I'm sorry your alarm sounds like a gunshot and its murderous echoes
early morning hazards seem to be bad omens, don't they?
you flip the switch from dark to truth,
lights changing colour

I'm sorry your eyes hurt from the exposure
curtains shrugged aside, spilling the day in
through the shameless glass

I'm sorry you have to see the sunrise,
the meager clouds whispering about
birds and flight and winds blowing south

you are alive, a survivor of the night, and
though you don't deserve this nuisance of
a beginning, you deserve this beauty of
a new morning

another chance to breathe, and to do all
of the things you did before
and others which you have never thought of

I'm sorry, I'm not sorry

-c.j.

until you kissed me
I had always thought home was a place
home is a feeling
and it might not be cozy and warm all
the time, but the clocks don't tick and
our bodies fail to feel foreign-
we are safe

-c.j.

I changed my name to smallhands
when you commented on their smallness
delicate hands sculpt our world,
the rougher hold it up
I wanted to be an artist blamed for the
earth's utopian aesthetic
so along a swift edge I signed my name,
my new persona, and said,
"my hands are small but my ideas can
swallow nations"

-c.j.

anthems for a seventeen-year-old girl include:
a bizarre love triangle, delicate hands, and home

bizarre love triangle is something
not taught in geometry
it is scalene, and it is uneven
for the shorter leg is the devil's arithmetic
and the longer, the perfect equation
the common side touches both in
different ways, for different reasons
shorter swells with jealousy as
longer and longer yet meet at their divine point
practicality destroys the art made, year last
a loss, a jilt, weathering sides so relentlessly
distanced from what devours ideals,
both isolated lines in cosmic space
each prayer inches them closer together
though it is bizarre, it is also beautiful

-c.j.

as yellow metabolises to red,
I speed underneath it,
thinking,
intuition's dead

colour-confused yesterday, colour-wise, now
novel concepts you can dip naked in tea
if until slowness illness reigns,
the missing yield sign assumes power
green lights we have yet to prepare for

-c.j.

my hands are diminutive
yours, stately
your strong hand, your left, can shift mountains
(in dreams)
diminutively, I am gathering stories, one by one,
I am building my own kingdom
knots of my bookmarks are in open basements,
open systems, getting another injection done

daringly, you motion the seas to come
loathe your home, soak your dead
ancestor's heirlooms
my head aches, darling, yet soon you shall have
your life changing sequence, making it difficult
for me to draw (aliens giving some often-buried opulences in a breaking mug)
oh, **** the nerves in my small hands
yours do the work, I say, diminutively
but you turn to me and say
you are the work

-c.j.

he made me feel like an extra
love wasn't in the cards- it was a possible
by-product because people always wish it
could thicken while lust engages all limbic
faculties
maybe my head held much more freedom than
he was used to
luckily an egregious loop wound me in its corral,
intimidating with what awful perhapses could
transpire
black paint all washed into covers, t-shirts,
white lingerie
even a list fixed of my mother's heaviest hues;
muddled, mindless file, to have with unsolicited taking-
like anyone ever looked anyway!
I am superfluous

-c.j.