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).

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

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

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.

Let us go to that market on Broad Street, the one by Little Theater
where I got mad at you and refused to scale your wrist like it were a skyline –
I did not even knot your knuckle-hair with my sweat.
I was so angry, but I want to go by there again. We can search for some
nectarines and decide which share of our bodies they appear, feel most like.
One will have to be rotting, because your cheeks are an old peach,
black fuzz on the ends of something round, enflaming –
another can be as young-looking as I was when you first touched me.
Then, you will hold the door open while we prance into the House of Pizza,
find that corner bench where painted lighthouses dawn the walls:
I have kissed you here before, once when I was sad and another with a grin.
Sometimes, I wonder how many places I have loved you
but that would be as impossible as counting every way I have known you –
sometimes you are a moon off the axis, sometimes you are a plum
sometimes you are bobby pins in my curl, sometimes not
sometimes I rest on the bench where you licked frosting from my cheek
and sometimes just going to the grocery makes me miss you enough.

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

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

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

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

after they have binged on him
and when I promised

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

glasses have no private view
like i could **** myself
when everyone could see,
though it was only meant for you
an image you have “for keeps”
everyone else defiles me

i want to be beautiful
and walk to the library at dawn
but they point, call me a ghost
they claim i do not belong

then, he with no teeth
will bite and snip my dress
until his gums begin to bleed

when they stain my shirt,
i will mourn, death of invisibility
once i scavenge i am caught
to the lens of your eye
climb the brim of your lids,
very tippy bit, you let me die.

my hair is sticking up like weeds because of the static:
when god calls it sounds like white noise
but I feel my veins cramping
and a man shoves himself between my bones

sleep on the breast of dead shrubs
will they swallow me? I am
a lamb and my blood is holy to the ailments I have

will you destroy me?
just to see my bowels absorbed by foliage  

please know I am in a better place now I will be a tree.

is that my heartbeat
or thunder eating its way
through my bedroom walls?

It is the place of dreaming,
you love me here without needing words.

Either one of us, you or I or you and I both
have lips on the other one’s toes
because the walk has
been far for this touch and I am weak.

You promise me here
that I am inside my body even when you
are, too -

I am not to live as some would suggest I do
breathing for the next person
to grab hold of me
and say that I gave them possession.

But welcome home,
it is you who visited two states to kiss me.

I cannot promise anything but
the kind of connection
that means I may dream about you forever

or write as if I will.
All the other nights where even my mind
had its lights off, they were just
practice for having to walk away from you.

It does not matter where it hurts
now that you are here
just that I can have you touch me there.

Sweet baby,
I dream of your love that flows like waves.

1.
the walls are built of shapes
triangles and circles and hexagons that do not
fit together
like we once did

we are these mislaid figures now

2.
the moon comes out at dark
but when I feel dark
I will not come out of my room

3.
the oilcloth catches my tears now because
you are too busy
to notice that they fall

it is like I am trying to hide
the weather

give a big umbrella to clouds in the sky

4.
the veins are taunting me
again

5.
the password to my email
is the last syllable of your first name
how average of me to want to **** myself and
keep talking from underground

6.
can I still apologize for holding your
heart hostage
as a dead-girl walking

Tied your hair with my tongue
into a little knot, a twisty-curly braid
and your pores turn to flecks of
pink sand when I make you blush.

Raising your shirt, I see lace sheets
where the hair on your chest lies:
found an everglade of dark and light
transcribed on your body’s duvet.

The skin you pull over your head
every morning, hiding salt from your
dreams of me hidden in a blanket
and being leisurely ****** to sleep.

Looked like some creature ate
flesh from your shoulder, a bit of you
and dried the blood with their lips
when they were finished ingesting it.

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.

Gauze on your arm –
reddening, the skin a shadow you
call after and summon home.

Like sunrises, the big half-moon
has its purple flab melted.
I humanize everything.

I make it all warm
even death piercing a door hinge –
where children hide safely.

Ink is the blood of another being
not like us, but you write
with your own on a pillowy peel.

