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. *******

With everyone but you, the photographs are scrutinized.

My mother says
we do not look close enough
or even as if we like each other at all.

But with you, she changes. Our skins seem tucked in
towards each other
the wrinkles know where to slouch,
I see not through the windows of my eyes but by braille.

There is a drug in us
leaving track-marks for the other to tongue.

More potent than wine, not as thick as moonshine,
this young and living love
amends the lighting in my bedroom and bathroom to the
consistency of honey, a shade of citrine.

Strangers are stopped from seeing
our pale complexion,
faces so close that the blood between us seems to blend.

I used to hear the moths tapping my blinds at night
but chose to believe it was you instead,
getting out of the shower, hearing the doorbell ring, I would
pretend it was you having come to visit me.

Eventually bought a compass for the curtains
because I wanted to see
what direction the rocks you threw were coming from.

Well, the thing never moved
eternally pointed south, and I wondered if distance could be
silent when our love is so ******* loud
but it seems I had only fallen for the moths at night.

Moonlight gives us fainting spells
the fall changed your face shape, touches your white back
until it is as freckled as Planet Earth itself.

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.

fire storms on my
skin: they look like honey on
toast and it kills me.

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.

hung your reflection upon our cave
the moonshine, the tiny peats
you only exist in these natural rags –

it smells like incense and
I am so alone.

Petals of red, the newest bloom in a cycle of seasons I
wade through with my body
holding nothing else but the ghost of a child:

supposedly this is life
and life is a horror story, but it is no coincidence that
this did not happen until I grew
to be the length of the train on a wedding dress.

I will not apologize for finding gore so beautiful, I am
saying so because it is mine –
a slit of skin that is not from a cut
filling the whole
bathtub with blood. I dilute water and material to
make sure they stay mine, the same to men.

If this is a temple,
I want my heart to be in the basement

where everyone I love can run and hide when there is
an emergency, the safe haven
that will flood and dye his face my color because
I did not keep his child this month.

Babies in buckets, I would give them a penny
for every drop of blood that trickles
into the drain. An infant’s length is a wheelbarrow
standing on its tippy-toes to see into crawl spaces

and they barely squeeze between. Yesterday,
I touched inside the tawny dwellings of myself.  
I tell everyone that this is where the children grow.

Up and maturing like wine, like fine honey beads:
this is the foster home where they’re safe
not abused by bowels. I coil my intestines to
frail wrists, around the neck expanding
giraffe legs held straight through my esophagus. If

babies in buckets require kisses or cuddles,
these folds will mother them.

How the starlight will keep heat inside, I watch a
moon protracted at night and hold it to my
fingertips so the newborns can see
what eyes sacrifice for a ***-hole person & place.

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.

I wear minnows on my wrist –
they came from my eyes
but at least they swim
and I am not alone when I cry.

I am guilty of emptying
my loved ones
into picture frames

so they will last forever, and
I have thought about
tattooing makeup to my face.

Everything
I try to hang onto releases me
like rainfall salt from
cypresses, leaving a bad taste
or nothing to trace at all.

I want to leave rose petals
in everyone’s pocket
to attract hungry bumblebees

because I feel
my least lonesome when
something’s being slid
into me, even if it stings a little.

i know where to find ghosts
just take my hand, and we can go where bubbles
never burst

where the sun hits particles of dust

where cars in rain
and streetlamps have those bursts of light that
extend farther than the bulb

dandelion fields, clubs where singles know how
to make hearts with cigarette smoke

where holes are carved in dirt that has never
been caressed, where
bruises go

when they are no longer on your skin

because i know about
searching for what is left of the dead with fingers
cupped like a shovel, knowing
you were the last thing they ever touched

well,
they're not just in the ground
ghosts are somewhere in the air i promise.

an eyelash twinkle tear,
and melted

the sugar in honey and wine
so god helped me cry

like a cramped muscle
after mile-runs

love, lava lamp red
makes me an island child

disperse the burden to each
of my adoring friends

you just do not know
how beautiful he can get

weep at the foot of a cross
but, by god, he is mine

lapping salt-beads
from the coast of an eye

hair is insignificant if not of a
root

row in streams of myself
destiny i spat up

with cemeteries,
learned to cradle an infant

feed him with my milk –
anon, i am a peasant

he cannot love me as i love
yet another waterfall’s dusk.

