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.

He placed me in a watering can
holy water, I said fetch me a blanket quick
fallen into warm holy water –

he said no,
that is all you. He must be my sunshine.

I have not looked out the window for weeks
weeds will break me to pieces,
they seem too much like weddings I’ve escaped
where the groom and bride are useless
to everyone but each other, then pulled away.

I think they look beautiful. I do.
The way females palely grow tousled with
tree limbs, cautious not to snap one with weight
and go tumbling from hilltops
dead blades of grass penetrate their kneecaps.

Neither are quite green or brunette
but in discernible loveliness when falling from
a girl’s skin, a satellite rained in cherry beads.
I must say I am in love with the gore of it
needing a heart to pump, but I cannot watch
               as their minds dive within.

If you love me you will touch yourself and fill my holes
with your smile, step inside me like
you are juvenile skipping through a rain puddle.
Pretend you believe it is tears from the stars that form
****** shapes and still are not full, if you love me
know that I need you to touch me or I will ask an army to.
Those lonely soldiers grasping sand dunes
in their sleeping bags, dreaming of ******* for vitamins:
sometimes your silhouette appears in sweat beads
of my showerhead and I am just like a veteran,
fill as much as I can of myself with my two hands,
I think that if you don’t love me I would rather be dead.

I was supposedly a girl much louder
than any other, talking to no one and myself
until father rushed to purchase the glue,
piecing me together, a wrinkled jigsaw puzzle
and now I cannot speak to him anymore.

Nor anyone else, the men or women
not even the babies howling to cradlelace:
if one asked for me to pull them out, I
would claim that they are conjoined twins.

Only me and the pad of paper I ******,
it rests on my ***** or under an armpit,
but worse are the sleeping crates
inside my mind, a door and a handle holding
one another like lips not coming undone.

Please speak again, they say,
they do not know I can completely do it
just not with the maggots swarming through:

please, though, put my lips back, I write,
as if I had not split them apart already
and ate the frosting they laced each with,
I will be a child whose cradle they’re inside
supposedly an infant with much louder cries.

I want to exist in a month besides December
when the trees are not naked, but I am
and still my ******* are budding blooms –
still, the adjacent skin takes the hue of a rose
while sunshine arouses me like men do.

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

Little plant, you cannot grow inside of me.
I am much too cold. Soon, you will be wilting.

Hook your claws in me like a kitten
and you promise to be good
not to strangle any organs, say a single word.
But I just cannot let you die in a place you

should not even sleep inside. Little plant,
you would not any rest even if you were dead.

He is walking toward the Pacific Ocean,
the man-I-had-once appreciates salt water so I refill our
pillowcase with it when he falls asleep every night.
He could drink it straight,
like whiskey or milk, and it’d fill him like calcium.

When he decided he needed more
I became one hundred percent sodium – sometimes salt
flakes from my skin like translucent freckles.

I do not go out anymore:
people talk as if he still exists although I
have him no longer. Mother Nature touched her hand to
my face and said she does not mind if I only swim
in public pools now, chlorine and all.

God told me he understands
if I hate the man-I-had-once, for breaking my heart
because he jumps into oceans and rivers
for enjoyment and I jump off of bridges because I must.

the grass dreams of a little girl
who will lay on its blades
again, shaking her small bottom

it feels much like warm wind
& baby bugs crawl into her hair
home, they whisper her name so

home is hope until the mom
kills every single one with soap
baby bugs do not know the

thoughts of tiny children, death
eats her skin & will turn grass
           brunette as she grows up

made of tiny stars
the stranger held my hand and
         lit up the night sky

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

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.

I am lonely.
I have driven past the house I thought we’d share
going on eight times now, and there
is no proof that it has gone back up for sale.

To be honest, I am not fond of it anymore:
its lime concrete and white wire fence are a little
too outdated. Painted cleanly.

A clean escape –  a criminal fleeing
(it was you who left me).

Nothing is natural or mineral
about wood doors looking like an emerald
but the expense was high.

I was lonely.

I called and a real estate agent confirmed I did
not have the means to hold you there
or anywhere, really. The line
broke like pillars crumbling from a lost war.

God made girls full of sap
so we chew on our hair when we get nervous
and blood falls
from us like butterflies from cocoons.

I am small
call me baby, or love, anything but doll.

Call me angel, not honey
I am not sweet
nor could I ever stick to you.

You left me three weeks after holding my head
underwater,
shrinking more and more until
the brain could only process our memories.

Later, just the absence
of pet names that would have made sense.

