November rains and nothing's new:
Let's go back to writing poetry for two.
I laugh outside the echo chamber, and read O'Hara in blue.

God is gay. His name is Frank.

We've been at this for years, my dear!
So why seep into silent sludge. Ink blots
on the sole of my shoe. If not for you.
The max! The wax! The musical goo!

As you know, it's all true -
However the weather,
Dead Girls last forever.

Here is the breath.
And here are the marks left behind by bandages.

Here is where I paint your face on each shoulder blade.
I make them meet each other,
you kiss yourself.

Here are the points of silence
trapped between fingertips,
toes, the chin and chest.

Here are the secrets kept in
the small of my back.

There was a mistake made in
the Bible, and you weren't there.
The beautiful and the sublime.

There's a song in my bones and
you're singing it! We step into the
blender, and switch clothes at noon.
When the sun set, we were in
bed together. Four newborn babies:
I hallucinate the destruction of a calendar.

Bottles of wine in the grass, and
this has been the very best day!
I kiss my friends with an infected
throat, and no one minds, and we
just go on eating grapefruits.

Sticky fingers, your car was almost
stolen, and here, I swear -
you'll never have to cut your hair.

You're changing seasons, babe.
Giving in to the decay of Fall,
oh! dormant Winter drowns.
It's Spring now, and you've gone
and smothered your little garden
gnome. I'm nervous. Like Paris
before the crash, we never saw
the bootstraps coming.

I am not the girl you knew.
I am not the girl you knew.
I am not the girl you -
Touching teeth in some unfamiliar basement, you liked it, we know.
And at the diner reading horoscopes,
you couldn't help but drift back to
some racist suitor, almost, maybe.

Yes! you broke a heart beneath the
bridge, and the river was there, and
he almost fell in.

What fun! I am gnashing glass shards in my teeth, my throat so raw and I found your sister outside of a bar, shaking. Some little **** crush said he'd blow up bombs in her head, I hugged her hard, and you were flirting with the doorway.

Suppose I awoke with just enough wind in my throat to say:
I would love to eat a cake with you in June! Alone. Or July for that matter.
Though I may be busy planning other parties, so June it is.

To start, their brains are still sparking.
Neurons still making connections and
breaking promises. And really, I have
trouble with the denotaded dead as
these bodies simply find themselves
at rest, in pieces, on a piece of a cloud.
Cerulean clean - little apple alabaster.
Their flesh turns back to wax, and we light
their wick embodied skulls with little
matchbooks disguised as bible verses.
Embalmed emblems and bodies bodies bodies.
Cremation in street clothes, everything special with
a man in the oven, a woman in the wood stove.
Back to ground, in deep with the worms, and
all the tiny evil machines as ushers. Death, hm!
Is some moon rock sweat and blood blister mix,
sandalwood musk, a turpentine must. You'll trust.
Playing fast and loose with scripture,
magnetic movement, entombed. Dead bodies are
keeping check of clocks, and swallowing wrist watches,
and don't forget it. Dead bodies will be late if
they care to be. With their painted skin and
formaldehyde breakfast, they form riddles in
caskets, and what about the Egyptians?
Dead bodies have rust in their throats and
foot soles made of limestone. They take up
space in rafters, between your bed and the wall,
stained glass stained with afterthoughts, forget-me-nots.

I will wear my
mother's purple coat.
I will not cry for my
sister's best friend's father,
and wouldn't you agree?
Spring is the best time to die.

Funerals are poetry
and
caskets are cigarettes
for
sober girls.

Can't you see my hands right now?
With veins like little mountain ranges,
all rolling, and tolling for you. All
sweat beads forming and falling from
olive knuckles. Wedding rings. And
electric blue varnish resting high on
cuticle beds. Beds, for one thing, were
never our strong suit. We just fell in
squares where there was room. In
stranger's sheets, my palms rolled
beneath your back, and through your
neck. Stuck on swiveled wrists, I
taught myself a new vocabulary for
all things shadows, particularly You.

And you should see my hands right now.
And you should forget the rest.

Can you believe how old we're getting?
How parents are dropping like flies! and
we've got to mean every goodbye - with
a heavy heart and a fist full of sky, lullabies.
And wasn't it just so funny? at the grocery
store when they asked us if we were throwing
a party? It was a funeral all along. We laughed.