Through fissured blinds,
sunlight cuts
my toenails in half –
rosy polish
and pastel skin.

I recall a blade
once used against
my thigh,
until I left pale
hues for scarlet.

If possible,
my veins quiver,
and I recognize
a familiar yearning
from days past.

These thoughts are
sour grapes
that I must wince at,
even when the
flavor isn’t so bad.

My mind is a weapon
that wrestles itself;
I am on a seesaw,
teeter-tottering as
a toddler might.

I am so tired, I need to get wasted
but I am pretty sure
any alcohol would curdle in my stomach —

the trashbag I keep under my
clothes, use my intestines as the
drawstrings. I get
anxious, my body is hot and heavy and
moist, everything slides off
my skin and never stops coming back.

I need to get wasted
but sometimes it feels as if everyone I
know is an alcoholic — mother,
sister, uncle, dad. It could happen
to me

and maybe I would finally be happy if
I always had something to
use to drown my body.
Having blood is not enough,
it won’t even stay under my skin. I
am so awake, I could drink
a river

and then another and another
and all my nerves would still feel open.

His illuminate
     head surfacing like a balloon
tied to a child’s wrist, mine
         bandage like gauze
               I pull him down and
      he brings me back up.

             Found a quiet space
   inside that no one has touched
so empty, can I fill you?
          Can I make it as bright as
                   your illuminate head?

   Wait within the gaps
until the blood pools around
        and drowns me.
             God, to be full finally –
      I wait and wait and wait,
I will give you this body
         the roundness you deserve.

Flushed
    and illuminate, my all,
the thorn I pluck into your hip
            exploding balloon
               now a rose expanding
    you are full in the center,
me, the hurricane eye.

Twisting like fingers,
caught around these curtains –
a pattern, two colors and
more dimensions than the sea.

One wave shivers upon
our house’s shoulders, neck.
It looks so aged and wrinkled.

The rash makes rafts
of its skin, purpled from burn
and the nerves become tin
cans or rooms without guests:
she napped on the bone.

Jealous that there is not
flowerpots in less, not color –
death’s but a mirror of black.

And giving pearls to
maids: I watched them pick
the suede from clamshells
and become a mother flood.

Nature was here with
dovetailing white linen sheets
soiled by flame, cancer birth.

Baby, angel, I have begun
growing chamomile on the left side of my mattress:
you left it warm enough to grow something
as impossible as weeds. And I know
I am preferable to the sun
at least to you, but what about the moon? There is just
something about luna, the moon, lune.
Sometimes I want to talk to it the way I would
you: moon, oh my stars,
I did not believe in naturalism until I believed in you.
Baby, angel, we are only embers
of what we once were. I heat us up as tea
and grow herbs where you once would breathe.
Warding off bumblebees by
taking their stingers into my paw, the air can hurt us.

It breaks my heart that women are assaulted in every country
like, I wish I could attribute it to one bad thing
I wish I could blame it on America or the economy or bubonic plague
I wish it only stung like hot coffee on her tongue
I wish **** were an ocean I could drain the water out of
but some people just think others should be put in a brown bag.

Limbs, limbs, limbs. Are we all just body parts
attached by tendons and cursed by muscles that mothball when we
need to cut the eyeball sockets of someone who wants
to mince clavicles, button noses, great big hearty belly giggles?

Every memory is sorry and starry, every piece of her *****
and I just want to blame it on one
******* bad thing, I want something so disgusting to make sense.

Oh, it is awfully high from up here –
a power surge, the slit of my skirt intentionally ripped
and yet no one wants the slightest peek.

The man I love must be entwined in the pleats
or is watching the carnival children with more interest
than he has in creating normal infants with me.

Am I not a woman, not fertile?
But my concern is for a bloodied male –
intestines escaping from an abdomen like his coins.

He has been robbed as I have, an empty wallet
while I have an uninhibited ****.
We whirl alone on the ferris wheel and want to get ill.

For when the ride halts, I could climb the
parachute and die with that defeated man on the side –
just not quick enough to be wanted like a carnie.

Becoming an atypical sort of sideshow,
write wishes with a ride’s ***** on my arm, a lovenote
leave with someone whose faith in which I restore.

