my younger self
rains on me like dew – she has given me
a new dawn, and as I awake

I feel
her mist. I want to thank her for
her sacrifice, but she
is too young to understand
that it is a sacrifice. She believes in love

she believes in love
but she
does not believe she deserves it.

still,
she gives warmth,   holding me like lips
******* on a thumb
           – young young young

in the summer before
everything ended,
we went to an art museum
that had entire rooms showcasing death
and you pulled me away before I could admire the human composition
stains, melted into bronze silhouettes, because
what if I thought it looked ugly

what if I figured out
I didn’t actually want to **** myself
and instead just wanted to escape you –

stains of strawberry juice around my mouth I thought of
as blood and you thought of
as lipstick

I prettied myself for
suicide , I scratched maps into my thighs – little guides of where a
knife would go
little hopes that if I saw the death display
maybe I would have known.

for years
it was all experimental. I watched pieces of us
come and go like art exhibits, you watched me as if I was nothing but
a work in progress
that soaked up so much paint I could
not help but look like you when it was through. I was
a child,  was
impressionist (impressionable –

now your thoughts persist
as human composition stains – happily, I am alive
and you will never be dead enough.

you said “you are a woman
but pure” –

I was neither

I was a rotting peach
you opened up too soon, my softness

my sweetness
went to waste. *******

I liked that crowded bathroom
we smoked in,
you held a joint between my lips and asked me to
exhale out the window
into the soft wooden fence between
us and the neighbor’s house. The walls
of that crowded bathroom
were pink
or lilac or something – I liked them
as you would expect,
but I don’t exactly remember
them. I remember my body feeling like too much
because the space was small and I am not;
my skin seemed to billow
out like tulle
to touch yours. Your dad gifted us
two different joints he had been saving for a
while, saying one was better
than the other but
he did not know which was which. In
that crowded bathroom, I looked up at you and
you looked down at me
because we knew
we had just found the better one. We kissed
then walked
out the door, saving half for later.

little lune,
my delicate moon

I wonder
how comfortable
you are inside my womb

we’ll stay up all night
and choke each other with our tongues
only catching our breath when
our mouths are forced into yawns. i will be the

first to fall asleep,
obsessed with the way
you fold your body into fourths
at night
to make sure none of mine gets lonely.

the boy I am sitting cross-legged in front of
shares the same bruises as me
and we create new ones
on each other,
swelling like sweet gumdrops

or ripe fruit. his hands mold me
into a mulberry –
I bleed

sugar and water and sap. I close my eyes so that
it can be a surprise,
the stains I will wear for weeks.

we have loved so hard since we met,
we created puncture wounds
into each other
****** the salt out
then bandaged each other up and smiled at

the soreness.
the togetherness of it all,

opening ourselves up so that the other
can love our insides, too. his
is the burn of incense with the silk of warm
milk,

and I am laying down
in the happiest ache from him
knowing we wear our skin down until it is so
thin that
we can't help but feel all of one another.

I remember being told
that what I found with you, I will find again
and I did not know why but I
cried

cried
and cried
               until my body felt so heavy
            it could compare
       to how you would feel on top of it.

         your eyelids, then
    began to look like little halos
             whispering
          that they were still pure – your heart, then
            
             would beat
     every time I thought of you
   because I never
ever
ever
could stop
   (even when I was lying to myself,
           I only wanted to lie about you).

for weeks, then
I only knew how to speak
                      in organs and flesh
                      in fluids and ***

when all I needed was a way to explain
          that
  somehow, when we met

                     we found a corner of the earth
     no one had
ever
ever
ever seen before
              and we inhabited it together
         so no one else would find it again.

Men have always told me that I am nothing
like “her” - the woman, the women,
before me.

I love like powder

silently leaving pieces of myself to sink
into their skin

(making them softer, sweeter).

My emotions are a hum in the room,
they steal all the air

but I am hush
and small; I exist in only the smallest ways
like noticing a man’s veins
then

caressing him in circles,
tracing him
connecting them like vines. I pretend

it does something,
I pretend to cast a spell

but I never say a word – I am the ghost
of hope
for men, I am

their good luck charm

(my magic
never noticed unless it works). Never am I
like the women before me
but how

I wish I had the strength to be.

I watch humans fumbling to make a connection between the universe and our bodies, as if without their metaphors and poems likening birthmarks to galaxies, we would be two separate entities, a collection of particles that inhabit entirely detached spaces from one another. Truly, the connection is evident in far more than freckles that resemble specks of dust and planetary material; our skin is not just branded by our environment, but bloated by it.

We are made of mostly water.  We are oceans, our insides are swampy, and when we bleed, the sight is reminiscent of sunsets. There is a universe beneath our flesh, internally, like how we exist within the flesh of our universe.