We can smoke cigarettes on the
overpass till our lungs collapse.
Resurrecting bodies and killing
spiders, foolish, faint-hearted,
at rest, yes! in pieces.

plywood smells and citrus blistered fingertips. we ate so many oranges that winter I thought we'd be the sun.
red crush velvet, an inky black stage, and did they know that we were sipping something heavy in the parking lot?

a man named Paul ran wires down our backs, and we painted our faces in hot lights.

Some barber, who does not love you,
Cut your hair, and gave you bangs.
You brush them back with careful
hands - yet another time you
shouldn't have chosen silence.

Weekend Warriors in face paint, remember?
Home caught fire and we danced on the
pavement. Tambourine shakes and tattered
blouses, please don't go away! Christmas
light canopy in the secret woodland electric
tree. We raged and swore we'd never leave.
All running toward homemade, handmade
radio waves. It tasted like some thick fruit
bowl and ***** poison - anything but
Still Life. Those brush strokes were shaking,
and I love you beneath theses branches,
and you and you and you and you and really -
please don't go away.

Glances in passing and nothingness,
I'll drop out and take up gardening.
And you are so cool, all German bred,
and sometimes braided. I see you, so
well-read and rather regal. ***** blonde
nuclear, alabaster, aluminum rods -
electricity dripping from the soles of
your shoes. This classroom, my own
ink blotted incubator, the radiator sits,
flatlining. Your jaw as two razor blades,
your shoulder blades, broad, gentle.

I wonder how you look in the morning,
How you look at yourself in the mirror.
Do you practice smiling, and
how often do you wash your hair? Oh,
you exist in glass, and I will not try to
know you. Leaving this poem limited,
and yet. Your jam drop mouth houses all
well-spoken soliloquies, radical requiems.

So, what would happen if we brushed
shoulders in passing? Your little accent.
Accident, we appeared in the same
huddled mass. Literary plugs in the
drain, and your new American. So,
why don't we just go walking on
airplane wings? Some transcontinental
affair. Frequent flyer *******, stranger.

Green dye fell from little jars in droplets from his apartment and on to the hardwood floors the white linens the bed sheets and me and you and i fell asleep holding your hand and i crashed your bike but i bought you beer and you threw up six times because we drank too much sitting down so when you stood up the ***** rushed through your stupid veins and to your pretty head so fast and i didn't want to leave you i wanted to kiss you behind the keg i wanted to kiss you in the bathroom in the side yard in a puddle and really when you fell in that puddle i thought you would drown but you didn't you just broke your camera some rough and tough sleepover remember my hand on the small of your back with our best friends on the same mattress you know my thumb almost got cut off at that house party we stumbled into steak knife *** of gold and joanna went to bed with a dull skull ache while your hair got caught in some australian briars

Our shadows, all gyrating in slow motion,
It tasted like gin. That night spent raging at
the penny arcade - juniper and pine and Ago.
Friday night, East Crawford Avenue, warm.
We were Christ-like figures wearing velvet,
and you spent your night in a chicken coup.

We can live together on
the hardwood floors of
my parents’ house, stay
up late, eating apples, and
sifting through pomegranate
sludge. Your beard will be
sticky, and my fingertips will
be cinnamon sugared, like
some candied catharsis,
and you can lick them clean.

Little infant Icarus, I will
turn you into constellations.
Rip you apart, spread you
across the sky, and pray hard
for clear nights.
Oh! the terrible things.
I make no apologies for
laughter in churches.
I am the forrest floor, and
I am a burning hill, and

I will not die for you.

Chlorine smells on the first floor,
And kids getting drunk on the second.
Saturday's daughters rolled up and strung out on echoing laughter in
shadowy classrooms. Then those ankle bruises in the forest green hallway -
We were drinking gin in school when   I first forgot those days would end.
In catholic plaid we kissed the kindest boys, I swear to God!
We were sparkplug babies wearing sweaters, and dammnit,
We Were Kind.
Kazoo choruses, and days spent standing side by side in a mirror.
We were all tin foil newborns with
Aluminum vertebrae and electric fingertips.

Now this is my dormant reconciliation,
And you're my living ghost.

You:
Text book Manic Pixie Dreamgirl, all blonde hair, blue eyes, and have you heard this song yet?
You call blood pomegranate sludge, and tattoo your toes with safety pins and spoiled ink.
Your freckles are corks, we understand, and your pain outweighs your grief.
You once found solace at the bottom of a bottle, now it lies crumpled in a lover's hand.
Bad kids! We were, but never bad enough for you.
Not twenty-five miles per hour, beer in hand, the sun is setting, we might not last till morning, but we'll go on driving anyway, bad.
You are cross-country dazzling, where-will-she-go-next? Paint brush lusting, vintage sweater.
You have spark plugs in your ears.

