Bellyaches originate in a forest
of as many organs you can imagine, assaulting each other
tree bark hung like Christmas lanterns on the border
that fall and kiss the **** floor come January.
When you cry out, remember anyone can kiss and make up
and I will remember too. Even your most painful places.
Inflammation is clouds billowing on sunny days,
digestion is their migration to the next downtown over,
your body is just nature, and nature is always, always right.
All too often, we believe we are a cathedral
of glass that can be stained and hit by baseball seams:
bellyaches are hiccups that do not dance out of your mouth
earthquakes are from monkeys hopping
from vine to vine, realize hurt exists because you are alive.

Our first kiss tasted like bad days, and so did our last:
we are moon flowers. We bloom when the sky becomes a
big tentacle, my lips strawberry pillows speckled
by dead flakes red skin you chapped with your tongue.

Everyone is in bed and we are in each other,
everyone is awake and we are swallowing more pills.

We walk, we blink, but we just think, think, think
of whatever dream we had last night when it all wore off
our lovely bones sounding like mouths bleeding love
                    or your train arriving at a station of sunflowers.

i:
how is that garden
i planted on/in your chest doing

ii:
in the morning, i like to write
in the morning, i like to drink coffee

the mug goes between my feet
so i don't need socks
and my hands give birth to my words
is that okay is that okay is it

odd

iii:
speaking of coffee,
we work so well with it. i am milk i am
made to be spoiled

and you are just sweet enough
to go perfectly
in me
(cinnamon)

iv:
sunburn would be okay if
it left your handprint forever pale
on my ***

v:
if you ever leave me again,
i will be so sad

my body will become strawberry milk and
you may not recognize me
for the color of
my blood

vi:
is it the sunset or the moonrise

I can organize my cuts and burns
by alphabetical order, day of the week, last year this year.
I can recite the reasons why I love them more than
any man, any shirttail brushing inside
my inner thigh:

they never leave. My blades never miss,
I never have to miss my blades when they leave.

I heard the story of a man who was murdered, his wife abused
and still he did not leave
he stayed like a scar
because he rose again the moment someone else
touched her skin, blew up as if full with gasoline.
I watched him fly above the city,
dropping death on those who already had their hands on it
wrung it out of beautiful men and women.

I want to do that so badly,
**** myself cell by cell, scrape the skin off
flake by flake. I want to
be dead but not know it yet. Sail in the air as ashes.

I bought a new dresser since you propped me again mine.
No longer can I reinvent that day –
it is too high, I would not knock your belongings into a drawer
and fish by strings of saliva just to see you again,
send my body parts to your mailbox so they feel at home.

But I can sit pantyless in an office chair
shooting bad guys via computer cables. They all are bald and
do not voice in my accent, nor yours, we were only
ourselves almost as I am only me without you
though not quite. Somehow we
are two together while I am not more than a half on my own.

When the judge asks,
how many fractions are the reminisces of a person worth?
I pontificate that I shall test them like a hypothesis,
I forget the loss of virginity because naivety never did leave me
though you did, and that is about the same, but not quite.

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.

There is something to be said about me loving women:
I did not love them gently. I had rage and
though their skin was smooth, their hearts could be as hard as
a man’s. Then, there are the men who I held when
mugs of green tea were only something we could burn our
tongues on, we would slide them together
and their wounded bodies slept on the other’s welts.

I have learned it is okay to be soft to those who can hurt me,
that there are hundreds of ways to love someone
that his hurt and her hurt is not always similar to mine.

I have relationships with and in watercolors.
The paints are conversations we could never bare having or
dishonesties swirling, permanent on some canvas –
picked up colors as wiry black hairs and straight auburn ones.
She folded my dress on the balcony but
a grey windstorm violently stole it. She made it happen.

I have learned that purity can hurt me, too,
the skipping stones that stub someone else’s toes and make
their feet taste like salt. The women I have loved
saw moonlight brighter than I ever would,
just so they could dim it themselves, like a dull knife.

When the soft bodies became too hard of hearts,
someone told me that I was going to love again soon
but it was not the same. I do not hit my pillow when my head
becomes insomniac, thinking of their faces.
I love men who are as fragile as tea leaves and taste so
sweet: their hurts feel just like I am vomiting my breakfast.

Scruffy thing, livid from washing
with the tip of my tongue
found hair in places I knew not existed:
it gave little track-marks, a buried belly button
sprouts in the radius of your private parts
and I scrambled your fur like eggs.

Matted with saliva now
but I find small locks in my ******* from
time to time, ones that did not stick
and were plucked from your pants-line.

