Until you spent three years away,
The moon was always shouting in my ear.
Through the drapes, past the glass -
In my ear.
I recall our ribcages, reflecting light in May.
Perhaps we were all facing west.
We stood near the river once,
All baby teeth and gold dust,
All glistening flecks and fleeting.
Where have you gone, friend?
Campus coves kept us close
From September till now.
But you return to blonde hair
In fevers, like she is/was
The window to your dizzy spells.

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.

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

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.

This side of Saturday night
Used to make all the waves
I don't recognize any of our old friends
The boys grew their hair long and the girls chopped theirs off

This side of Saturday night
Used to be lighting strikes in your car
We'd drink *** in the bedroom loft
But we've been excommunicated from the mountain
(Perhaps its for the best)

You should know
She's not sad because she misses us
She's sad because her whole doll collection ran away

Now she's alone in the toy room
With nothing but a tiny plastic soldier wearing mascara

It's true, it was the age of kissing wrists and secret smoke
It's true, that was a long time ago
I'm holding on to memories that barely exist

This side of Saturday night
Used to make so much more
But not even close anymore
Now we're all brokenhearted and sore

Seduction is philosophical
Blonde boys play games
Like backwoods checkers
Blonde boys love brunette haired girls
Because pigment stains their wrists like tattoo ink
Distance is a screaming match
Between past lives and past loves
Blonde boys wear bracelets
To cover tattooed wrists
Across boarders, coasts, and continents
Voices cruise through noses and throat boxes
To bear the bad news

I think coffee smells like cigarettes
And I think cigarettes smell like far off Summers

Three kids sitting cross legged in a homemade shed
A trifecta, if you may
A band of crickets screaming prayers into the humidity
One recounted stories of robots in the high school hallways
All laughing and golden, whispering empty epitaphs into the abyss
Singing songs of nothing to a comfortable god
One spoke of aspirations shrouded in cigar smoke
A life of more than mother's wishes and monetary muteness
Being caught between stagnant calculations and hammered guitar strings
Lyrics tattooed the back of her teeth, curious wonderer, light wash grief
Questioning the deities found anywhere but her circle of friends
And we must sacrifice ourselves to rock bottom
One drank a singular beer and couldn't see straight
A hole in a head, filling fast with all those secret woodland soliloquies
Like for the first time, she could see
Clumsy ankles treading through the over brush, love or lust
And how should we go on living through these nights fated to end
There was a soundtrack to our revolution,
Haunting hymns over the busted stereo,
Love poems washed away with morning

But the night sounds
Oh, the night sounds
The holy ghosts in moonlight reflecting off the leaves
The sacred rub of skin on skin beneath the moribund trees

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

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.

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.

This is the funeral dress that was stapled into my shoulders
And crucified
On the huge hill cross, where clowns once emerged from cotton smog -
Where bricks smashed foreheads, and we fingerpainted the sidewalk with each other's unruly blood
Where the Summer sleeps off a failed suicide attempt
Two years ago you put a hole in my head
But this is not the hole in my head (present and aching)
This is the black funeral dress I stapled into my own shoulders
The one that was worn too many days too soon
We are all infinitely bound between her death and a single desire for a boy with destructive ghosts living beneath his fingernails

I keep telling strangers about the way your jaw shakes after midnight
I keep telling strangers about the night I scattered glass shards in between my box spring mattress and the trundle bed
I keep telling strangers about your porcelain knuckles - the way you kiss each one individually before punching me in the throat
There's a rage inside my head
Disease spreads like forrest fire and floral secrets
Dead girls dance in October, rest in November
Goodnight

Things were always happening in the dark
And behind closed doors
Or after everyone fell unconscious to the hand of drink

What I remember most is that first night in the basement
The beginning of Year One
You shotgunned a beer in the boiler room and we almost kissed

My hands on your legs felt like something I believed in
It was always all wrong
I had trouble deciphering between your face and my reflection

There are still so many nights I pushed into the space between my bed and the wall

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.

It's late
And I know you're not awake
But there's something you should know
We shouldn't have been left alone
Just when I started to call you home
And I understand
That you've taken back your hand
I taste blood under trees
And think of the trash can keys

Remember that night that you and me listened to a song about rivers and roads
Over and over
On our way home
We couldn't get over
The sounds of their voices
And we didn't want to leave each other, if only for the night

That was two years ago
And now drives home hold tears and headstones

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.

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.

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.

Shortwinded bliss
That's all this ever is
Riding on highs
And hair dyes
The time machine resides corrupt in the pantry
Hysterical light passes through my skull
I am not awake

I can pretend to have fallen numb to my burning chest
My gypsy words (and my taroc pack & my taroc pack)
Flames in the woods - that's all it comes down to
This is tragedy in its truest form

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

That night my head revisited the act of combustion
Fueled by cinnamon syrup and ten dollar wine
I caught fire under a false summer sky
We stole the Holy Father from the threshold of the devil's den
Lo-fi guitars sent us spinning back in time
The three of us became the opposite of a memory
We bent the solar system with glass bottle visits to our old favorite songs
There's a place I'd like to be
Half drunk in the fluorescent lights of a college town bus
There's a place I'd be happy
Carpet dancing with a trinity of alcoholic poets
That night was beautiful and Fall and fleeting
That night is my next favorite memory

I didn't understand how bad it would hurt
How hard my ribs would shake
Or how tightly I could clench my jaw without breaking it

I can't believe you died

You drank all of that whiskey
And your head fell off
And you died

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

There are few things
That can exist outside
Of the Summer

We used up the other seasons too quickly
We smoked the whole pack

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.