You know what he said about drinking Coca-Cola,
How it's better than Jesus and how you're better than the saints.
Yes, and you were born a tin foil baby with an
Aluminium vertebrae and electric fingertips.

And with your elbows on the table, you will love me until morning,
And not a minute more. It's the awake verse the dormant, and
All those things you miss when you fall asleep. How strange it is.

So if I could call you that would be a fix, my ***** veins left crying on
Fresh linens. I'll hold off until our next drunken encounter and you
Will play to social construct, while I whisper sentiments of beauty -

Some things just can't wait.

And on that first night,
In the movie theater
I cried because I knew
You'd break my bones
Crack my chest and tattoo
My little heart with a drawing
Of your neck.
And when we got stuck in the mud
Driving home from the show,
It was all wonderstruck dirt
Gravel hands and
I stood in front of your
Headlights - deliberate illusion,
Creating a vision that went without notice
It was my own fault, getting involved with anyone but a mortal.

Bite my fingertips till they callous
Or better yet, bleed.

And why don't we go walking on airplane wings?

Life is a death march, and we pass
The time making cave drawings.

February chatters in the
hollow of my cheeks.
Sounds like hallway whispers,
we went out with a flash.
Like nothing, comparisons pale in
your subterranean brainwaves.
And I am so very strung out on
Your Hair.

Pieces of glass fall from the film
above our church steeple skulls.
And sometimes this weather is
far too temperate, too mild to taste.
But it's tastes. And so it's metallic bolts
painting our tongues, some new and
glorious rendezvous held just past your lips.

Your mouth is a cave I crawl in to.

A barback slid you out
A generation early, in
The shape of your father.
He who befriended the
Blondest girl in town -
Elf-sheen baby, eternally mortal,
Entangled in bedsheets, or,
Everyone's Fantasy ****.
So she gifted you lawn rakes
And snack cakes, and you
We're raised in the bar on
Highway 51. Far from the
Vinyl static emitted from your
Mother's breast. She warned you
About The Suburbs. Always
Whispering tiny prayers -
Grab the keys, we're leaving.

And they keep dying on you -
Your matriarchal mirrors.
Leaving you in the hands
Of workmen scientists,
All waiting for the explosion,
The bomb to drop,
The neighborhood burn.

Grab the keys, we're leaving.

I will kiss you on trailer kitchen floors,
And make you trace my corduroy with
Your grown out fingernails.

But your brain resides in elsewhere -
The place between two auburn freckles
In the cork skin milk.

Tomorrow never does arrive as
We exist in strictly today -
Holiday ties and river guides.

There are only so many times that I
Can haunt the roof of my mouth with
Cave drawings of made-up memories.

Only so many times that I can turn
Up the volume and smash my skull
Off of those reverberating guitar strings -

Hammer those bar chords / Say Goodnight.

Say goldenrod.
Say Time Machine.
Say velvet dress & radio wars.
Say Eileen on a dance floor.

I believed in the backs of your knees,
The little cove I built beneath your blue dye village veins.
And I remember the back of your neck, with ink to show, but summer came and grew your hair out long.

Deliberate illusion, babe -
I'm sorry for the mess!
The psychedelic bonfire,
The prayer that you'd undress.

***** baby beats.
Pumps red through my tiny head,
And into the walls.

So I will cease production
On love poems of yore.
I will color my insides with
Little pills and forget the rest.
I will take note on my own,
Bottles of wine and aluminum shreds,
And I will coat you in vapor rub
Until you've melted into peppermint bits.

This hallway was so much smaller,
Back when we owned it.

And it ran rampant with plaid,
Concealing plastic bottles of tequila thrown about the parking lot.

We woke with trembling chests -
Rumored teenage love affair coursing through bed frames and fingertips.

Standing in a cemetery, East of any Eden.
The sky is frozen, and my bones are still.
There's a rip in my tights & there's a rip in my tights.
And there's a skeleton lying in a wooden box,
Sent from Ireland, all red-headed and bones.
So I'll scream your name from behind tombstones,
the urgency dripping from my tongue,
glowing through the rip in my tights.
We are not dead yet. And yet.
You continue to exist in careful corners,
subjecting yourself to death beds for secret stories -
In tandem to refusing to die for yourself.

You will sing comforting songs to your parents,
willing to cease existence without ever causing a ruckus.