They slumber in a box or are wiggled
between your comb’s teeth on my nightstand,
I want to find the torn follicles
and replace the black stems again
compose poems on you with my wet mouth
hide my name in your body hair please.

He wants me to shut up about before and after, he doesn’t
sleep anymore to throw off a balance
between now and then,
here and later, when it happened in regards to tonight. My mind
works as a clock of who we have become since:
my body only exists in the place of Our Great Divide.
Morning is just sheets of velvet upon a
lover’s breast, to be peeled, to reveal her strawberry scars.
Evening is when I feel her fists inside my skin as if
I am being penetrated by icebergs
and I cry, your **** hasn’t been the same since it happened.
The blood seems to get lost in the train-track
to your veins. In our divide,
I wonder if most of it was passed to her half of your heart
but that thought makes me so sad I remember I am mostly water
whereas there is simply the milk of her curves:
I have the talent
of turning myself inside out when I want to be dead.
She just curdles. I was once the same,
he wants me to shut up about before and after but at least I
can cry on anniversaries without needing a calendar or
rotting the post of my ex-boyfriend’s bed.

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.

People who touch me are scary
but people who don’t touch me are worse:
if I am a pocket they turn inside out,
at least I am not suffocating
in someone’s emptiness.

There are arrows made for killing and
arrows made for loving –

I was oblivious to the latter
until my heart dropped and bled on the floor,
crying, give me over to someone please!

And I did it fast. I was given eternal love
all because of an arrow in the ***.  

One day I will die for the same twig –
wooden, pending, poked through my spleen.
Even open wounds have needs!

I beg like a girl, please oh please,
if you make me die I can live in a dream.

I have made a new skin for you twenty-six times
the cells, a telescope or our children
having lunch on my favorite parts of you –

sometimes their lips’ pressure made you cross
chattering like a bug on summer screen doors,
and you would turn them blue. Aching,

they would plead for a larger bruise,
discolorations that would give plenty of room
for the fresh cells I am growing, giving life.

These make you smile for their thirty-five days
spread across my hips and the waves
rocking the sun, radiance to burn your side,

the teeter-totter into your flesh –
I remember that you love me again and
have, too, given me new skin twenty-six times

but yours is built much like a fire, heat ambling
to my chest left and farther to the right,
every cell becoming one skin, waves high tide.

Love is a series of lanterns being lit
where there was no need for lights to be hung, unraveling at the
ceiling's spine
I set a flame by means of our hybrid blood.

Already *******, just how infections are supposed to breed,
how love is supposed to be
I fear someone else has touched the vials.

She started a forest fire
that's traveled from grass to stars to hearts
and the meteors give false hope, seem all but perfectly like rain.
Calm, there
is a small peace in
having all your worst nightmares come true.

I understand these problems because
they first existed in my head, everything always begins as
cells in a body
now relief in seeing hurricanes split windows

                    because he would
                                     understand, too.

Hanging from these rooftops is what is left of just the two of us
it looks pathetic like dead cigarette butts. Our
nerves tied into rope.

She has contaminated us
I cannot hold his hand without touching hers too, I cannot
love him without watching our foundation
burn to the ground
but the whole world is bright when there are three lovers inside.

Once, there was a man who wanted so much to love that he
snuggled butterfly bodies back into a cocoon
like a small manila folder. He married their two existences together
and braided her antennae to signify an engagement ring –
never kissing, not as a husband and wife would
just would light up the nerves below his skin any time he showed
his butterfly what became of
the earth outside of air holes. In a way, he lived there, too –
breathed through the sheer fabric of butterfly wings.
He knew how to love, every eyelash looked like her flying again.

This was supposed to be the poem I wrote without any reference to
my love for you, but it seems the only pretty things
I can say are about us.

I question what you have never wondered about, but
somehow I wonder because of you.

How is it that we survived last summer’s big rainstorm without an
umbrella, and were motionless under it
until you shook me so I would remember to breathe.

Thinking
I have never slid my arm into a man’s sweater when I got cold,
put the other ***’s fabric around my body,

would have been nice that night.

But it could not have been so bad. I peeled my wet clothes off
like a tease, wishing that somehow you
could be watching me through the closed bathroom stall.

Soon
I don’t know if it was you or the blankets
that swallowed my hips, as if being inserted underground,
I just know that six hours later I woke up sore from feeling so safe.

From you, I learned that no one can rewind seasons
to take back mean words or return pine trees their old cones

and the next time you call
I should thank you for telling me what you have for breakfast each
morning, what you make for dinner and midnight snacks.

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.