Tuesday's picked it out, the three year old envelope
I had dried out for a scrapbook
quite close to rose petals in pattern and fabric.

Symphony number four sings,
he thought I was a little girl when we met but I have
felt like a *****
since birth; the difference is that my privates
came upon a sunset at age eleven
now it is unacceptable to wiggle my *** at every man I see.

God, to have my body change
with the sky. I was supposed to run to my earth-mother
tell her of how I altered the cycle of the moon
but I've waited until now,
month thirty-six of burying his fertilization in myself.

Compared to him, I am so young that
I am dead.

Any year after 1990 has been negated
letters have been written, rewrittten, unwritten in black
marsh pen and the tide of it
is filling high in his eyes. For some time now,
my hands have been on every universe
redrafting what is already supposed in my bright, red ink.  

I have been a woman for seven years
and a ***** for seventeen, but
my daybook just reaches December 2010; I took a man's
thorn so all this blood would begin to matter.

I want to cut heart-shaped holes in his wall
so he can see the clouds
billow and pucker up for him, so he can know exactly
how much I love his soft, pale patches of skin
in the expanse of a happy sky
and its clear skin. Ripples as wind
across grass
picking up the skirt of some meadow down south
the powerlines fell but there is still
electricity all over him, I am the kind of lover who
has a heartbeat only in someone
else's hand. I want to have a window into his.

If I take too long in the bathroom,
it is because I write poems about you while I ****.

Sometimes typed, sometimes portrayed
by morse code:
tampons in a wicker basket and toothpaste dobs.

I can form your ***** exact in inches and vein
just using these utensils
in the mornings
because I am seventeen and you
have just been inside me or inside my reveries.

I have enough memories for an old woman
and had enough *** for an old man.
To be happy, I must feel you swimming through
me even when our date-water leaves
and sometimes I get wet writing, remembering.

If I take too long in the bathroom,
it is because I write poems about you while I ****.

If I take too long in the bathroom,
I know you are listening in the room next door.

Nobody put any one of themselves first,
just the bottle.
My mother, genteel as she was,
wrote sketchpad poems on how alcohol must feel
shrouded in a chifforobe. If I were the author
each stanza would only say “warm”
because such is how I felt
folding myself among the goblets as a child.

On dress hangers she had no use for
but to dream to abort me,
I hung and thought about how laconic my kin was
not asking what state I was in the past week.

(Mississippi,
I would announce. M-I-S-S   I-S-S   I-P-P-I
as many meters as letters in its name
and I burnt my calf on an old man’s motorcycle:
he kissed it better, a stranger did
though your bureau’s dirt chocked below my nails.
)

A false god set my parakeet free that trip
at least that is what mother held when I got back –
Oh, many days ago, azure feathers
spanned in a conduit
right by the lady’s home, you know the one
you tell me that her carpets look like bacon strips
(once eleven years ago I had,
as many years as in Mississippi’s name).

Had it been so many months
from the episode when I accidentally mumbled
“I hate you” and never regretted it as I should have?
Had it been so many hours since I wondered
why I could not hate her
but she could hate me, or say so “accidentally”?

Nobody put any one of themselves first,
just the bottle
even I was careful not to shatter when we shared a
ligneous hiding space, regal, misunderstood.

But on returning from Mississippi,
(M-I-S-S   I-S-S   I-P-P-I
One Mississippi Two Mississippi Three Mississippi Four)
I hoisted myself like a stiff jacket and
realized no one could see the difference between
red wine and a child's blood, in laced imperial stripes.

I was told not to love another woman
I was told not to **** any man
so I thought about books when I laid in my hammock with lemonade
how I wanted one with a spine as long as mine
to finger in the dark of a moonless night, rather than myself
or any mermaid-girl who dripped with water like loose gemstones.

Her stories were what I would read and her body
I would imagine swimming to the harpsichord of a fantasy film song
effervescent, but never touched by anyone
even a fellow without blowfish thorns for fingernails
as smooth as hardback covers, as permanent as paperback pages.

And I grew up, and I did love another woman
and I did **** a man
but I still remember the mermaid-girl who had paper fins
and an all-consuming love for splashing ink like an ocean’s brine.

I hate how you become crystalline
losing that stiffness laid upon your arms,
as if daisies grew where your nerves
once were, they had trembled up –
wet climate, trembling down your face.