I always thought you looked like Frank O’hara.
(That is, after seeing a picture of Frank O’hara last night).

And we both have crooked noses,
So why don’t we just have a baby?
Force feed it poems and dip its hands in food coloring,
We can play muted guitar and watch the infant insect dance.

I will continue to refuse to die for myself,
And live with you at arm's length.

We were Christmas velvet Christ-like figures
Licking wounds with liquored tongues, and
You spent your night in a chicken coup.

Snow sky in December, and things were unseasonably warm.
There was a fire on the porch and my teeth drew blood from
Joanna's forehead. In the field then, we screamed so loud.

There was something more than magic in the air those days.
The back room at the State Theater,
Citrus blistered fingertips and plywood smells.

And you chose me.

After I asked you to
call me reckless in the
crushed red stadium seats.

My best friend threw up flowers in
someone’s mother’s shoebox,
And Nelson got a ****** nose.
All while we ate chocolate in the shadows.

There were boys on the porch smoking pipes.
We ran through the haze, into the field,
Reeling in those tiny bulbs of hysterical light.
Something was screaming in the trees that night -

Maybe wind, but what is wind other than
Gold dust & baby teeth? All glistening flecks & fleeting.

I was force-feeding you radio wires
When we were frozen in some lost October.

I remember us,
Sticky in July -
The humid taste.

Our phantom limbs reflected off of pond ****.
The lake water found its way in and around my
mouth as goldenrod spit took shape as radio waves.

You’d pour liquor on the lawn, and slide through
the *** grass. I’d skin my knees on hot pavement
and write your name out in unruly blood.

Now you're flat-lining in a corner,
Keeping perfect time with the music.
I’m confined to wires, hallucinating you.

Fast tracks on the gym floors,
And a few beers every night.

That was you, in glass.

Upon a conception's eve,
You fell down a flight of stairs.

Now you wonder how to face your father -
With bruises on your legs and embryo below.

We are close to death, and
Earth was carved from chaos.
The aging bags beneath our eyes
Are swollen full of gold dust.
So we'd better pierce our skin with needles
To let the glitter out,
To make the crystals grow magnetic
Before the final bow.

The wrong belongings -
The microphone is meant to reside in our city cove
And everybody loves a Dead Girl

The illusion of completeness -
I still dream of Catholic high school hallways
Of teenage girl's knees, living clean beneath plaid skirts

The humid taste -
God hid all the secrets under particular blades of grass
It's nostalgia in the typing pool

**** happy - klonopin.
We're drug addicts or gay.
Crisis where christ is.
Bullets fly and we laugh -
None of our business.

We sit shiva for strangers ,
And blood splatters the camera lens.
The uprising persists.
We exist in glitter.
Head trauma, and its bad (I think)
Somewhere, a baby is crying.

It's classical for the incomprehensible.

Last one to die, please turn out the light.

I remember us -
Sticky in July.
The humid taste.

Now you're flat-lining in a corner,
Keeping perfect time with the music.

Conscious, then not - again & again.

You'll keep me in the waiting room,
And later, we'll drop acid in your
Parents' attic, and of course, I will
Never be the same.

And so we'll bleed:
Through shin bones,
And fingertips.
Through our female eyes,
And particular thighs.

We'll scream and stay put,
But avoid stillness at all costs.
This is ground control
To The Marginalized,
Here to force a few things clear.

Your shock treatments
Will not drown out the
Footsteps. Inching closer and
Closer to that white front door.
And all that false feminism does

Is boil my ******* blood.

And my friend has three degrees.
With a rising temperature he says,
"Cheers to rebuilding!"
And we laugh.
And we cry.

I'll dip my finger tips in cinnamon
And you can lick them clean
While smashing me to bits
Until I'm nothing more than Goldenrod Spit

If we were just seventeen again
Everything would be magic *** bubbles

Dear Joanna,
I swear to God,
If I made you cry,
I'm sorry. You are made
of Sunday evening forget-
me-knots, and shadows in the
fields of our hometown. You are
six guitar strings reverberating in
constant cosmic collision. Cataclysmic
babies in your brain and with my elbows
on the table, I Love You. And with my hands
shaking hard in the concert hall, I Love You. And
with all the new slang spitting through radio waves,
I Love You. And from the backseat of your parents' car,
I Love You. And a tough **** friend, please stay with me till

The End.

You know, we felt the dark together.

Dear Joanna,
I am drunk.