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

You can tell if someone is rotting by looking in their eyes. I
get the look of smoke on cotton,
my mother's childhood house burning when
the doors became more difficult to shut than my legs:
her father died
her mother drowned
so she could pass the bottle to mine. The only ring I have
been given are the purple
bags and bruises and tapeworms
everyone says were alright in childhood,
the rings around my eyes tapering like the sound of
morse code. Read me
listen to me please because my body fluids are like ashes
that will go up in flames again if
ignored: I will burn you. Your black eyes will
get blacker, darkness is the only thing that can commit to me.

I know a girl who has a tattoo
of the words “hold on” and it is mostly sad because
her skin
could not hold onto the needle that
breathed the ink
into her bloodstream. She keeps the words
as a petal on the flower of last
summer, reminding her that we can become bruised
again and again and again
without ever losing our sense of touch.

Does it not feel like rain today to you,
my delicate ghost?

That or the wind has lust,
blowing up my skirt, it must see the
white you left unattained by men
I say for you, these storms are
a chance to greet pureness again.

You have an O-mouth
the way your whispers ring like howls:
borrow the air, evaporate mud.

I hear such a sound and know that
virginity won’t be enough –
what tears do fall
from your great blue waterspout?

Do they know, my delicate ghost,
they are but pieces of you dropped in
my hands?

When a lace funnel carries your final
god-spits cleansing our land
you are so delicate, but I shall ask –
is it like rain for ghosts, is it sad?

I never wanted a man
but when I did,
his chest had to feel as soft as mine;

our *** was to be the kind
that made buds
blossom and petals fly.

Thought

he loves me
he loves me not
it doesn’t matter, he is still hot.

I could not be reminded
of a gun

when a man wanted to press me up
against a concrete wall,
I wanted
to think of bubblegum or

August rain;
soft, warm, moist things
keep-me-close sort of things.

I never wanted a man
until I met you

who had me the wettest of all things
mimicking hot tea
on the very small of your thigh

dropping leaves for

summer storms to pick up
and love us, love us not, love us.

You said you like my shampoo,
but you love me more.
I didn’t shower for weeks, tucked my
***** limbs where they couldn’t be seen,
just to make you grin.

Your lips met my forehead,
tasted black waves, dyed to straw,
that stuck to your mouth in the wind.
I regret to admit
the hurricane soon fled.

I bathed today, in dish soap,
and focused on my feet,
then cut off the hair you kissed,
because it had grown too lengthy.
I waited as long as I could;
my eyes aren’t visible,
and I tripped over a rug this morning.

I’m bidding farewell to you –
the last trace of
your body on mine.
And I want to cry.

how do you love someone who wants to be dead

how do I love someone
who didn’t
want to die when they made me want to

something breaks my heart every day
I’m sorry

I hate this attic I have become,
full of dusty things and second thoughts
getting good use of a ***** old trunk
it is my bed, flattened boards into a cot.

Inside are the rotten brain-cells
where I construct every bottled-up plan
pursed, then shattered on their shelf
blood on my cheeks, I blush for the man.

O, he pushes into my womb,
to be used as the deepest keeping place
and I will wither into the closet soon
the parasite inside me, I need a final case.

Wilt farther, I know I shall
as men, bloodsuckers, open my bowels.

When my birth canal becomes important, I want to create
nature. Unforgotten nature.

Her name will be of the moon or of the heavens –
my Luna, my Evangeline,
I even thought of giving her my stuffed pet’s title, my childhood
best friend. She was a cat with a bell around her neck
but I cut that off, I already knew of lone *******.

When more threads between my legs are loosened, as I only
would slit for beard or baby,
it is not a wound but nature unforgotten, fresh fruit.

I want to have a daughter
who someone will **** the morning breath out of and remember
that her freckles are midnight stars, that he or she
has a piece of heaven within them. Oxygen and eggs –
my daughter, a woman in the twelfth grade.

The best thing you can do to get me to forgive you
is take off your belt
and make me bleed, better than I can.

I have slit my wrists into mouths for air and
pockets to hide unhappiness in

because of words
like sorry
like I wish I did not have to do this
but everyone always has to, I know, and I need

for someone to carve the
flesh from my asscheeks the way my
parents wanted to
that time when I was six years old and dashed into
the road really hoping to get hit

for the first time. You
could hold the blood and guts for the first time and I
promise
when I am empty, an apology will feel full.

I am lying on the beach
sand is in my skirt
the waves break in my eyes
& I am loving you

headfirst.

The reason the sun burns
my skin is the same
reason why

I cannot hold your hand
without sobbing
anymore, you are beautiful
& could ruin everything.

