Picking up where we left off. Picking up a body from the floor.
Arms stretched.
Teeth falling like seeds to the ground.
To the dirt underneath it.
What to do with something cold:
Stare at it,
Cover it with your palms,
Die with it.
Picking up from that moment, from the place I died for the hundredth time.
I cover up my puffy cheeks,
my rotting lips cracked and
caked in chapstick.
I smoke a blunt and wipe makeup onto a sweater.
It doesn’t feel like coming
Back to life, but it reminds me of a waning moon
and looking for the brightest stars from your driveway. My hair falls out in clumps in your hands,
If you notice it is only for a second. It doesn’t hurt because
You look through me, you can see someone else in my face.
Someone without maggots crawling out of her eyes.
I die again, when you look through me. When I follow your gaze
To the gravestones behind my back.
When you tell me
“I can’t do this with you anymore” and you break my fingers kissing them goodbye;
I die then, too.
Picking up where we left off, I am a ghost hotel for your lazy mistakes.
I am surrounding myself and hiding from myself.
I carry old versions of me in a funeral precession; I drag them on the
Floor behind me as I walk. I am still more gentle with myself than
You were.
I died last week when you called, when you tell me,
“I just want to hear your voice,”
I die before I can reply.
The body knows blunt force trauma but can’t
Recognize poison until it’s too late. It bubbles out of my broken jaw
And seeps into the mud.
I pick my teeth up and put them in a pile.
I would call back but I am choking on the grief.

there is a version of me who is covered in ash.
that girl would rather jump into the fire than put it out.
there is a version of me who is scared to be
the fallout, scared to be the end of the
sentence and the last touch.
i want to hold that girl in both hands.
i want to touch that girl gently.
that girl never listened.
i want to tell her in a language she will understand:
you have been wandering through the smoke for
so long, you can't see that this is just a room. this is
just four walls of a house, with a boy and a bed drenched in gasoline.
this is just a boy, this is not a home, this is just smoke and mirrors.
there is a version of me who wanted to save him from the flames.
i want to brush the dirt from that girls forehead and hold
onto her shoulders until she stops shaking. i want to tell her in
a language she will understand:
it will always feel like this. it will always feel like gasping for
air, you never know when its safe to be yourself or when its safer to be a version he wants. it will always feel like planning an escape route you never use. why wont he open the window? why wont he let you breathe?
there is a version of me who needs someone, and i wish to God that i could cover her eyes with both hands until the pain dissipates and it is just a room once again. until it stops burning.
that girl is so brave.
that girl tried to leave so many times.
when she puts one hand on the doorknob, i want to stand behind her.
this is just an empty room with scorched walls. there is nothing
more than the nothing that is left.
when she asks. "where will i go?"
i want to whisper, "you will come home to your heart."

i make up rules for myself and then i break them.
i have spent so much time picking out seeds from my brain.
i am trying to remove the rot i planted.
i promise i will smoke less,
and drink less, and
write more.
i promise i will spend less time living inside of my brain.
i can't explain this method of self-destruction.
it is not detonating.
it is perpetual loneliness, like sand through an hourglass.
i dissolve.
a steady rain
for days.
and maybe its stylistic,
as every writer enters a page the same way,
to pour.
to let the flood cleanse your skin, to feel
relief, reborn.
i make up these rules for myself as terms for falling apart.
i am only human, i have been buried with these words
and have the grief to prove it.
i smoke too much,
i drink too much,
i haven't been able to make it out of a poem alive
in months.