I feel this connection most when I consider him. My body deflates into a cloudlike existence –soft, floating, pacified. His touch warms me, it calms me, it grounds me but in the sense that I am still free to kiss the stars, and my lips become soothing to them.

One of our final nights together, about midnight on Valentine’s Day, he took me to the beach and faced me in front of the ocean, stood me below a dome of astrology in the skies. Lucid blue from the constellations and water stretched for what seemed like days, all-encompassing me. But my eyes could not leave him, especially his mouth slipping into smiles, because somehow he appeared even more beautiful than the immensity of our earth enveloping me. He cradled me there, he lifted my dress, and still I felt warm against the backdrop of the Pacific Ocean in winter.

He is a dream, and he is an angel, and I believe he steals ornaments from the sky to gift to my heart so that I can feel as beautiful and as grand as all the universe combined.

the first breath I took upon seeing you,
I swear,
split my ribcage
so my lungs had room enough
to smile

we are the possessors of hair
whose instincts
tell us to wrap it around our neck,

we think about
bottling our spines in jars
for good luck.

in the summer
our veins fade into our tans
as if drawn on with a teal colored pencil

and we powder our flesh to look like
sugar cubes instead.

this hatred and this worship of
our bodies
translates into
an aversion to our fluids as if to touch them
is to slurp creek water
but it is not poison: it is magic

little ***** being,
the petals that swathe you are pinker than mine
and your nectar is sweeter too. you
deserve to have a name
that matches
your melanin – pure as infant’s skin, not
human
but better than.

you slid your thumb into my pulse like a thimble
pressing hard enough to stain –
my body has always been a crime scene,
you
just make it visible.

death groomed me for many years; it
told me my blood was honey and honey deserves
to be suckled

it told me
I could never be a fantasy
until I fantasized of dirt and weeds filling me, worms ******* me
and using my empty womb as a carousel

taunting me – “I’ll make babies
fall out of you just often enough
you will start to believe you could love them
if only they’d stay”

and now
pearl strings of *** spiral down my abdomen like
small intestines,

sticking and staining and staying.

I am trying to hold my heart,
let it cling to my chest
like an unsettled infant
aching

but I just wring it to death. it can nestle here
in my palms
where your *** has stayed in the pores
and when I think of you

I blush and sweat and it grows mold.
is that what we meant
when we promised each other
eternity

or will we
be able to exchange
organs again
                                    (soon)

I think of you
and I love you so much
my heart wants to ******* itself

hand around my neck
you bruise my skin so that it looks like damp
cotton,

stained white *******,

and I bleed from your touch so often
it feels like I
am losing
my virginity every day

it feels like I
am a little girl again
and they’re still teaching us that our insides are
made of bubblegum.

draw pictures on my tongue with your fingertips
and they taste like salt,

you are from the ocean
I could drown myself behind your house
or I could imagine
where else your hands have been.

i ****** on your breath
hoping it would bring the pink back onto my cheeks
but at some point, i stopped being
fresh-faced
and realized that i eventually will stop
loving my old loves. my smile
has expired, it grew too exhausted of needing
everyone and everything
to be happy, licking my lips until they chap and a
boy or girl wants to dissect them.

it is like
i open my mouth with the expectation of
something falling in
that won’t taste too bad. it is like i
want to keep everything and everyone warm, near
hot
for me.

then suddenly, i am the moon
and neither the sun nor the stars can align
with me. they lived too long without
keeping secrets,
needed more gravity to stay awake. living is hard
when your body
is always open for business.

my arms have begun to feel like
the rails on a staircase
that have been painted over one too many times, swollen
and begging to chip – you sunk your teeth

into my flesh
like dull pocket knife blades, but it
was not a love bite. you never loved me enough.
I was

still a child, sprawled on a sofa, spread open,
when you asked if you could
paint me – a rubeneqsue
silhouette that knew too few years,
an anomaly, damning every man with my figure or
something. (*******,
lifebait, ******* until it ruins you)

it sounded as if it hurt you
to see me, I believed you were going to coat my skin in
*** and blood
instead of pouring it on the paper.

you said everything reminded you of my
shape. you
rolled your car window down one day, and it was
rounded at the top – you

imagined it as my *** grinding
down onto your ****.

you cried as you thought this, your daughter
in the backseat,
and fantasized about
cutting all the beauty out of me. you small man, you
coward

I knew
I had to do the bleeding for you
but eventually grew tired
of patching my open wrists with your dried spit.

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

girl, falling snow

I imagine the cold air
brings braille to my skin, my entire body to be lifted
from concrete
and read like a goodnight prayer

blood braids
my hair

cheekbones break and collapse as craters
on the moon

they sink to cradle dust
and atop, feed other little rotting things that do not know
gravity
sticking like a new ***** –

to die from your emotions
is to
finally become god.