The pores on your face
are enflamed, like a valuable red ruby:
I realize for the first time that I could shatter you
put my sadness in your heart
stuffed up like fortune cookies, misfortune.

When you cry,
I realize for the second time that love is not just
a chemical like dopamine, serotonin.

I do not love you just so I can fall asleep
at night but I only play with
puzzles when I realize you are missing from me:
that is the difference
between science and feeling, your beauty.

I taste the placebo affect
when you smile like quartz in the rough,
I realize for the first time that I want you to hang
from my neck on a diamond cut chain
and discover, and know that I can be happy.

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.

I do not imagine suicide as impulsive,
rather the day I wake up and travel thousands of miles
in my thoughts
to tell everything I have inhabited goodbye.

Nature will have the instinct to swallow my skin
in its blanket, the breeze whispers
to my boyfriend that I love him anyway.

A crew of mushrooms shall lay me on their breast or
beneath their umbrellas as in a rabbit hole

and upon lying down, petals spill
across my tired eyelids, and the breeze murmurs
that it is okay: I will not be missed because I will have
nature holding my bones the entire time.

She is there, playing my hair like a harpsichord,
whisking me away.

My skin keeps raising in a certain spot,
the surrounding veins looking like orange juice pulp. I think
about my boyfriend in Florida, how he ****** my
calf right where the spider bite will return
again and again, and maybe he has sent his teethmarks
in the papery flesh of grocery store containers.
In that case, twisty-ties on bread bags are fangs I can finger.

He says I have the look of white chocolate everywhere
but so do zits, teeth, and milk, if we want
to use logic. He tries to make me seem beautiful but

it mostly falls flat, not until last week did I believe in bruises
as a method of communication or appreciation.
Now it would make me happiest
to mix our blood and call this relationship romantic.

There is this disease my friends complain about
called a “food baby,” how after eating it feels like small feet
create rocking chairs from the dull edge of my ribs. I
feign labor and birth nine months later:
she’s yours, congratulations. It stopped being cute
after the first time I made my boyfriend’s face spark up in
confusion and fantasy, it makes more sense to
say there are maggots getting married
under an arch made pale by my intestinal track. I say so now.

I miss my boyfriend in Florida very much,
although I only have to lift my thigh up and he is here.
He leaves scars on me from insects that need to escape their
venom, I am the Golden Gate Bridge
that they climb merely to jump off from, to die.
He would probably say they are just strawberries on my
hips and hands, white chocolate that would not melt for him.

your sobbing on the telephone basically became,
did he ever love me enough
to wish that I was his first & not
just his last

because it comes every daybreak
because moonlight's
so much more quiet than sun

I fall asleep counting lies instead of sheep
then the cold bodies

coo
coo coo coo
& replace any warm-blooded creature myths gave

your songs about trust are now
just broken promises

(they matter too)

coo
coo coo

there is pressure in your stomach
where you want to make me shut up & stop now
so we pause

for you to replace yourself
with someone less calm

but the moonlight is so much more quiet than a
sunrise
I have dawn inside me &
intend to ***** it out onto your shoes

fertilize the flowers
so a whole meadow grows facing you

birds coo
(they matter too)
coo, coo coo, coo coo coo

we talk about this 'til my lids can close safe,
did he love me enough to wish that I was
his first
or just a really good last

because I tried to be really *******
great to you

& mornings
have always been hard to bury
behind my eyes
coming second after some really great nights.

in the search for warmth, I put on older pants
that may have frayed rumps but feel
good on my hands

though you look better on me
I am just not the starched denim kind of girl
would rather not wear pants at all than
be flattened, smothered by your material.

It is August, but the rain has got us snowed-in
and when you expect everyone
to be upset to get loud to cry cry cry
they do not. It is quiet.
The quiet hurts me (is my sort of madness).

The air outside
resembles the moon, or my skin.

In the winter,
the sidewalks look as if I have been beaten and
died coolly, flatly, quietly
on them. I am so white, I glow.
I am so sickly, I poison the grass.

But it is all very soft and silent,
I am like a pillow
too cold to rest your head on.

At night, I fall, devouring anything that I can
love —
when there is nothing,
I create the big rain, the arsenic rain
I stick to myself and everyone is hush, hush.

I used to sing a lot, used to lace pearls on flower petals
and the sea would sing to me. I have heard that my female body syncs
with the moon
that I am a tide, my mood is high my mood is low
                            I am a force of nature Mother Earth can hold.