And the little army of tears builds
a mountain between us, lava seeps red:
I am unarmed compared to sadness.

You, bright and so clearly agonized,
the tortoise shell is clever in its respite –
shields green from gentlemen until
they hardly believe that they are alive.

I despise what the dampness can do
sometimes slipping you rigid while I am
concrete asleep in a nearby bedroom,
under linen and hardly a human –
your shine so pure it overwhelms mine.

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.

Minnows **** the throb out of my eyelids
where I jumped in the great pond and was filled with brine
each fleck, a pebble for them to slurp like soup.

I will remember this moment by the clothes I wore
take it out on yellow ruffles, navy strata  
hung attractively on metal shelves but would faint if I were
to wear either once again. The accessories were similar.
Had a fish unbuttoned my blouse he would see
buttons where another female’s ******* would coarsen.

All I had meant to do was water a plant, feed the fish
but their container had grown wool:
I must dive in! It is better to drown than consult a quiet god.
Upon arrival, I realized that this was like entering
another species’ bloodstream. The waves sway your torso.

No wonder these blankets have become pink.
Behind is a freshwater sea, accustomed to the float but not
the dreaded sting. I have even drowned a few times:
I shall curse the flounder who resuscitates me at bottom.

Huffing demigod, a scarf of your hair is around my neck
and it nicks my clavicles. Pin a rose between thighs –
     that is how it feels, like thorn-blood your love.
           I am the emptiest thing you
                            have touched the toes of.

When you ****** my pulse,
             I became a coffee drink, now funneling the
      tentacles who suffocate my hair strings &
you cannot know how subtle I am not. Finger my teeth.

      Purposely, I do not bite.
              As Pacific as an ink ocean, you are deep
         between what I swallow and ***** and keep inside.
   Where fish once swam you took. I can only drain for you.
                   I know you empty me deliberately,
                               the final ache and void.

Love for me to stay the emptiest woman you have ******,
         until I do not need a house for my soul. No,
                           not more than I need your cut.

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.

I could never help him hide a dead body
in a forest, where creatures have whiskers as thick as vines
blood’s green from chlorophyll falling from trees
dried leaves shield wounds,
because it would be mine. One day
when he is stabbing my heart, it will have to **** me.

I use weeds as bandages. I have had three broken hearts
but never experienced heart failure.

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.

I used to be afraid of my saliva
the soapy buds on my tongue and gums,
afraid that at night, they would drown me:
and I would spiral into the clutches of
my throat, fleshy & claustrophobic.

Now, I dream of such tight places
and how water may wash me to a place
where I will be contained for just seconds
too long. Asleep, the doctors look like
comets bursting above my eyelids.

Drool, the culprit dripping down
my chin gives them the satisfaction of a
final goodbye, if not to cleanse my
life just before she ends.

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.

Baby called me Rusalka,
having the same number of syllables as my name.

Moonlight tossed me in a river to awake
fins from my toenails
to bird-sing to the handsome until I am unalone

mortality, mortality
as clean as the banks of a landfill.

Our child would nap in a basket of ripe fruit
strung to a willow and birch

description of me, “perpetually wet from something”
or alexandrite
golden by dusk though with a jade sunburn;

hair so long
would *** a rainforest’s feet if it had a pair.

Suicide on the tip of one’s tongue
now saltwater buoyant on the roof of a mouth
I was out of wedlock,

mother anchored my wrists with tangly fieldroots
right below our old tire swing

and

Baby simply meant I touch
everyone with my laugh, and it makes them dead.

I see now that you shared with me so much more
than what you hid,

beginning seventeen years
       eighth months ago, every day
has been our day. Even before we met we shared things
so well
if it were raining here,
I would send the storms down south to you.

The weather has so much more strength
than our anger, the earth
let me love you before my heart could catch up
and would take you away if you
ever stopped loving me

everything we share
I cannot lose when you still adore me.

When I presumed I had nothing,
I stopped living on earth. I did not want to share
anything with you
          with half a person
                  half a stranger
               a lover without lips.

Nothing was stolen from me, not exactly
rather I was a heart
that began to beat,
then stopped
midway, realizing an important piece was missing
some artery God forgot to connect.