I count the number of women you’ve slept with
by how much lint I can pick from your shirt. Girls who staged
a camisado: by evening, a washing machine’s dream –
supposed to be in slumber but you come out
needing cleaned. I love you the way a mother does
her son, even after he has said, “I hate you,” ninety times.
If I cannot remove you from them,
at least their particles stay unattached to you and
I am a bobby pin broken in half because it tried to open a lock
sewed closed with a special heart-glue; other
girls are newspaper articles read with coffee at dawn
you forget until the story’s repeated on a nightly broadcast.
God, you look like opal when you come home –
curly-cue dents on the back of your knees,
the kind of handwriting only made by fingernails or teeth.
I wonder if it is because no one can find your birthmarks but me
if a woman can be self-righteous enough to want
to inscribe her own, and so, you have just become a gem
littered all over with worthless pearls.
Invisible, I am invisible. I can want you, but it cannot be seen
how your love is intangible and cannot be felt.
What he sees is so important that he does not realize
just as much is too bright for his eyes –
when I believed our breath was a single, everlasting force
and why would choruses sing a staccato song
is the same question as, why would I continue to flirt with you
knowing that every day I crawl further outside our
three-year bubble into something more like
a bunker. I sweep the floors behind every midnight attack.

I will show you the ***** parts of us,
and how unsafe their salt tastes,
mended, reckon bliss in this place –
no one kills what they never loved.

Because then it will not matter,
amputees are not fatal, but no one
has amputated their heart or head.  

Each person, each piece is opaque –
but there is something to be seen
inside, the ***** parts we leave
wrestling with us when they speak.

I think I want to be with you everywhere
and not just somewhere

as though the moss is our carpet,
rain sculpts a feeling of growth in my bones
I am a tree. A meadow.  But you lie still –
wait for my breeze, you simmer away
a dandelion.

Your hundred florets spread like wings
and fly somewhere on me –
a promiscuous garden. Somewhere &
everywhere.

My mother gave me a locket that has, “love is patient,”
engraved on its hind, in English and in French. I wonder if that
is another excuse for her not being able to love me
the first fourteen years of my life.
The necklace has a cross, too – her saying He took care of me
when she could not. Second in importance, yet,
am I to an absent father too busy upstairs to say morning.
“Love is kind,” is a sort of finale, somehow fireworks
say that no one has ever loved me up to my mother’s standards.
She did not flinch when she gave me this. It
is understanding that she was not the only love I did not have.

Two are there, one is like a rail
a forget-me-not stem –
I forgot him. The memories were
dug from my girlish head yet

there is a fever in his grave
weeds severed his head, he looks
more dead the
farther I back away and the
garden is more & more beautiful.

I begin to stick up for
the bristles, the maggots I hid –
at least someone tastes him.
At least his ghost can lead on one

more smaller thing, barely
nothing. Yes, I realize I was not
anything but a parasite inside

something who was already so
close to dying, someone bigger –
someone darker than me. I
chose the second.

He had a fever about him, too
but it just lit up his cheeks
and his eyes, though they were
always closed. At least
I can remember they are brown.

Two are there, I am impressed
with one flushed man
while the other became too dead.

When were we first able to look at our organs, point out the
brown spots on a liver or cuts under your skin?
I want to know when man first
came to think of me as a piece of fruit. A watermelon
only good for her seeds,

an apple needing a good cleaning. I imagine
they first practiced stitching on those big banana leaves,
made a hole in the center
as if anyone cared whether the plant could breathe.
But really, what does earth science have to do with my body?

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.

The last time she saw me naked
I was a child

who would plead for forgiveness by cutting it into her skin
and who you could tell still walked barefoot
through winter and snow near
her best friend’s boat
to light a joint they would put out on her wrist.  

(She said it was beautiful
but I was destroying myself and it was beautiful
like the blood left on a train-track after someone jumps.)

I deserve to take up space,
he said. (six by four feet in an underground
cage)

mama said I never stop crying,
that I'll still scream when I am dead. she
reserved me a plot.

I have loves who
would be mad I left a note.

I have loves who will keep me their ghost, tear
my white sheet skin
because I never said goodbye.

see my flesh
in a necklace,  hypnotize happy boys
you are getting very sleepy

very tired of
holding onto something half-dead.

I feel most like a ****** when I am cold
         the pale daughter of snowflakes
not to be touched with fingertips.

