filled with earth
that opens to the pearly
gate of heaven

and each of her legs have grown
stiff because god so desperately needed to

shape a marble mold of the most
perfect being he
ever created and killed way, way too soon.

(the road has ended as
many stories as it has begun)

Hot concrete pried her mouth open
and I will be the one to
sing through it until she gets her voice back

like using sugarcane
to lure clouds into leaving the sky.

two dimples, not perfectly round

teeth yellowed and
paws brown
from graves dug for small dead things
she wanted to hold, to keep

her nose
like a wet autumn
cool rain in the days before winter

(I will not remember it as
two nostrils
submerged in blood, taking her air)

she sung the way other
dogs would bark

her gifts
were always bigger than her

her toes still have their imprints
on my skin, sharp like
the needles
I hoped someone could save her with

but only she could do that.

she sleeps where she always did
barely underground

the earthworms
give her new whiskers, caterpillars
will share their fur

because hers is in a plastic bag
on my dresser and
her skin is where she
would want it, she dug her own grave

so I would know
she is always going to stay safe.

When they ask you to identify
my body, it is okay
if you reveal our secret –

how you move the hair from my eyes
with paper clips
and melt them into my skin
to try to make me indestructible.

all I want for christmas
is a jealous lover who will wrap me up
in bows and paper
for no one else to touch (i mean
                                          hurt)

The biggest lesson in nothingness I have ever received
was your hands clamped down on her ***
expecting me to still be able to breathe, six hundred miles to the east
when all my insides were insects
feeding off my feelings and trust in your love.

I did not even have a phantom of a thought
that could touch you or flow like autumn wind in spring. There
was nothing as far as I knew
and so there was nothing, although
her mouth around you should have left a bruise.

I thought of you as something as isolated as the moon, except more
beautiful, less haunting to a girl with nightmares
because you stayed still during the
night when it’s too scary for me to open my eyes –
I believed there was nothing to see (I was wrong I was wrong).

the black pavement met me with two toes
and I realized
it is hot because hell is underneath.

ribbons and your cologne
lead me to elevation, but that just gave
me farther to fall –

I learned
how the moon cannot take a full breath
so she donated her lungs
to the sun in a tiny glass bottle, glued them
on with twisty ties from bread.

that is how rays
were made.

mornings are made of night’s death –
a garland of stars
that just drop
or dissolve upon a devil’s pepper kiss.

you welded your teeth to my skin
and I felt the burn
so intensely, I knew you belonged in hell.

there are aliens who do not believe in me
and twice as many men.

there are opals
that get their color from blood droplets.

there are novels that never got composed
just spat onto paper.

there is a trunk full of
vintage clothes and their women.

there are
pieces of dust I have mistaken for rag dolls.

call me honeysuckle
and I know why (your ****
should have
stretch marks for every time I’ve made it grow.

I like to leave strands of my hair in the sink of anyone
I have ever loved or hated
because when they clean their bathroom,
I want them to remember how many times I
cleaned up blood and puke and ***
in their name –

I do not want to be a ghost that silently haunts on skin
but so tangible, even their
house will remember how I feel to touch.

He lived in the perfect place
for a trailer park,
but his had the only wheels for miles. It
was a cemetery with just one

dead body,
a morgue with a single
black garbage bag.

We had a funeral for my hair
when he held
scissors to my skull, and swallowed my
motor cortex so I would never

run away – a promise
that he needed to check for silkworms
in case that is why my hair

stayed so soft.
My braids went into the plastic bag

and his tongue danced down my throat
daring me to move
saying he would love to
see me bend all my bones for him.

All his blankets were green
like the forest,
all his walls made of wood paneling –

me, the last young thing
and he buried me alive in his bad breath.

I am okay with blood in soft spaces
like between her neck and collarbone, flower shapes on
her *******, a trail from thigh to cotton sheets,
the sky vomiting sunset
on the carpet where my kitten sleeps.

Just not on concrete, nothing should escape a
person where one could not rest
and be safe
while clouds regenerate clear blood for her veins.

the earth creates pearls
from cream

and

that is how i got to be beautiful
and round and

everything he wished i
would not

be able to accomplish without
curdling first.

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

My first inclination
is to write about rifles and *** and ankle socks with frills
around the top, but I do not know
anything about that – much less all three at once.

One time I had a dream, or nightmare, or fantasy
of getting ******
by the barrel of the gun.

Instead of bullets,
glowsticks entered me.

Guns are shooting stars, like *****. I have to steal cartons
of iced coffee to stay awake and
bend the caps
into heart-shapes to have any hope –

morning wood puts me in mourning, that is all I can
ever understand about myself.

notice how I have no
photographs of peroxide on my skin
but kept
three hundred of you.

death is not more important than
how much
we love each other

it just feels better sometimes.

I was born to a woman who smoked cigarettes
and since I was a child, I tried to inhale blueberries until they
stalled my windpipe.

