January was dark. All **** day. A cold tequila car. A book with writing down the spine. Thick salt tears, a heaving chest and a shaking rib cage.

February was nothing like the movies. Sliding to the cheap seat theater on ice roads with friends you don't care to know. Numbness and red cartoon hearts.

March was my birthday. ***** and three sad ghosts in the basement. A banquet hall concert and a pack of gum. A boy turned stranger and a tragic lo-fi guitar.

April was bad. A hotel room filled with cousins and no blood to show for my innocence. Two-headed boys in painted sweaters. Tiny bottles of rage in the back of her parents' car.

May was my best friends, but not him. A return to the ribbon tree with plastic bottle poison. A handful of dirt to escape the way *** makes you think of me. Two girls with not much else to lose.

June was the night in overalls. Screams and tears and mouth fulls of craft beer and whisky. More ghosts - so many ghosts. First time ***** and my personal demise.

July was the night we went swimming on her birthday. Beer on the back porch. Forgetting why we ever hated one another. We slept together on my living room floor.

August was candle wax. A picnic on her mother's surgical scars. Tragedy and almost nothing else.

September was the great departure. Another year apart. The music festival in that field. Boxed wine and Pope Francis in the living room. the trifecta raged and kissed and called it a night.

October was leaves in pavement rivers. Sneaking into that concert just to  watch them fall out of love. A pack of Marlboro Reds and unrequited fireworks. Animal masks and German beer. Four girls on ghostly slopes and celtic knot rings.

November was fevers and mirrors. The night we traveled back in time. PBR on your sister's porch and a long drive to the high school. A girl faced with the ghost residing in her hometown. Bob Dylan and a second bucket of gin.

December was mostly a blur. Christmas parties and holiday breaks. Basement promises and winter lagers. Old home movies and my best friends. Secrets in the college town and history's tragic repetition.

Maybe I'll get published
And you can read your name
In a literary magazine
Yeah, maybe I'll get published
And make a couple bucks
Or better yet, struck by a bus
So you can visit my bedside
And play out that hospice epilogue
That's been reeling through our
Brain cells
Since the first Fall apart

These days I'm writing in red ink
Trying hard to get back to blue

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.

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

Elizabeth is a name that sounds good in a poem
An epitaph that reads infinitely:
"You were electricity coursing through this town"
Or
"You were always the most fun at the bar"

Everyone had their story to tell
About the night they first met
In a haze of cigarettes and her brother's guitar
About the last time they saw her
With glazed eyes and wires in her arm

No one ever thought to ask - Can Rachel even breathe?

Brick barely coated in chipping white paint
Across from a theater with red crushed velvet seats
Green backyards & girls gripping beers
A beamed basement, home of the mountain boy
Not far from the teepee
Brown wood as dark as his ***
Ashy black woods where you gave me your sweatshirt
And my blue hair turned gold
Pale sun in bottles on his back porch
In the orange glow of early summer
Red blood drunkenly thrown away from a broken heart
And the saddest color I've ever seen
The color of something that could never be
The color of you and me

Perhaps at some point
She was in love with
Each of us, individually,
Or different parts of us
That she smashed together
To form a glowing deity
In her mother's pottery barn

This being created was
A blistering hybrid -
A lake water guzzling,
Guitar string swallowing,
Paint brush *******,
Hair pulling, ring bearing,
Monster in a pair of old fashioned skis

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.

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.

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 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.

I am drinking beer in my best friends garage
Her hair is turning blonde
And I am getting drunker with every bitter sip

I love us

But in this moment
With pop music blaring
And flood lights glowing
I can only think of you

You and your curled hair
On prom night
You and your drunken hands
Last month on her birthday
You and your mouth
You and your mouth
You and your mouth

You thought you'd see her around
Not everyday, but fairly often
And no one quite knew how to take it,
When a new boy took your place up on the mountain

Remember those endless days you spent
Frolicking through fields and licking cement
Spelling out each others names in twigs
And stitching your bones together with gold thread

Now she's got everything she needs
A blonde boy from the state park
Who lives in a barrel of beer beneath the southwestern rapids
And a home made from the backseat of her secondhand car

You have sternum pains and you know far too much
You used to wear your hair long to keep those mountain secrets  
These days it grows to hide the footprint left below your bottom lip

Some bonds lie strictly in memory
And
She knows she's been on your mind

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

Maybe the night is blue
Because there is a layer of skin
Covering the honest red sky
And we all ask why

Why do we see veins as
Camera shy and blue
In my finger pointing over cheap wine
At you

And why is everything we do
So complicated and blue
When there should be red between our words
The only upside is the sound of morning birds

Blue is the color of suffocation
And that is how you live your life
No bright paints in your closet
But a muted blue and a broken promise

You will. You? Will. You? Will.