             But by tongue –
it is the skin that beats my laughter
and halting me through ice.

No man can separate my wings or he’ll
          freeze, become attached to me.
obstinate as a glacier who sleeps.

I lost my final baby tooth at age thirteen. A man came
along to pluck it out of me,
pried my chapped lips apart and said
it might hurt a lot. It might even feel like a worm, like my belly is
bloated with bottles of water or bags of blood.

But I was only reminded of
needles, the thinnest cylinder of an off-white substance
developed to cure me from my childhood.

He gave me acupuncture, he left the needles in my pocket after
so I would never forget what he gave me. Not what
he took, just what I needed
to remove the *****, size seven footprints from his floor.

I did not keep the paraphernalia,
just grew my adult molars, had dreams about crawling after him
feeling tentacles swim in my mouth again
and biting down so hard I could fill bags with blood.

I am almost eighteen and soon
he will know how it feels for someone to see what is inside your
body, then take it without your permission.

Your pupils are tiny and starry,
lifting your eyes from that dark canyon
the dust sea

dying them brown, giving them
black skin that won't peel
under sunlight.

I understand moths surround you
but you are strong,
they only
fill your eyes like tears

attracted to the light
your nameless energy, where life touches

you
it just begins to trust.

Insomniac plants must squeeze
their eyelids at night
to build the crystal white structure of
you, hues shadows hold onto

saves, grows to, trusts
as a lullaby verse to become glued on.

We sprout from energy
bright and warm, float in a hot tea bath
chamomile up out of porcelain

rosemary and roses and honeydew
lit by candles,
we feel your energy and just believe.

I want to turn you into the cotton slip I wear
under my skirt, suffocate you in my tight spaces
and give yellow perspiration to your pink lips.

Limbs wrapped around you like a head, the frill
of a sunflower flaccid in autumn moonshine:
oh, feminine stars, you say. I am in a dark place.

I have become a river and I will eat you up –
admire the open field, the sore meadow and if
you can’t sleep, remember you are in my dream.

Where you still trot southeast without being
connected to my dress seam. You could go back
home but I would rather you stay warm in me.

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.

How can young bones have old blues
when they do not keep strands of their dead wife’s hair
in a kitchen cabinet, too lone to rot or grey.

The sun moves not at inches, but in miles when it sets
and that is how I feel every time I am left.

My fingers creak when he touches me.

He trusts my heart enough to sleep on my chest
breathes onto the origin of my breath –
I do not dare move a centimeter, forgo our bodies’ sync.
I do not trust that any minute stays existent.

I met him with old scars
have been given young ones on the heel of love.

Mostly, the blemishes appear like a blush
which is only just blood settling in and surfacing by a
titanic of skin.

I think of a young person twirling their hair
around everything, pencils and fabric and water bottles
that both new and old lovers will
touch and believe they got the closest to her scalp.

My insides are silver, his are as
gold as the trail the sun leaves to remember dawn.

The only silly part is his asking for more air, I want to
say that he is alive and because he is alive
he has plenty of air
(but I would gladly offer the remnants of mine).

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.

Everything I do not know
is scribed in pages floating on street corners
of every city in the whole wide world.

Strangers know more about his love
than I do.

He cannot talk too loud or
I may hear, and I run after these verses like
live words can save my soul or
better yet, **** it.

It is the worst case scenario.
My knees hit the concrete, I am unloved.

I am a secret
one that cannot be articulated, written down
for my presence is like a funeral.

Not the birth of something, rather a death
a lack swimming internationally.

Everything I do not know is
everything that everyone else already does –
whispering more beautiful secrets.

Well, there’s these watery eyes
that plead and guide my travels –
a remote without a power switch,
so I can never not act, in fear of
disappointing infants, lambs, art.

I am told to sway from right
to left, then back around again,
as an image for more beautiful
things than my mangled self.

Transposed beneath moonlight,
a hundred vials of innocence
taunt me, a kaleidoscope of the
experiences I’ve lost through
mania and wishing to be less manic.

I will rub your back until you forget what she did to you –
she was your first love, you were mine. I want to explain in words what
beauty looks like, but I have learned that the
fireworks when we cup our fingers together or sit too close are
even better than a kaleidoscope
unfolding holidays back into normal days. The 5th of July, January 2nd.