My mother taught me that word –
windpipe – after she coughed for hours upon hours. I
was so happy that day, imagining how I must have swallowed
windchimes for the doctors who helped birth me
in December’s final snow –
how I hoped they believed I sounded pretty, although

covered in that sop adults call life juice. Life juice sounds nice
but I had known babies who
came just as sticky as me and never got to breathe.

Windchimes, you know, the things
beautiful ladies in ankle-length dresses hang outside,
my daddy lived thirteen hours down the interstate and I knew
somehow that he owned one.

In my dreams, I touched it
and pulled on it. I twisted the copper-ends up like my
momma’s hair and pretended we were with my dad by some
lake where the breezes are heavy enough and I
am small enough for them to carry me up, up, and away.

Everyone insisted that windpipes are inside
while windchimes stay out –

I fixed that problem, too. I tried three times to plant chimes in
my ears, unglue parts of the skin there from myself
to make room for dangly jewelry. A tiny
slit was all I needed, but it would not stay open for long

and I never got to swing my head
pretend I possessed the ability to create music like how God
let my momma grow smoke. I never got to exhale.

As I have aged, my body’s become a full moon –
a thing to howl at
unable to hide in the dark (a dark so dark
it swims from beneath me, and I glow like light).

The years have had a refractive nature
and I cracked the eggshell, the first crescent and

the second
supposedly a silhouette holding hands. I am told
beauty is symmetry
so I must have two of everything to make a
                                  whole –

but by dawn, I seem dull
unawake (the thought that no one needs me
on my back anymore, there are

rounder things than me). Without needing to be
reminded, my peel wades to the next
month of sprouting
       pallid craters who match those before them.

Nobody knows how to say goodbye to anything, even the
sea has ruined edges
leaves its will to a muddy bayou. Our
phonecalls hang onto me after there rings a dial tone, a curly tail
of wires ribboned around my most important parts
thigh, artery, genital. The bed
is the whole bedroom, now. I am handcuffed from the ceiling
waiting for your voice box to quiver again
and am kicking and screaming –
I am heartbroken at nothing, not for no reason but for
nothing. Lovers are not versed in goodbyes
or else we would not be lovers. But I prefer the sensation of
suffocation to cold blankets,
rather heat them up with blood and guts than have a
mattress that has never smelled my ***. You do not know how to
ring my neck or drown me in sheets that’ll
just hide hide hide the word
goodbye. If this is your worst trait, not wanting to go,
I am happy to let you love and hurt me until I can float, too.

I heard falling stars twice tonight
and am pretty sure they both were full of milk.

My heart is too heavy
for me to bring it everywhere I go, sometimes it just wants
to sleep under the blankets and sheets all day
where no one can ******* it but me.

When it opens, the treetops are covered in the
color of buttercream
and its branches split like eyelashes from their lids.

Moons can get tired, too,
let go of her brothers and sisters and just burst.

when you feel sad,
I want to take you down to the water
dip our toes in
and pretend that we are saved.

my best friend and I
used to jump from this pier
holding hands, as if
the same minnows would kiss us –

they never did
so we learned to kiss each other.

while you lay on your back,
I will kiss you, too,
and tell you how cute your ******* are.

you say they look like rashes
but they are
more like strawberry buds or a
a woven rug to me.

when you feel sad,
I want to show you how the whole

world is on your side and
nature breathes good health on your
skin, the tears hitting your
cheeks are just waves from the sea.

Adventurers travel
to places where they could shoot themselves and
have it mean something – wait for
steel-toe boots and whimpering floorboards to remove a gun

from the kitchen sink, the tile is as green as
moss statues in pool water
and the caulking is about to be dyed red.

I follow tracks, the pads of my feet. I want to be one
of them – steal a rusted van
with shotgun shells in the passenger seat, safety uncocked.
A home for the only things I care about
has no door. Squirrels

carried it away in a drought, bad men lit a wildfire,
birds stay safe in eggs that never hatched
hanging by spider webs in someone’s daughter’s room –
her hair remains in the velcro of a teddy bear.

She is the only ghost – everyone
else’s corpse had some reason or another to stay here.
I see ashes in a skull, I smell **** on the center of girl palms
old blood used to keep eyes glued open,
mine holds dolls to
my wounds, my emptiness fuses plastic hair to me.

Almost little pillows of ravioli
bloated bellies, frayed skin, so white that morning
cannot detect us – in death, pimples
might pop like balloons, and we get left to look beautiful for
for the next person who wanders along.

he is never human. always more
      sometimes less

  and whenever someone asks me how i
am doing, i want to mention
                that i am
                      in love with a demon

(fire under my clothes,
       my *****).
    it has nothing to do with much

                       but i always want to say
that i am married to god

        and never owned a bible. he
melts heaven
                    so the sky will rain angels.

I should have known
arms can be like coffin doors, and when his opened
it was not safe to lay down inside.