Those days were hard work
of not running to you and asking you to
give me something
      share anything more with me than just the sun

   and I realized that even if you did not,
the sun would hurt now;
it would miss me and you could feel pain
I can't
because it was you who lost love
                (I just never had it).

I had ideas of it,
you had your favorite flakes of my skin and
thought of the inflection of my voice as a *** *****

how could I lie to you, you would say
with my hand down your pants
and it made sense. I could make
             sure you never have children,
     but I'd rather make sure you do.

The body parts we shared are not mine,
but were inside me so often
            they almost could be.

I had similes for
everything: becoming flaccid, the sun setting
scarlet cheeks like a burn
all larger than what I did not know.

I had the power to hurt you, I just didn't.
We both lied,
but I only would lie on my back
and once in a while, I pretend you did the same so
the sun does not lose us as stars
         a constellation.

          The Little Dipper
poured the same poison in our mouths
    and that has to count as
             something you did not keep from me
  (something that believed in us).

I have known girls who can only be held quietly –
that if you speak, it destroys their bodies
so instead you step around her thoughts and
touch until she understands how to exhale again
only by word of action, our language of fingertips.

Sometimes I failed. The decibel meter
climaxes far too high, she does not breathe again.
She gets so plum-faced I know she wants to die
and those girls, sometimes they do anyway
even if you pet their ribs all through the night.

Or they become just a gap where words once
rose. Her name rolls off the tongue but
there are unnecessary spaces inside, melting like
snowflakes when rain isn’t quite cold enough –
to become nonexistent, a piece of evaporated dust.

She can kiss, can hug, but no longer can she love –
an embrace is nothing if it is quiet and girls’
are in silence. I have known these girls who do
not feel, but sometimes I wonder if they were
real and simply vaporized flake by flake like snow.

spinning stars on my fingers, but they are amputated
before I could get callouses or cigarette burns
like daddy gave me when we hiked through woodlands
and meant to urinate in shrubbery not on my shoes

years we were consumed by the distance of each other
but he could not have scarred me on purpose
or I would have known it was meant to sting a little

sleeping in blackness but wondering ceaselessly
through conversations in which lovers are not obsessed
if I do not wring my eyelids, juice the retinas to bed
figures dance and they are ghosts of rifles he has  

us children **** the very barrel obsessively
until the trigger flicks our tongue, soon I smell smoke  

black and white and the disorder is somewhat colorless
there are sparks but rarely a single flame to see
just the bruises spitting **** slapped into skim milk
and now, some relief, I can do all the slapping myself.

I only live in your heart,
the masculine particle of your air and
whimsical, my treat within

I will love you forever if only
you keep your breath winded.

A doll, button eyes and two cloth feet
which walks her on a chant –
for that is me, dwelling in your body
I exist as a plaything

or a burbling dream.  

My strings attach to your arteries
and I am on a highway to your soul.

I wobble, topple, follow
your staple, an underground troll
of noiseless, poppy veins
because you welcomed me in the lull.

I can almost remember
the exact force you
used to kiss me when
no one was looking;
when on foot, they
nearly knocked me over,
and when in bed, I
sometimes savored breaks.

I can almost remember
the exact pattern of hair
behind your neck, escaping
below rumpled fabric and
near body parts I would
have used my mouth to
make love to, had folks
turned away more often.

I can almost remember
the exact volume you
spoke in when we
leaned in too close, your
lips fondling my earlobe
and verbalizing
just what I had hoped
you might do to me later.

I can almost remember
the exact length of your
eyelashes that extended to
catch tears you cried for me;
my thumbs were not always
swift enough to form half-moons
under the almond orbs through
which you watched me depart.

His body
   is a water tower & it holds
   gifts hidden in the bowels, wrapped in
   intestines like a cherry-colored ribbon

     our words fall into
stardust
  and he has black coffee hair
  
dark tea skin
     been there since he was an infant
spoke tongues, the language of romance
         but I was hidden under

   the bed
until virginity was okay
until he coaxed me out, a prophet man

       his fingers knead me
dough
to be a perfect flavor of snow & sadness
     fill his empty corners to the brim.

His waltz-walk, just added to loveliness
in a southern township
made a balled hum like a grown elm
sprung from pillboxes or a revved engine –
the tip tapping, centerfold pouring tea
and fertilize the carnal burn.