I ****** myself until I bled
because I
knew you would
have wanted to taste it.

worms live from the decay of dead bodies
they are beautiful and soft,
and anyone could break one
but why would they want to when
their bodies seem as sunlight against glass?

you do not know that they want to get inside of you,
take from you,
and add your remains to their
empire of dirt. their soil, their sustenance.

he found his way into my soul,
he wants me to give all my insides away
to make him more beautiful.

worms think they are ugly
they have to fill themselves up up up
of other people, until everyone else is empty
and ugly too.

i am so sad
i want to die, want
to open up my wrists and show him my veins
because they look like worms

like him,
and i need them
but never wanted them.

intimacy,
his sweat sprinkling salt on my skin
so that I will never want
to open it.

our ***
is how it feels to be a skipping stone

at first, cool to touch
and level
then dripping with
the sweat of the sea. it is loving without concern

that the love will become
too important,

loving
at dusk

swollen lips, red like they are blushing

sunset dyeing the sky scarlet
like it is blushing

he gets under my skin
where the flesh is so pink, it looks like i am
blushing –


          small strawberry pores.

still, my head
stays above the water

it just hits me hard and i swallow
waves
of salt.

lingerie lace constricts my hips like seaweed
it is exhausting to love him
the way i do,
my breath moves
wind through his hair
and i pant oceans into his chest.

he must feel
my eyelids flutter

in an ache
to be opened into a path, the trail from
body to body to

     shared dampness
         shared passage across it

              the skipping stones
feel plush
if i want it hard enough
caressing the body of water.

quietly
learning to let my heart rest, but never my
thighs

his remains on my stomach
like wax.

stars spilled out from the night sky
into morning, mourning,
and
so did your skin.

please know, your
voice is
louder than any gunshot now
even as new bullets echo against
your gravestone.

I scraped my knee
and asked my lover if he thought
the blood is brown because I am all dried out and
rotten inside,
or if I am just full of dirt. As children, we
drew lines in cemetery soil

pretended to snort them – I must have inhaled
the cry of someone’s bones
their whimpers
of exhaustion

(my angel in a cloud
who I cry for each day
keeps asking me to just let her die, she is every
unidentified flying object and
she is tired
of needing to stay afloat, even with wings).

I wish I didn’t need so much sleep
but it is probably my fault.

I lifted
a bookcase of pretty things, doilies beneath
porcelain faces and bottoms
mildew
smoke-stained letters

and blocked the windowpane. Light reminds me
too much of
how I became a mistress
thinking I would not take anything away,
thought I was adding more love
into the world – it is
too full.

Darkness is absence, darkness is my
own creation.

I spent my allowance on it
to pretend I am still young enough for bad men to
want to play dolls
with me, twist their heads around backwards
so they will never know of their
private parts

never be like me.

I never dream of you, my sleeping mind does not need to
make up the sensation of your touch: I
already know. the only
moment I ever forgot was while

missing you in air. I am of the land –
the sky is too much,
it swallows me
it holds me and all is static, saturated and humid
I hesitate as rain that needs to fall.

I missed you so much
that gravity had to pretend it was missing me more

there are clouds that are too kind,
feigning love
as a distraction from my loss.

underwater,
your hair moves like shooting stars. I was reminded of
that then – how I had abandoned
you for astronomy,
pushed meteors a little closer to you
and they just seem to float. they lift in slow
motion, they curl
because there is no gap between
your bed and the wall up in space, is no shelter
to feel safe. water and loss and the galaxy

are so heavy
they have to cradle you until they bruise.
I think about you –

I think about you.

I felt so big, my heart felt so hard
I did not understand
why
I was melting.

My skin said
different words than my mouth

there were
welts I called petals and
droplets of my blood
that stained like nectar on his sheets –
I used them as ghosts,
traced silhouettes
to haunt him with, but the loss

haunted me more. It
was
a dehydration.

He had me believing I was
becoming more
and more full, there was so much
affection I just had to
spill a little –

instead, I was being emptied.
Eaten, swallowed

fattened
for the slaughter.

your first love is expecting
and I know it is not yours, because that one already
fell out of me.

I have problems differentiating
between what is something and what is nothing, but in my head,
it is a city now – there was no other place
large enough
to hold its beauty. like my empathy, my *******

conscience,
the guilt I take on of other people's sins

none of it ever leaked out from my skin. only dead cells,
I plead to do something for me –
if you must breathe
for another woman, as he did, become bigger
than a town
and make her feel everyone's pain too.

there are anthills in your backyard
that I placed into existence. I gathered pieces of life from mine
and the moon
and knew you were sad
so I brought them home to you. each bug holds
crumbs atop their back
until they drip to the ground like a runny nose, meanwhile
a child
brings dead things
to the person they love
because they trust only them to bring it back to life. I do that with you –
recycling spider legs and folding moth wings
onto each other,
add twenty fly-lashes for good measure
as if anything I can find
will take the tears from your eyes. you taught me how to
caress carrot flowers
at such an angle, they can heal. my mother will drink until she dies
and I am that child holding
petals out, their extracts and oils spilling into
the last hope I'll ever have.