The last time I was in the room with a ******
flowers speckled my hair,
pink as privates, cloud-white. I considered our honeymoon
and thought about how we loathe
sunshine, but would create our first bed on roses
after I have spent five or more years removing her thorns.

I did not know about clotheslines being used
for more than our damp second skins.

She once described it as a construction zone, being the
property of some government
who does not care if it ruins someone's habitat
to build a brand new home. But I do not know if I can say
the same; a house is your mountain above
all hurt, only you
can jump from the top and make yourself bleed.

There I sat and swung on wooden benches,
my most disturbing thought a wonder of how it could hold
me. The sky was supposedly blue,
just now I cannot remember, colorblind of any
possible plane forming smiling men above our heads.

Sometimes, things are not on the tip of my tongue
but still making their way through my
brain-cells. I wanted to lay down on my stomach for love
be a carpet of hair, unshaven legs, sweat beads
until the clouds showed me handcuffs. My
safe lover, agoraphobic, now I can understand why.

I did not think about blankets being used as
shields, or mattress springs made of barbed wire.

If I had known, I would have eaten
my own hair and thrown up every petal on your doorstep,
their broken flower souls, now warm-blooded.

Several forms of art, I can sever the seas
or have as many “him”s
and “her”s as time will allow the couple of us –
all involving ******* one another
up, I can even cause oceans
to bleed in my mouth. It is okay to be bad
at painting landscapes and good at
destroying them – good at making people seem
as expansive as a country or continent
because freckles are stars and
we cry so much we’ll build a sodium factory.

i want to perform an exorcism on myself
bite into candles so rough
wax’ll become sewn to my mouth

and i forget how to
flick my tongue to form your name.

i must be as close to you as my thighs
are when i sit down,
mature inward upon ourselves
like legs crossing, calves behind kneecap.

count the number of girls
who pretend to be someone else

during ***,
then count the number of girls who say
softer softer softer please

and i’m sorry, i promise the first will win
because chilly air can make us
light-headed and nauseous;
harder harder always just distracts.

i want to swallow guns and swords, then
tell my friends the bruises
came from you –    they kind of did.

I don't know if I lifted my dress up
so you could smell my grain-stained kneecaps
or notice the new bones
stroking your palms on my hips -

please acknowledge any part of me.

Where the light is almost navy,
we press our shoulders against the wall and I no longer
can differentiate between my hair and his
torso, his fingers and my cellulite.

One of us is a pin cushion
for the other fingernails, I writhe in the motion of
letters that may spell out I love you
(or just, I love your skin I love how your **** makes me
hiccup) his wall
bruises my back and gives me butterfly wings.

We adapt to whatever corner we’re touching
or have come close to denting,
confined to the bedroom not any broader than his heart.

I dye his collarbones with my hair
everything can be black but tongues, he says I should not
smoke because he would prefer if I breathed
but nobody makes me more breathless
by filling my lungs with nameless sort of things.

The shadows turn his sheets into mulch
my flesh into threads: I shift in such a figure it shall
creates twinkling stars out of everything.

He will pull me down in minutes,
when the needles stop injecting euphoria and I can use
my butterfly wings to fly up and down
onto his lap
where nobody can see that I am no longer pure.

here I broke my heart,
no wonder I cannot sleep
at night anymore.

I wanted more than anything
to wash your mouth out with soap and rot
your teeth so no girl
would ever want to kiss you but me.

Told her things in ***** words you thought
you taught me,
but you weren't my first

tongue,
blood, use for a bandage.

-

I wanted to say I had swallowed pills
that hurt more than you.

-

I wanted to adopt lilies
as my little sisters to help them grow with
my tears -

something has
to get fertilized (has to be real).

-

I wanted to believe in fairness, that I'd
done something wrong

wrapped my lips
around the base too hard
you are what I needed so much, perhaps
it put an ache in more than just
my heart.

-

I wanted it to have been loneliness
not desire

(that is why I let someone's father put his
fingers in my mouth
and napped in lingerie his wife
never wore, and his daughter, aged

one year farther along
than me, heard us

me being his good girl, and
her understanding why she never was.)

yet you were not lonely
just painting a still life of two girls
with rubenesque thighs
you had hoped would last forever.

-

I did not want to be saved.

the clouds walk as slow as you,
fish never get any rest
they don’t sleep on their backs.

we are their
heaven, full of broken hearts
(i once saw a cloud that looked like one –
that is our heaven, too.)

the day you broke my heart i
temporarily stopped using my toes to
get you hard, stopped resting
my feet on
your lap and kissing you

like i were smoking a cigarette. inhale
without breathing,
that is what

it is to be a fish.
we are their heaven, eggsacks

the kind of person who spells lonely
wrong because somehow
he only has
forty-five chromosomes and

cannot walk
more than a few feet without
evaporating (breaking my heart.

please, baby,
let us buy a jar of honey
and attach ourselves
together.

borrow my organs
please,
get better soon.