And halogen lights threaten suffocation.
I think I'm going blind. Really, this time.
Do you recall a day spent craving defective
Melodies in our high school hallway?
And really, do you remember what you
were wearing the night spent too close
to the teepee? Green. Your arms, organic,
and your fingertips clean. You know what
I mean? We once raced up the mountain and
watched the world spin slow beneath trees.  
When I think of snow flakes forging down to
Mother Earth, I taste cheap whisky sugar water
--- (the kind we stole from your father).
Tell me you remember that night. The first
evening spent alone, side by side. Falling hard
for each other's coats. Screaming out to oblivion -
I swear to you, we'll write a book.

I swear to you, we'll write a book.

Dear Joanna,
I am drunk.

My head feels hollow and my bed feels heavy.
I keep dreaming of asphyxiation, and I am
terrified. I wish we all crashed our cars in
the high school parking lot all those years ago.
Nothing can reignite my soggy, stagnant vertebrae.
Your breath was in my lungs when you were born
far from city lights. I listen to the music radiating
from your Shins. And I wish we just crashed our cars
into each other or something. Can you gift me a few
sleeping lessons? Or has the nocturn taken your
tiny hands, placed you in the haze of a night's blue
middle? Kissing lipless kids on street corners, we were
both murdered by the ghost boys in the dark parts of
our collective, electric skulls. Jesus Christ, Joanna.
We were kazoo babies in sweaters, and **** it,
We Were Kind. You suggested we murdered time.
And you know what? You were right.

nicotine and led paint
lilac cigarettes

always mistaking ghosts for gods
you can't shake the innocence

getting high on hair dye
copper strands won't heal the blows

you gave it up on halloween
dancing naked, he'll never know

blonde boys don't love you like I do

thought it was time you said we're through

playing pretty in your living room
cut your bangs just to feel alive

learning lyrics to his favorite songs
your veins tick out of time

your mountain days are out of reach
throw your body off the *****

you dance but not in tangles
try to hold on to hope

blonde boys don't love you like i do

you kiss and tell and then you're through

She will choke you with goldenrod
And I will watch you get so close to death
That your body's going cold

Oh, flawed leader you were so confused
Not absolutely monstrous, just downstream
With shattered paddles. At the height of your power

You must have known - it would all burn to dust.

Blood and gold and memories made inside of a certain time and place

I'm putting all my faith
In a roll of tape
Trusting it's torn pieces
To hold my memories to the wall

Purple-mouthed idiots
We are all glass bottle drunks
And it's so funny how
A string of lights feels exactly like a human hand

Warm and wired

Write me a song
Call it
The Sound of Where We Were

There was a time you threw a party
And forgot Joanna's birthday
And went raging down the river
With your next best boyfriends
Left our baby bird stranded in the nest
Dropped acid and showed some chest

There was a time the boy you claimed to love
Had to beg for your attention
And you wouldn't pick up the phone
Even when you were carving things all alone
And a time when we went to a concert
And we rushed you home to rage with
All those new and improved mountain kids

There was a time you called me crying
Screaming songs about leaves and
For a night You Missed that Band
And through heaves you recalled
A night spent on a razor's edge
Thrift stores and throats raw
The old September
And you promised to call Joanna
And no surprise, you never did

Deities die, babe,
But I didn't dare to
Predict your demise.

There's a chill in the air
There's a ghost in my bed
There are bugs in my brain
Little infant insects
Driving me mad
Keeping me warm
I boil my fingertips
Over hot stoves
Without that blindfolded faith
Things grow scary
I'm numbing the pain
With ugly poison

In my America, we sick dogs on the Natives
No reservations
Safety is:
Same ***
Same color
Pulling an afghan over Harlem
Pulling an afghan over the Afghans
Choking down turbans with turpentine

In my America
We ignore the horrors of history
Psychology is:
A field founded on healing female hysteria
Terrified boys sitting unabashedly petrified of
The galaxy between a set of particular thighs
The ******
Lunging into the vacuum only after they've been properly liquored up
In cowardice camaraderie

In my America
We segregate within our feminism
You can march with us, but stay at the back of the riot
****** spelled backwards is:
A ***** bottle, smashed off of a fraternity stage
And dragged along the spine of a man in pastel
****** spelled backwards is:
A picture of thread in knots, tied around wrists
Of female ******* rebellion
****** spelled backwards is:
I need this
For me
Woman
Alive

Slowly, you are becoming less and less of my Milky Way
Less of my galaxy
Less of my night sky

You are proving your humanity
And it's blistered and ugly
And I can barely remember you glowing