and there's something about
turning 16
and filling your lips with
the deepest red
in the mirror

how it feels
like you've become a rose
freshly unfurled from
some skeleton,
your colours as rich and
viscous as your dripping blood

yet a rose that's closed
in a glass jar, you are
turned and admired, you are
twirled in fingers
like the stem of a wineglass

because at 16,
you feel you are something
refined,
mature and flowing and
beautiful

older

but it's only
your mother's lipstick;
she too is getting old.
at night you take
the crimson off,
and the rest of you
comes into focus.
all your yellows, all your blues;
you will need to love them too

and don't you let the laughter
slide off from
your new scarlet mouth
because you're 16 now.
it will try to
and you will need to pick it up
off the floor

because you're 16 now
but remember one thing for me:
you are far more sturdy
than just a rose

you are a girl
you are every colour
you think you haven't become

somewhere
between 4 and 15,
your innocence was lost
in the angles of your cheeks

and the hardness
of your dreaming
wore itself down
like bark on a tree

now you're standing on an edge
looking over at the sea,
with softer hips and aeroplane feelings;
you know
that you are leaving

somewhere
after 4 and 15,
you learned to be gentle,
to hold yourself
more carefully

you were
a flightless bird.
you are
a girl, becoming
woman, turning
over her dreams
like tea leaves.

you know
that you are leaving
somewhere
behind.

A fire breathing dragon lived inside the nook of a tree,
Small enough to fit in a man's watch pocket,
Big enough to singe the bark around his door.
We peaked around the nearest trunk,
His smoke billowed around our adolescent ankles,
From his penny-sizes nostrils protruding from the plane of his oak.
We figured he ate the ivy snaking through his neighborhood,
But noticed no pin-sized tooth marks in surrounding leaves.

We then became bored with our own imagination.
We realized this black mark was only mold,
And we aged ten years.

In the aftermath, I lay across my adolescent
comforter in the faded spot, hoping to soak up any
remnants of a sun that refuses
to show its face today.

Raindrops stick to my window,
spattered from juvenile tyranny,
born out of temperamental
tempests that literally manifest
from nowhere. These are the tears

I wish I could cry, for even the sky
prays it could hide from the tumult.

my childhood was removed from me
inside of a blue mustang
and what remained after that
I tried to barter off the highest bidder
but I grew,
not up,
but forward
further away
slowly releasing
hands of defiance
fists chock full of hopeless words
like anger, the flavor that aches the bone,
the cold kind,
more barren than the green of Christmas lights
glimmering off the icy veneer of a white picket fence
overeager, in the apathy of theatrics,
to strip off the remainder
because the empty feeling that followed
might one day
make a decent poem

My hand searches for yours
under the table
in this semi-crowded place.
Our friends chat amongst themselves,
their words like white noise,
but they glance at me and you,
expecting you to make a move.
No one sees what we are doing,
but they know.

They know.

They grin and give you a thumbs-up.
I sigh,
half out of raging embarrassment,
half out of content.

My hand has found yours,
but now my lips want to do the same.

This is a poem for nobody’s eyes
About my students
my flowering black and brown baby girls
more bud than human, saying all singsong how
black is ugly ugly ugly
holding their arms up to
one another, comparing hues
About the instant I realized
I loved women too
and sagged hard against my bedroom door while
dread and hope danced a strange dance
in the pit of my gut
About the college kids I see in class everyday
popping Aspirin and Xanax and the pill
with their headphones and angry publicness and
******* ******* **** this
and notebooks and pens and
soft privateness and
I love you I need you I need you
About the boy I couldn’t speak to for years
without feeling sick or small or unrequited
About Audre, Toni, and Maya teaching me
how to start revolutions with a word
About how I dream again and again
of kissing the girl I am in love with
and sometimes
we are the in the dark and sometimes
we are laughing and sometimes
I am moving breathless
into the room saying
I have never loved you more than I do at this moment
and lips are on lips are on lips
About how I can’t look at this one
pink nightgown because I was wearing it
when my father said he was cheating and
too many tears fell on those
tiny satin cherries
About Holden Caufield and that
******* merry-go-round
About a crazy, unquiet and
utterly illuminated self
Me, spoken yet unspoken

A yell for the child comes with momentum
It shakes a creak out of each elderly step and surrounding glass fixture
Wailing wakes the set of mahogany stairs before stopping at the moat of the dudette’s dungeon

Kaboom, it kicked the door in on the dream

Enter a flow of sunlight
Now visible dancing off the sweaty leaves and onto the walls of the hallway
Leaping onto the eyelids of our beholder
She turns to face the wall
This empty vessel isn't ready

The yelling quickly becomes relevant
As it Sharpens into an irritating spear  
Creating unwanted foramen
Making mesh out of the impermeable cushion enveloping the chrysalised girl

The parent is a lackluster alarm clock that she bought
But still wants to beat the **** out of.
Though they serve their purpose
the half conscious tend to be ungrateful

A smile breaks open now
knowing such noxious noise is futile Fighting the lull that was already present in the room.

Going through the first motions her feet find a base
and her socks slide dangerously over splinters and thornish nails peaking out of the floorboards
The drums of her feet meeting the stairs announce her arrival.

On the first floor there awaits a vision of her childhood
Her father watching programs and eating breakfast with Charles Osgood and his correspondents
Mother making moves towards the car.

She’s surprised
The sweet smell tricked the girl into believing adventure land had been relocated to her kitchen.


She witnesses Bands of fibrous smoke slide off of the bacon
And harden as happiness on the rims of her nostrils
Her hunger whispers clear thoughts and primitive instincts from her core
And a shell of rubber pellets is released to ricochet around in the girls belly like a couple of quarters in a piggy bank -
Wants reverberate and drive up her throat
Driving her hands to the cooler of the three tired skillets

She does a quick but thorough survey of the stove top eyes hitting every grease patch and
Yellow egg puddle worth avoiding

Sitting at the galaxy black table
Jaw tensing against its will
Gums sweating and shocked anxious
Tastebuds wiggling into the room left available by the imagination
Eager on ripping into fattening pleasure

Osgood leads them into their moment of Zen to be ended at the pace of the subject
Father different from daughter
Daughter different than the mother.