Well, in two days, they will have you under anesthesia
and I keep hoping you might say some
nonsense about my eyes. I keep worrying you’ll dream of her tongue.
You are on the side of catching any morning light –
but there is no comparison to a spark that has already burned out.

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

I have watched mothers lose
their children, and children lose their mothers. I am tied
by my toes to a loop
which can be seen in cafes and morgues -
the breast-feeding, the burying, the everything is all
on a string. I have heard about
women and children thinking they are unlimited,
I am unlimited, too, if
the two ends of a circle never meet.
My lover once closed his heart off from everyone, and I
never understood until now
that you do not
have to open up in order to be full inside. I still can
water his flowers, even the weeds
and he never has to open his eyes to see and
he never has to open his heart
to feel. I understand that sometimes it is better to just be.

you are the stain on my skin,
the “i’m sorry” cuts bandage

& pinker than a girl’s insides
we have the ballad of crying

my feet in front of yours: it is
a contagious fever, our sobs

built upon lapses of euphoria
you give me reasons to come

my senses, my fingers are on
strings to not wring my neck

northern pinnacle you have &
gallop around my heart-lines

this is just where you belong:
on & in me through my finale.

While you
had me check to
make sure you are still alive,

I noticed
the most beautiful
embroidery on your heart. (It did not say

her name
or my name)

The valves open and shut so
quickly
not because you are
dying, but because you have so

much love
you could overflow

you are too big of an ocean to just
up and leave me.
I am learning

to tie my veins to yours
so
breathing becomes a little easier for
you and the thump da thump

(I have a heart murmur)

will draw
a portrait of two lovers not abandoning

each other. Red as a rose’s
flesh, pink as ours:
together,
we can never become threadbare.

Why is it
that after I cry
I feel as if I have been
washed inside

but when you **** me
I cry

because
I never want to be
clean again.

She doesn't miss you, she doesn't miss you
but don't worry:
he does not miss me either.

I have to wonder
if there is something I am missing,
some kind of place where lovers are taught how
to hurt one another
because everyone
I have met
so far has done a pretty great job.

it is exhausting to love something
too far to touch

& like their body is made of glass
when you see it
you are afraid it will crack

but they insist on making you sore
they know what
you want & what you like

even if it means risking their neck
breaking tonight

& like you are a house of worship
for a quiet man
he has no name but loves

how you make it sound
on the base of your throat, redness

when you know he has cut you &
gave you something only to
take it away

as soon as you see how exhausting
needing it is.

I mean to uproot your brain when I play with your hair
let it whisper on me like an acorn spinning in
the breeze and dribble gen from a puking child’s mouth.
His skull is a basket, his hands a corset on me now –
I can make you a man once I get the disgusting bits out.
We have different wrinkles outside but our veins sip
blood similarly, a vampire or cannibal or a passionate
fan of our hearts’ discography. I have come to
a fork in the road where your folds become almost pink:
as vivid as a guillotine, the brain is dispensed to me.
Finally, I call him mine! And in my hands is your mind.

I wonder
what training bras train us for –
could it be smiles of blood between our thighs?

Or the Olympics, that special woman sort
where everyone loses and men
are given
our prettiest offering.

We need training bras like we need them –
nothing wrong with growing grapes.

I buried thorns in your bag so
you would know not to leave again

you played them like a harpsichord
breathed the rose-scent in

& watching the blooms, I knew
that you could not disappear at all

instead floated on for a little while
until as rain once more you fall.

my arms outstretched, I give your oxygen back to you
and cannot stop the anger when your lips
are too far from me to kiss

break these bones to touch me, do not let me hate you
or I will really want to.

The food rots when it is already in my belly
baby mush, cinders from its graceless fire trail –
I dig my tonsils with ******* but
you will not return to our winter, the exterior.

So, hearts slip backward: a new abode
these intestinal earthquakes applauded in Hell
have stolen fruit I certainly could have froze.

In the woodshed, I discover a scalpel
and attempt to dislodge you from my hipbone
but now my stomach’s been kissed by Satan
I am birthing premature infants from a wound.

Another hour I shall give a funeral
for the apple core, swallow each seed so you
will grow once again safe and sound in my belly.