I would have
But you turned me blue
And finally, though dead on the floor
I am bleeding red blood
No blue for me anymore

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.

I'm sorry that we all had to stand by and watch
As they packed your mother up into a box and
Laid her to sleepless slumber on the huge cross hill

I'm sorry about the Evil Machines. How they ate away at
Her heart and left her so unrecognizable that her
Face looked more like a window than anything else

I'm sorry that we're always forgetting to ask if you can breathe

It seems like girls are always either
On their toes
Or on their knees
Bedside tables
Ready to monthly bleed
And to forget their counterparts
Swings and all other ugly things
Like their need for rings
Or whatever boys think we crave
Cause men with beards are here to save
Us from ourselves
And our woodland self destruction
A head put under construction
Wicker breaks beneath them
Paint chips
Cracked hips
Blue lips

It seems as though
Girls are always found
On their toes
Or on their knees

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.

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.

That October stole my heart
When we drank pumpkin beer and smoked apple tobacco around the kitchen table of a now foreign Ghost

It's funny
No -
It's tragic
That a single whistle pulls me back into that basement
On a musty couch, hidden under men's clothing

I am wearing pink shorts
And you left an empty house to see me

I am offering you a beer and of course, you don't accept it
And we listened to the greatest songs I've ever heard

Something about the acoustics found in a room with burn marks and my best friend lying on the carpet

I am not sure if I am in love with you

I am in love with the memory of that night

When you were born, you didn't cry.
2. Your mother did not understand how you held your composure, but your father knew of silence in times of miracles and hospital gowns.
3. Your hair is whatever color fits the facets on the ceramic sink in your Current Hometown.
4. You were gifted with Delilah's able fingers - not to cut the hair of your blind bearded boy, but to meet with piano keys on early September mornings.
5. Your lips are the border of liberation. They are red from the blood ridden boots of soldiers traveling from your chin into your throat, seeking serenity.
6. Your voice is a memory of a strangers first love - unrequited, tragically beautiful, and played on repeat.
7. When you were four you broke your own heart.
8. Your insides are painted in stripes of green and white - green for grasses and a shy boy's house shutters, white for the absence of feeling - comfortably numb.
9. You made a green and white striped basement home for two years, and realized that we do not have to call our insides home.
10. You drink brown bottle whisky to forget forbidden phone calls on far away spring nights.
11. You drink green bottle beer to remember dancing on her carpet , talking about poetry, and hugging the ones that have turned into ghosts on far away spring nights.
12. When you were eight you tried to pull the sun from his jealous sky and badly burned your palms - the blisters looked like four women's silhouettes and after that, words started storing themselves in the callouses.
13. There are boys living under your fingernails, escaping heartbreak.
14. When you were born the doctor cried at the sight of your porcelain skin, something so beautiful can't go without breaking.
15. Your mind is more beautiful than any skin I've seen, and **** the doctor for pitying something he would never know.
16. Everything breaks.
17. The doctor who delivered you went to school for ten years to discover something that the moon taught you in one night.
18. Forever.
19. You are the melody of a summer - naked in the pool, running through the fields, golden browned by fire in sky, screaming songs into every abyss, every void, every absence, every white stripe, filling the space, reversing, slowing, and replaying time.
Your record plays forever in my mind.
There is a white light shining from every part of you - an immortal deity in this world of unbelievers.

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.