The idea hits me. My heart is set on fire by it:
I am the reason some rocks are heart-shaped, my fluids
can create layers on ammolite.

Even my ***** could purify a pond,
I am earth I am water I am wind I am fire I am juice squeezed from
apples and orange peels
                    only the sun can gather my pulp.

I watch a father star cradle its firstborn
and we exhale on the same sky, I cannot believe it. We eat and drink
from the clouds -                          my clouds, our light.

The opal loves her body (she shines) the wind loves her body (swaying)
birds with fat bellies sing to me and
every one wiggles her ****
because she loves her body - why shouldn't I.
        (There could be pieces of me in everything beautiful).

Sometimes we play boyfriend and girlfriend. You tell me it’s
thundered at your house right as it
thunders in mine, we share the same weather that
our lovers do not. Together, they are their 5000 miles away.
And together, we are still alone without them.

I live as if on an airplane
suffering the clouds and clear skies
the flat lands, forests,
and skylines I almost touch the
tips of.

My wings vary
from angelic to hard metal.

When I love,
it is like throwing flowers out of a
window, which land
perfectly in a girl's hair

but I still have a *******
that I can use on you
and be
completely warranted to do so.

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.

You are melting into the windshield,
a single bug the wipers hit,
and I never loved you: no, I could
not have desired something like this.

Your flesh does not resemble a
body, nor a human, nor any being I
have felt compassion for somehow.

And your words are jumbled like
lyrics repeated out of tune. I do not
know you, bug, I do not love you.

I have noticed that you do not bleed,
although your murmurs are pained
of a pink sort of memory
from your live, a single human day.

Some witch, blocks of lavender
and spice and bricks, will pick you:
she will grant a single human wish.

May she find some use of you,
the single bug I have slaughtered so,
but recall that when I killed you,
you were something I did not know.

Months have been named after
girls who broke my heart, four whole weeks
a year birthed in the honor of those who
should have never been born
delivered in my heart like a box of fireworks –

I half-learn foreign languages to believe that
there is no such thing as remembrance
and so her name is different
than each fourth month, the one of showers.

Cometh no flowers or forgiveness
enough to forget, just new words for old pain.

The first boy who saw me with my shirt off
did not like girls, not yet
not ever

and asked me if it was stretch marks or cuts
decorating where
other men would soon touch

as if he were wondering
the color of my eyes. (Blue or grey, maybe.)

Our first conversation went like this:
*Let’s have a picnic, I bring the food and you bring
your body. You will take me from behind
while your tresses caress my face
and your skirt mingles with the hair on my crotch
brunette fields on light pink gingham –
our skin embarrassingly red against a jade prairie.
I will be like a teenager again, make you into
an adult. You will teach me how to tie
your cherry into a knot with the tip of my tongue –
if anyone sees, I can tell them you are my girl
& starting today you never have to be lonely again.

I am getting tired of the sea
every morning, whispering, “duermete”
like we are lovers
who kept each other awake all night.

To wish her goodbye…
say, I am leaving Miami, him, not you.

Reminded it is not just love that can sweep
someone off their feet –
also thinking I left some of my food
in his refrigerator, two gallons of milk gift.

I believe I will return,
not for liquid, not for anything tangible
just a redo of our last embrace
without an ocean of salt lulling every

******* thing,
and I believe I exist in there somewhere –
sea-wide, seaside, we rest just us.

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.

My mind does not sleep through the night, the questions
have their before and after. This is the
after. I ask again if he was ever really here at all,
this is June
this is very nearly July
and I am colder now than I was last December on his
breath, that I could see wiggling
wanting to escape into me as a pillow would into a case.

My mind is full of his absence,
I think it grows every morning I wake up without
a moat of our bodies cut into my bed. We were only just
children playing house
without the need for plastic appliances and plates,
made linen from hair lockets, leave

seed marks on his skin. I ask again if it still remains
touched like an early ripened strawberry.
That was December,
was supposed to be, but I cannot trust a memory of my
head resting against the fabric of anyone’s jeans
because then it may be true
that he really loved me after all, and maybe he does still.

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).

He once said that he did not feel anything until it had a name.
It was invalid, inexistent. I decided that the worst thing about me is not
that I want to **** myself but that I cannot ****
everyone who has ever ruined a piece of me. Their numbers
are still in my phone in case I need to call and apologize for nothing,
in case they still want me and I can cry when I turn them down.

I let people hate me more than I let people love me,
I need men more than I want them. My sexuality is fictional, he’d say
because there is not a name for what I do to everyone I touch.
There are only their names polluting my heart.
I let people hate me, I let them keep me dying more than living.