Never were you made of Earth
you live alone inside me

and somewhere the December still exists
and the moments in which we kissed
and felt each other melt into liquid pouring down

our throats
my heart is a rocking chair it sleeps in

a child, too, your name whispered
the language of foreign
countries
and these women have no word for goodbye

or terrain or sunrises or seasons
so babes do not age  

until streets wind to the mound of mine
you changed, loosened
our two halves make a hole

Where
I eat the breeze

that your lean lips propel
and it flows from my clavicles to toes so
you exist everywhere
but everything’s as solid as gold or teeth marks.

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 just got a whiff of you
and the place you stood last,
the corner of my bedroom
where your air simmers fast.

In some ways, it was grey,
a fraction of our whole,
now it has been divided –
but now, you seem so cold.

What was once a bloom
she bit the petals away, wilt
our single lovely air bead
swallowed under her gloom.  

I just got a whiff of you
and the place you stood last,
just here beside me but feels
like something I never had.

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.

Under the tires,
concrete penetrates me

like seeds, my blood a fertilizer

is this how pine trees are
grown? forests on the side of the road?
every particle of earth is taken

from a sad girl’s soul
and I donate mine to the highest bidder

may it be the 18 wheeler
may it be a rifle
may it be the noose, its chainlinks

or all three.
I am to be part of  the atmosphere

condensation, an angry girl’s
rain.

Paper thin are the words I have composed to you:
I despise this fact,
hours and ink spent on my ruminations
form letters not more substantial than cigarette smoke.

As a little girl whose excitement of snow is
wasted on stained glass windows
that are unable to preserve the print of her breath.

Your comb on the dresser where you left it
would take days to be delivered, and your birthday gift
can only be seen on my nightstand
in photos I take. But I purchased something made of
porcelain to write love poems on so they will
not be ripped or

vaporized when August and six dollars gives them
to the famished mouth of your mailbox
empty, but for bills from
hospital visits caused by my hand heaving onto yours.

I just want to write your way back home to me
and I know the wind could
blow away my every wish, thinking you may ever stay.

I think that you will feel better
if I remind you to keep bottles of seawater and a spoonful
of honey on your
bedside for the next time you get sick:
a detox, this will climb into your pores like a
pillow
this will smooth any of the scars in your digestive
system, your fear is in
you like it is a new ***** that is destined
to fail. Sometimes suffering wants to be silent but I have
tried to talk yours down, promise
that it is okay to be
soft
and okay to need to add sweetener to bitter tea
and acknowledge pain like
I do when I imagine myself as a little girl again, palm out
because she knows she is lonely for
someone to hold her hand.  I
pass pills to you, maybe they will stretch out your throat
or decrease your fever by a couple degrees
without realizing
you would feel better if I just
thanked you for taking care of me when I’m sick, too.

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

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

Bees buzz like sirens,
I walk around them like a marriage bed
no one sleeps in me but empty shells.

What their stringers did was carve a
cavity right into the center of me. Summer is
not a time, but a place for sweat on chests
and hiding **** under leaves wet with dew.

I am a child, I eavesdrop.
Sunlight does not betray my fabric
soiled from conversations ending in rain.

Then, there are the warning animals:
go home everyone says.
But I have not a home, I have just places for
my sagging hips to lay until discovered.

And most of the time, I am invisible
hiding beyond clouds like snowed mountains.

If it sounds soft, it is not.
Villages are made from mattresses like me:
underground, the world loves tugging
on damp springs and spines while bees sing.

Your name is Rachael
and I am supposed to sweep you up like a moth
or the baby spiders you think are yours
but they ate their mother, too. Like you will.

You will see yourself in a diagram
the size of dog paws.

You will see yourself on the owl stand:
artificial, do you like it? I am sorry I said no.

You will fracture an oyster
and expect babies to queue out, to call you mom
out of every egg is a memory not your own.

Your name is Rachael but
you are hardly a woman, not a person, or a bug.
A moth is more alive than you
because its wings can blister on light-bulbs.

Your name is Rachael
and so you are of artificial skin and thoughts.

I did not bloom
  
     pink
underground
    summerless bulb

              mostly the
undercooked appearance

and gutty roar
         I did not bloom

     although it appears
that way –

speckled rose
with spread wings
                eating her days

     like knives
feeling small & summits

             I was born:
Worldly, sharp,
        the deranged.

Let’s trade wounds: I will give you the burn
under my breast and you can replace
the Vietnam War stabs with it.
I will take them upon my shoulder-blades.

Let’s just lick all the scabs away.
They make you look good, but I wish your
hurting would have stopped
the forty years before I was born.

I am still breathing
and parts of you are so black –

looking asleep on a pile of cigarettes
the tobacco tied into rings
kept wrapped around your finger,
I’ve kept you tied close to me

so that every particle
you ingest, everything you can think
lets me know you are living.

my beautiful charred
angel, do not break your stings.