These are words I threw to pavement
Many Mays ago
Not for you, but about you
Not dead, but dormant

My shoulders quake in your memory
And I keep dreaming that you shaved your head
There were sopranos hidden in the bed frames
And altos renting out the bathroom window

You rest your head on state park driveways
In the backseat of your best friend's car

When you walked across that stage
I thought you'd shudder at my ghost
But you didn't
You staggered behind classmates in robes and
Forgot about the shirts I stole from you

Forgot about the first night by the river
Forgot about my brand new chipped tooth
Forgot about the night in the shed, a shirt pulled over your head
Forgot about the night I sang about fire water in the walk-in closet

I'm still lying numb on the gymnasium floor
You found your way to the big city's door

We are still alive, bleeding that same fantastic blood
God is cracking our ribcages open to collect the ghosts residing there

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 know about the night you drank all of that beer under the moon
And that people were singing or bleeding or something,
But you had a fist full of blonde hair and a bear cub in your lap
So you didn't notice anyway

I know how nothing can come between you and the animal secrets,
But everything is and will always be blood, ***, and a very high fever
Freeze dried and cracking, your hands run empty in the drunken court room
It's happening again, but this time - numb

What is a guitar, but something to smash off the bedroom walls or throw from the roof?

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

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.

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.

Girls like us can't be saved
Just numbed for long enough to realize what isn't love
Time changes change time
Again and again
Your ghost invades foreign lands
David stands before me
And I can only smell your collared neck from a faraway spring
I'm starting to think I imagined the whole thing
The artist screams
And your face replaces David's
Men in marble urge me to stop
To drink wine without wanting to touch your hands
To kiss continental strangers while I still have the chance

On nights like these I have to write my own poetry to fall asleep to
I dreamt of us walking through a street laced in ***** snow
Just me and Joanna

Years pass
And I am as lost
As I was then

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.

Then, night two of the ******:
That evening ran rampant.
With ounces of beer filling each skeleton bone,
Flashes of indigo, and a friendly plate of pasta.
And us Hispanics have to stick together.
We made a home in the sand pits and
On the college buses, we must have been
Going one thousand miles per hour, and
I heard from a good source that the wheels
Weren't even touching the ground.
Bruises, baby. A concussion to match.
Still sprinting through the indigo, you know,
The night sky has never/will never be Black.
Blue consumes me. I am drunk.
My best friends dragging my lethargic limbs
To and fro. Warm ***** at the apartment party -
I am in love with each of them. My friends, that is.
Riding high on all that reckless rebellion,
No matter what happens, this was, this is.
(Forgive me, but - We Are)

It's happening again
Wires slice my fingertips
And strangle my brain
*** refills my empty veins

You were in Ireland
When I first saw your hologram
On the back porch
In Belmont Circle

Well, I'm back to standing in fires
And busting open my knees
Drinking until the world goes black
And all I see are your nimble nails working the guitar

Oh, why do we place ourselves
So deep into the ribcages of
The only boys that can't love anyone
But ghosts

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.

Oh, my God.
We had it all wrong -
It was never Weird Honey.
No, it was Wyrd Honey.
It was Fate, honey.

We are beings of narration
Killing all those trees
Then turning into some
Demented Johnny Appleseed
And how do we experience religion?

There are reasons why we are
Moved by the art that moves us
It lies in the state of your own handwriting
The good music playing outside the clinic
The sound of where you are (were)

The idea of the uncanny
That clown was only scary
Because it's almost human
How sonnets singe my fingertips
And it's entirely illusion

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.

We promised one another
We would be eighteen forever
That no matter where studies took me
Or where the music took you
We would be eighteen forever
That through dents in your car
And cuts on my legs
We would be eighteen forever

It was okay that no one understood what we were
Because we didn't know either
It was okay that we both drank for sport
And held hands on the couch in the Fall
When you were sixteen -
Maybe Less
Maybe A Little More

You said you'd stay eighteen forever

Christmas holds too many ghosts
String lights have seen too much tragedy
Pine trees were once adorned in our empty bottles
Now the old pine has fallen dead

Where did you go?
With flaxen hair, all whirling and twirling
You escaped through meteor showers
And we got tangled in afterlife moon rocks

We lie in familiar basements and discuss
An ink on skin memorial for the best friend you gifted us
An eternal mother's day playing to the sound of
Loose change in my pockets

Still, no one cares to ask if Rachel can breathe
We continue through the motions
Sailing over your hometown on glass shard boats
The ice is getting thinner