I have an afterglow from watching him,
he treats it like a sunrise;
it splits to a peak, and dissolves untouched.

We think of such moments as a fever,
I hope he considers my smile a moon jewel
a valuable pepper of pearls
she wept and they fell from her head –
but not I, no, I know that girls do not cry.

And there will be a moment I know
he is walking to me, he will waltz with me.

clothes worn too tight
so it feels like there are needles who need me, who bleed me
a million parasites ******* and taking me.

he is *** and surgery, he is far too in love with life
wants to be inside of everything

but i like the miles
i like being so far that he cannot take things out of me
or even know they’re there.

i am a parasite, i want everything to be inside of me and
that
is why we
fight with him in my mouth (having is feeling.

builds midnight with paper stars and dark attics
because then the sky can be ripped
into shreds, stuffed down my throat and suddenly i possess
the whole world without needing to live in it.

Palm-brained, more sweet than salty
you do not wilt and you do not expand:
cats always land on their feet,

I worry like your owner. He may fall,
he may stoop on his knees a fateful day!

And the ripples seeming ocean waves,
pale as an eye’s center, brine inside
your skin goes a particular way beneath
curdled fur, covered you so –

you are a still a ****** to my hands,
though I have tongued your fleece case
there is the special salt pulsing below.

We are bigger than sin, we have size on
huffing waters. They are wafers –

lanterns, their latches open and shut
but we say the same: I worry & you haze
not concerned that I will jump,
girls are like cats landing on their feet

girls who fall because they believe
their palm, a parachute is expanding.

I do not want to be Sylvia Plath anymore.
Her skin cannot fertilize my daises in the oven
or make rosemary’s taste improve
because she has it swaddled in a grave –
the rest has wilted. She has burned and died.

I do not want to be Sylvia Plath anymore
though her words were eloquent
and her waist was very thin. Those insides were
polluted as soon as Hughes discovered them.

Does anyone personify depression?
I would, I think, if I let myself be her again.

Her pretty limbs dangling beyond her head, the
torso conjoined with crimson bars
once metal or iron, once acquainted to
little pollen flakes she swallowed I am sure.
Is anything as pure as a woman above the floor?

I do not want to be Sylvia Plath anymore
but I am sure she is still pure, too.
I bet flowers grow through her throat and exist
in the young body she so hotly removed.

Little beads, baby blooms, figs
writing poems from a nucleus’ dull flicker –
thyme ablaze in patterns of words she has said.  

I once wanted to be Sylvia,
because most of the time I want to be dead.

Thanatos broke the paradise and gave it yellow skin
but when slit, his peel hummed like an opera
just beautiful enough to make me fall in love with him:
moon set and guts gouged from death songs sung.
How his eyes are melancholy orbs, storm clouds
and his chest has not hair but scales that shed to stories,
the final sunset he found as a father in doubt
before noticing me in a scope and his son in glory.
Now he walks less ugly through esplanade and field,
singing through battles that eat him to wounds.
When he reaches me, on one knee he has kneeled:
a proposal has no purpose for us, so he passes his tune.
    Is death a mission to bristle our love?
    Thanatos, my one and only, is an angel above.

a relapse
is like reheating coffee on the stove
hoping it tastes so stale
you won't want to drink it anymore

but even then, I
will pour it on my skin and
hate myself for days.

Your morning breath drips as honeysuckle into tea –
I drink it, refreshing. There are days
where I can nearly see the heart in your chest like a Valentine’s Day
card and you are not just flesh and bones when we touch.
You are full the same way my scalp is a street of
gold streaks. Our love was once not more
than a **** planted in a coffee can, now there are roses
whose thorns lead a trail back to the day we first met under umbrellas
and dewdrops slightly sweeter than rain. I catch all humidity
as if I were a cloud – stormcloud, suncloud, so rich
with your every season I could boil it in kettles and make steam.

The air is ****** up: it is a flower’s fault
a peony weeping and recessed
its creases looking like an elderly face –
I play dead, pretend to be aged than earth.

You count my rings as pine trees’
but I have few, if you’ll notice. You do.  

I would say your name if the oxygen was
not stolen away: instead, I tongue at
my teeth and breathe breathe breathe in
secret hoping the garden won’t reveal me.

A fairylike, but natural room I am in –
feel its rotten sap still giving sticky hands.