I am one of your tastebuds
                know when you like
   something more than I

         crumbling
    crumbling
         we are food

                            we
she has a spice that you like
   and I am too sweet

          I will tear myself out
so you can be free
  to taste better things

Your hair has grown *****
from all the secrets I have whispered into it. I even had
you sleep on the floor mattress and
butterfly wings, detached spider legs, found a nest in you
swayed in a way that sent you straight to sleep.

There are beautiful things within you that you do not
realize: your scalp is black for their blood,
you are the perfect place
to hide ugly things in because you make them less bad.

Just last week, I heard bugs buzzing
probably in my kitchen or the bathtub drain
missing you.

I told them that
wherever they are, I missed them, and I missed you, too.

For three years
I have been dirt under your nailbeds, no one’s gotten
close enough to see me. This skin
is a cage
and I know how everyone looks to you

sticking to you in some place, the green goo of
a dead firefly or
an old sweater hung by shoes you no longer fit into.

Your mother is not
from America, but is a mother yet –
I am not from her, nor am I foreign to you.

She watched us in bed together when you were so ill
you thought you would die.

But mostly she saw how

I put more fever
on your cheeks – I wished I would die
for you. No one would miss a crescent of filth you
touch them with or loose hairs
on your sheets. No other girl would notice.

i:
Yellow jackets have their nests in the ground so they can
give their stingers to everyone
below three foot tall & never feel alone.

ii:
When I die
I want to be cremated to make room for another
five foot, four inch tall girl to live.

iii:
The woman who shall love you second
will not have the same size anything as me, not even my
heart.

iv:
when will there be more people alive
than people who have
died already

v:
You breathe 25,000 times a day
& only expect to
love once in your life.

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.

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.

Thumb, thumb in this earth –
I could fit my entire soul in there instead of apple-fetuses!
Perhaps purée the soil down like a lockbox
and give it to my love to unpack
for when I age, it gets too big, I must rise again from dust.

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.

As a warning, I may impulsively delete my account within a few days. I am at a loss with my writing, and the hate I feel for it is affecting my mental health. A lot of what is here is disgusting. I apologize to everyone.

I have not yet decided if I want my body
to be a weapon, or if I want to use weapons on it.

It came from the constellation
Capricornus, which is parallel to the planet Earth –
the swirling element I am associated with.

Not air or blue sea
as you might expect from someone as blue as me.

The first time I laid on someone else’s legs
I remembered the man who loved me was a Fire sign
because my skin became as easy to
flake off as chalk, and I liked that very much.

Pomegranates peel quite the same
without knife, perhaps I am fruit more than I am sad.

This is a type of fruit originating in India
where round is the most honored shape and
my mulberry smile may give someone an element
of Fire between their legs.

open a stitch, in you go
find places others do not know
we are in a cardboard box or emergency room
but it does not matter, I want to *******

and so we will, we do
like two siblings figuring out body parts –
without meaning to be, you end up hard

something like this has to be okay
burying remnants of yourself inside me before
the rest withers away

and even when you’re old
I will let you have me on the floor

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)

A jagged, sharp thing the men love:
is it my teeth? or the knives?

I do not know if the world is getting
bigger, or I am getting smaller –
one would comet a smile into grass,
the safe blades: the green is bliss.

But I am piqued by such shine,
I do not want it in my life, no, it’ll
outweigh love I have cut into pieces
inside.

And it cannot be the teeth: they
are human, though blank as a page.

I make my feelings into poetry
and you make your actions the same
when you lollygag in rainstorms &
leave love notes written on my face.

And two parts of my body you
make damp, my cloudburst eyes and
what lies between my legs’ land.

But in the afternoon, I’m reminded
that the two are not exact
because only one hole of mine can be
                                                   sad.

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.

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

borrow my organs
please,
get better soon.

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.

I am in the furnace
    and it has these red spokes

    looking like candy,
I know this is how I will go

  the chunks of fruit beads
       oh jam, and my jelly

   I become a worm,
he has put me in an apple

    adjust the stem and crotch
nap like a pit, like seeds.

Our arguments have begun to sound like musical notes
on a guitar that needs fresh strings,
there is nothing new about them. I cry about the same **** thing.
You look better now that childhood's run past you,
the round cheeks remain
but heartbreak means more than pouring sand in a girl's eye.

For every twenty things you would like to say,
there are a million that you already have. I listen to your
song crescendo and wane and the
rhythm of your heart seem to fixate, on itself, no longer on her,
I think it must be the most beautiful kind of hurt.

The worries did you well,
took their form in lyrics like a group of deep-settled wrinkles
aging the process, aging wine, can only get better
when you read the ugly things I write.
And although you look good
wearing the "about thirty-two months ago at five o'clock" shadow

I will not miss
the year you turned twenty-six.

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.