me and you, we communicate via ants across statelines –
today I am sending a message
that shares more like a plague than language – of sisters needing
different things the same ways. and you
tell me it can reach you
in one insect's insomniac night
if I douse the compass in primrose and my honey.

young girl from the mountains, watching her lover
make fetuses
and pretending they are
just flora with human characteristics –

all she knows
is to feign
until someone else sees the truth for her.

they are fleshy, veins
reaching outwards
like blossoms in september that want to last until next spring

they are in denial, will be an apparition at best
because it is easy to see through
an unhealthy plant's leaf
as long as
you have the time to watch them die.

the first time I don't feel disappointment
it is when my thumb
leaves prints on my earlobe, caressing the metal back of
an earring – something is there
after all, just a stud but it is something beautiful
I had
forgotten.

in a bathtub, scent of my skin rising from the water
like jasmine against morning dew
         like fog

I relieve my legs of their hair
and the razor
peels the skin from my fingertip, it undresses into raw
flesh, losing my print –            sadness
returns like a resurrection.

piling dead skin up like ******* lines,

they say
to close your eyes count to ten breathe in breathe out
anxiety will not ache you anymore

and he is in bed
with a girl he loves
who isn't me but has the same hair color

so it is a little okay.

all these years of living outside the city
have turned my heart
rural –

outside of me – the only things
that i can acknowledge
exist separate from who i am and what i feel –

cicadas rub their arteries together, too small not to touch
intimate parts
when laying so close.

they found me
in the midst of my drowning life

and i listen,
they reenact my ***. it's okay, please don't disassociate
because of me

if it keeps you from feeling empty, get full –
swallow the details
even if
it means i'll forget them – i am

far away
from everyone. isolated, weeds like a noose, i ruin
myself first

because i remember far too much.  i
am alone too much

i have nowhere but myself to put the hurtful things.

now afraid –
my heartbeat is the rhythm of
bugs
running from the sole of a pretty shoe. i am

wanting to scream i'm sick i'm sick i'm sick
but only the trees
will hear me –  hold me. i'm sick

and for once
i can't ***** it out. can't bleed it out.

He asked
how I felt after losing my virginity
and

I just needed to know
if god will bury us in the sky
after the ground
is full

I hate myself so I won't hate you. The feelings
swell in me like
parasites or a pregnancy –

think of my dead fetus,
a clump of cells
decomposing. My skin is colorless, it died  
before the rest of me

(or him or her or they).

You
have been the lump in my throat for years, I taste
*** and blood and tears
and I *** and bleed and cry
for myself, as if you would not want it.

I already know what you would say – we are
under the same sky
so you will

always be a part of me
whether I want you to be or not.

I hurt myself so it feels natural when you do it
and finally I have the courage

to hope that when
we touch, it breaks me enough to draw
glass from my fingertips
and carve holes in you, too. (I spread
myself open and it was never enough for you).

Pretend you do not put opals in tiny glass jars
and **** their color,
they form their own town of
cracked stones
looking like lightning. I saw you boil and
bleed the air to create thunder
I heard
my thighs slap together
when you were inside me, the humidity between them
created storms –
nothing is ever fine around you.

I have an open heart, closed sleeve

it is enough
to feel so much
without
having to show anything.

His eyes yawned
from watching me suffer too often

and
I learned to

be less exhausting.

I am writing notes to ghosts
and realizing
that there are some bad habits I will always go
back to.

The morning has opened its eyes
through sea salt
from
the Sandman in
an abandoned bedroom

tides
swim through our curtains
wrinkles
its white skin

I am
next to the ocean.

I do not belong to myself, nor
the shadows –
I have donated all of my years to men
until they are old enough
to be gods

and how I have fallen on my knees
as they grew to be
too old for me

the earth never is. I don't love
it enough, still

nothing aches more like trying to be better
when dirt forms crescents
like a moon
beneath your fingernails.

torture ****
is the kind I make for you, the
desperate clawing plea
for you
to choose to ******* to me.

there is a phrase – “sea of stars”
and I think
of it as the sort of oasis that could be above earth
or beneath the soles of our feet.

blue blue blue azul

where the air brushes my hair like snowfall,
where water pulls at my skin
like

a new lover. like him on our first night together,
still unsure of which
words were
too intimate to use – there came to be
no talking, so much less desperate than we
are now. I could grab flesh
and remain aloof, as the ocean is.

something
is always glistening in the sky or the sea

I wonder if I got closer, if it would look like your
hide
after twirling your fingers against
my tongue. the belly
of your fingerprints moving in my mouth.