I was hurled from the heavens
When I fell through a cloud,
Right arm first
Reaching for your hand
And what keeps my sides scraped
Is the way my rib cage drags
Just a few feet behind yours

Rub my eyes to smear the tar
My professor teaches careful writing
I will go to my grave defending the fact that writing is reckless
And I don't care to surround myself with those lacking a rebel call

I lost my mind in Tennessee
Too drunk to even sing

If sleep is rehearsal for death -
These songs are the soundtrack of our demise

I sit on my bedroom floor,
Sweating,
Contemplating chopping this mop from my skull.
Watching my strands fall to the floor,
And writing each one a four-chord goodbye song.
The junkyard dog alive in my back pocket
Whispers things like "he'll never love you anyway".

Now I've got
Blue hair.
Are you
Still there?

No, now you're dropping acid on the mountain top.

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

I could say I'm still
Drinking ink on the kitchen floor
But that would be a lie
I've moved now
To the rafters of the theater (you know the one)

Perhaps the smell of hot pavement will always call to mind that one night after the concert
(you know, the one with the tambourine)
Perhaps the mildew scent of a basement boiler room will always be their first kiss
And perhaps the stale smell of fire lingering in long hair will always be the night they went on a bear hunt

We all have sacred ground -
The tree where they strung lights and spent one Fourth of July
(And three nights in May)
(And maybe even one in early October)
The theater lobby where the lights turn his hair a slightly blonder shade of brown
Maybe even the coral basement where four girls choked down their first bitter buckets of her father's old beer

I miss my friends
So ******* much
That I feel sick

When will we fix ourselves
Patch our rips together with craft beers and pink wines

Tell me it's not too late

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

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.

And I've got this tragic talent
Where I can fold up my feminism
And stuff it between my legs
Torturous ******, it's toxic shock syndrome

Apologies to suitors as I run fast from their drunken hands
When really I should be cutting those inebriated limbs loose from the bodies they've succumb to
Because I was taught not how to defend myself from charming attackers,
But rather to refrain from setting my drink down at parties and bars and family reunions

How is it that the Boy's Club manifested itself into the bible? And how the ****** Mary is only remembered for carrying greatness below her breast
Giving birth to the boy wonder all while keeping her ***** intact

And finally, once that sacred space rock exits the womb
We must answer to that almighty lord of genitals
Like if Jesus was a girl, the Ascension would have taken place much sooner
And that archangel would have had to start all over

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

Scene:
Everyone in a hurry to get to hell
Where he can't say I Love You
Even when he's drunk and you're begging
Baby, please tell me what I dream of hearing
What I carve into my neck at night
After the Om Nashi Me's go to bed
Everyone running through this death march
And eyes hollow out without a doubt
Your yellow undertones from your mothers throne
Boy this is not slow dancing in a burning room
This is arson, setting the house on fire and rolling in the flames
Because your hands won't even reach out to pull me from the oven
I am tired of waiting for perfectly drunken nights to kiss you and drink from your cup
I am tired of running through this death march
Let's slow down and dance under blankets in the shed
We are twenty, we are not dead

I hear people ice skating on the roof
I met you at the water fountain two years ago today

Two Falls ago
We went on a bear hunt
And I held your hand
Over a broken girl
We spoke of God in the woods
And the trees stole our dead letter secrets

Two Falls ago
We were all sixteen
Maybe less, maybe a little more
Leaves floated in pavement rivers
On homecoming and Halloween
Smoke filled a laundry room, we burned the rug with homemade cigarettes

Two Falls ago
I wore wool socks in your driveway
And stayed up with you all night
We slow danced under blankets in your plywood shed
I saw my best friends everyday
And drank stolen liquor with them most nights

Everything was Golden rod & the 4H Stone
Everything was red and pulsing
Everything was mattresses and staircases
Everything was Sarah Jones and Radio Wars
Everything was bonfires and lasting

Everything was all of us,
screaming and
laughing and
singing and
crying and
Together - under dizzy skies and dying leaves in Fall

When I said
Meet me in Monatauk,
I meant it.

And the only thing
You've ever meant
Was well.

The river water was in and around my mouth
As four silhouettes screamed through shiny phantom limbs.
Like the moon's reflection was the only thing keeping us afloat,
And there was talk of some radical ******* and a doctor's appointment gone wrong.

Then after the movie show, we thought we'd die in that torrential highway downpour,
And you let it slip that your ghost was ready to leave your body.

What if Death is not a reunion, a homecoming of prodigal children
But rather -
Terrifying
****-all
Death

Blackness and hollow silence
Flesh and the lack thereof
Not quite kitchen tables

And really, how softly can you kiss someone without killing them
Or watching their eyes roll out of their heads

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.

I found cigarettes hidden in the notches of your spine

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.

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

I am terrified of the flashbacks
So vivid and green
On our foreign ghost's porch
In the park
We were scrawled out on the same page
Holding hands on the track past midnight
We spoke of velvet in the basement office
And I kissed your neck

I am stuck in an infinite loop
Memories of nights spent in the boiler room, beneath the string light tree, on the carpet in the mountain -
Anywhere but here

Somehow in the last moments of this January
We ended up in the same bed

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.

Last night I dreamt of all the friends we've lost
I screamed myself awake

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

We haven't spoken in over a week,
But really, we haven't spoken since May.
And how many times can I spell out I love you with a fistful of gold dust
Before you believe someone could love you with a fistful of gold dust?

How was that party with the mountain boys?
Did my name fling itself through the windshield
As you pulled in to the driveway and back in time?
Was it all 2012? Ski slopes and corduroy?
The herd of heads you've only ever heard of?
Were you a wild child in the deep woods?

I see champagne bottles scattered under trees,
And guitar strings echoing, resonating, suffocating.
When she pulls away you fall into blue eyes, all wrapped up in books.
Good for you, perhaps the happy couple will one day
Take up residence in Georgia or wherever the freckled girls gather.

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.