And I must wonder if we will all erupt into
An overflow of you
Or sink into the sludge
Not quite knowing what to do

We keep faith in sure hands
The secrets lying at the bottom of the bottle
Cigarettes on the overpass
The promise of August and Everything After -

A freelance writer with knotted blonde hair, coming through in stereo

*** on the bathroom sink
Back then at the retreat,
Time was spent getting married
Or being carried
Off to a hospital bed

There were
Shattered knee caps on hardwood floors and
Hands dipped in jealousy, coming out as green
(Or a tortured, teenage lesbian)

Aluminum barrels of smooth poison
And glass bowls of hydroponic hand holding
It was a day spent breaking the law, somewhere past coherence
A void in which we fall beneath the affection of strangers

Shooting up skirt in the shower, and keys in the trash
Hey, it's all better than drinking and driving
Or sinking and thriving
In the marsh of your own oblivion

Stupid boys and their razor blades
Stupid girls and their glass shards

No one holds hands anymore, there's just too much blood

On the drive home -
I barreled down a
Familiar highway
Numbered - 43.
******* that old
Catholic school
Coffee through a
Bright orange straw,
Down a melancholy
Throat, I accidentally
Witnessed summer
Collapse in on itself.

The very last
Glimmer of June
Covered by a
Cumulus cloud.

July waved in
My rearview mirror,
And I swear,
I almost cried.

August started
Shaking, hard,
And cracking
It's gum.

I saw the world as it was,
And then suddenly,
With no prior warning,
How it was not.
I watched as the things I knew
(Or thought I knew)
Crumbled to ice blue dust.

I drove through
Your hometown.
Past your parent's
House, the gas station
Where they called you
All those pretty little
Names you'd prefer
Never to be called,
The table we mourned
At after the polar vortex.

See, it's been almost
A year now. Since we all
Rolled down the hill
Into tiny, wooden caskets.
Since you bought a
Hairbrush to untangle
The knots in our
Best friend's chest.
Since none of us knew
What to do, but drink
Coffee and make promises.
Since we had to grow
Older, and smoke
Cigarettes on the overpass
To ease ten shaking
Shoulders.

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.

Robots around the dining room table
On the roof with a string ensemble
We were so drunk in the time machine
We started to swallow the clocks

One for you and one for me
And two for the girl with ghosts in her empty eye sockets

We used to lay punch drunk
Beneath the knuckle blood ribbon tree
Write letters to lovers and bury them like saints
I can smell the ink from two years away

We only ever surrounded ourselves with the reckless
I only ever dream of the wrong boy
We touch arms and compare our skin
We succumb to the warm lights

I know that the summer holds some type of magic
That it somehow becomes a physical reincarnation of nostalgia
Where time stands still when we are given a chance to have the perfect night
Where past loves can meet again, on brick or carpet
For one more night of infatuation and hand holding

Where hate drowns in amaretto or burns out in the sun
And we return to one cohesive group, singing old songs that hold more meaning than any of us realize
We jump to the beat of that one perfect year, entwined in our scents and lisps and favorite beers

I know that when fall returns, we won't be drinking Miller Lite with our best friends on the back porch
You won't be close to saying something real
I will return to bad habits in dark basements
We will all have to go on in real time speed

Leaving the Band of Bad Kids
Breaks my heart every year

I wake up with a fever fueled mainly by your hands
Or lack thereof for that matter

I disrupt the monotony found at the bottom of my coffee cup
Or ***** glass for that matter

All our thoughts of kissing girls have been written off as weird honey

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.

Wet grass broke my heart
Plastic tarps taught me how to hate myself
Metal cans frizzed my hair and sliced my throat
Fireworks burned my thumbs and left the kitchen lights on
We're all pushing twenty and things are going stale
Chlorine burns my brain even if I hold my nose
I slept inside with the mountain boy and my best friend
While they were naked in the dirt
I didn't want to leave The Survivors, but she saw my seams begin to fray, stitched me up, and put me to bed
The broken hearted girls stayed apart that night
I couldn't hear your American Screams and I'm sorry

I had a mental breakdown in a grocery store yesterday
Linoleum floors caked with dirt and a mother scolding her child