the last time i saw you, you told me that there is a string connecting us. that you tug on it and hope it is still holding onto my end. that some days you feel like you have to stretch it far, so far you can pluck a eulogy out of the thread.
you wonder where i go, when you spend all day with your arms stretched out to me because you just can't quite feel me there.
the truth is, there are days where my love feels like lace around my wrists. i carry the weight evenly in both of my hands, secure by my side when i walk.
there are days where my love is tethered to the end of a kite. it circles the sky under the breath of something magical. it puts on a show, soaring and floating carelessly through empty space. these are the days we go up and down, i can't predict how the breeze will shift us, how far we will go, where we will get stuck.
there are days where my love is a spiderweb, and it curls up in dusty places and covers what is rotting in the dark. it is a trap, it is like glue, it encases all of the bad memories we've gotten stuck on until it is a grave site for what i haven't been able to forgive.
there are days where my love is a strand on your sweater that i can't stop pulling. i unravel the sleeve until i'm too embarrassed to give it back to you when you ask. these are the days where i take it too far, i want to fix things but i keep making them worse. these days, we are a pile of fiber on the floor, and i don't know where it started and where it ends. i don't know how to put us back together.
i imagine us connected by our fingers now. pulling at each other when we feel sick, or when we're far away. i realize that all of these days, i am using your string to fulfill my creative fantasies. there is only so much space between us, and i am sorry for making you
give so much line just to watch me tangle myself up in it. i am full
of knots, of nonsensical anxieties and depressive fits.
when i need it, you tie kisses in a necklace around me to make me feel safe.
some days, we give more than we take and this poem is a way of saying that
when you tug on that string, i will always be there.
whether it is up in the clouds, or in the corner of my past, or drowning in myself, i am entwined in all of this endless love.

to bring back what you love the most. to reach your
hands into the dirt and take it from its resting place, all
the dust you would brush off of its skin.  
i bury my losses in my stomach. i swallow every
grievance and eat loss whole. its not enough
just to lose you. i want to devour you.
to hold everything in your teeth for so long that
it turns into nothing, wet and falling apart against
your tongue. you cant repay what you owe just by
looking at it, just by being there. you have to do more
than just hold it to fix it.
nothing you bring back to life will ever be the same, cracks
form in new places and life grows in the space where your
skull meets the grass. if you lay still for too long, you will
hear the bugs whisper and feel the ground move.
to be reborn in
all of the places you're used to, like a mountain range
changing with every rock that falls.
to be able to look at the same person twice without flinching.
i just want all the things i can't have, my stomach twists when
i think about where you're lying under the pavement. to bring
back what you deserved to have taken away, to get on your
knees and beg for rain to wash this taste out of your mouth.
all the words you would spit up, all the stories you would
tell and bile you would choke on,
to bring back what you love the most.
to look at yourself.
to look at anything in the eyes.

ive been thinking a lot, you know, about being alone. about my body as a vacant room. about the loneliness of a room with someone in it that wishes they were somewhere else. no matter what corner i turn to, every room is empty.
ive been thinking about forming habits, too. about how they say it takes three weeks to develop a habit and four weeks for your skin cells to regenerate. as the days get closer i wonder if my skin will know that you're gone when the clock runs out on the last day. if it will feel like how you touched me before you left in some expulsion of your last traces. if my hands will shake and i will wish you were next to me again, all over me like you're hiding me from the world.
ive been thinking about how you hid me from the world. i get to this part and i stop writing. you asked me to fight everyone with you and start over, you asked me to run away and build from scratch and it sounded like seduction. you made it sound so good, i get to the part where i wanted it and i stop writing.
mostly ive been thinking about being alone, though. because i can't afford to write it down, i can't afford to break this habit. my skin wont know your touch but these words are burned into my hands, and thighs, my neck and face and chest. ive been thinking about your name burned into my chest. stamped, branded and
ive been thinking about if my dying skin cells are going to miss yours, ive been thinking about if youre dying to see me and if your skin itches like mine does. if every room you enter is empty when youre waiting for me to walk through the door like i used to, as it keeps getting closer, you want to keep the skin that knows my touch because its the only part of me you have left.

I want to call.
I want love to be less violent.
I want you to say something nice just so
I can hear it come out of your mouth.
I want your voice, and I want
You to tell me you love me, and I want you
To tell me I'm beautiful and
Calm me down. I want
You to talk me down from the ledge and
I really want to be next to you but I'd settle for a phone call
And I want you to tell me that everything is okay I don't know
What to do because you're the only person I want to
Talk to and I don't have anyone else to call with all of this hurt.