She stood still before the choas; unshaken.
The wind blew its mighty breath against Her core but to no avail; unmoved.
Her coffee'd skin warm like the sun that kisses the Earth's horizon.
Something within Her had risen without warning nor permission:
She was a Goddess, in Her own right.

Brown. The soft tone of the Earth.
Golden hue painted widely across the canvas of Her *****.
Her skin like caramelized silk, with the sunglow of Egypt itself.

She pressed Her face to the Earth's floor and moved mountains with Her prayers.
Queen of the meek, ambassador of the poor.
She was the perfect amalgam of beauty and brokenness.
~The Goddess of Humility.

i am the frostbite
spreading through the frozen fingers of your new lover's
hands, transferred body heat
burning the skin.
i am 3 am drinks in the
pouring rain, swerving onto
oncoming traffic.
i am the ship lost at sea of our love.
i am a broken bathroom mirror.
i am an unidentified purple bruise
on the neck of your ex-lover.
i am the fork in the toaster.
i am an untuned guitar in
a filthy venue.
calloused hands against soft skin.
slam the whiskey shot down on your neck. wash the blood off in the kitchen sink.
broken blinds forcing unwanted sunlight into your nightmares.
i am the definition of breakup ***, i am the
aftermath of self-hatred and one more go around.
**** just for the fun of it, just to ****.
pretend you are making love. pretend this matters.
i am late night emergency room
visits for rope-burned necks.
i am the car alarm blocking out your
one night stand's profound moans.
organize your bookshelf to spell out my name in the titles.
every song on the radio
will sound like goodbye.
i am the perfect time for a first kiss. swollen lips. swollen throats. inevitably calling your name on my deathbed.
i am under-the-bed-shoeboxes filled
with ripped photos that
still smell of his cologne.
i am one more dose of ambien
to get you through the night.
overdose on love, starve your lover.

stop.

rewind.

i am the first glance in a coffee shop.

play.

Last night I read about a woman who purged herself to death.
We shared the same birthday,
the same habits.
Sometimes I wake up in disgust with these bones.
Other times, in narcissistic bliss with these bones.
Then there are those perpetual evenings,
when I whisper threats disguised as mantras to these bones
I want my obituary to say
that I loved this delicate framework of calcium & collagen.
When I'm 91 and the only thing I've expulsed myself of
is the need to perfect these bones.

Listen:

You cannot give back what you stole from yourself. You can’t feed your body the things you denied it while it was quivering beneath the whip of your merciless, perfectionist dysmorphia, or erase the scars you’ve carved into it, or stroke it tenderly all those times you wished you could jump out of your flesh and become somebody else—a goddess-girl, a radiant impossibility, angelic fire with taut skin over crystal cheekbones and a torso so trim it could snap in a storm.

But you can start again. You can make vows to yourself that you will spend the rest of your life fulfilling, because to hell with comparison. To hell with the wars waged on magazine racks. To hell with GET SKINNY IN 3 WEEKS and HOW TO TIGHTEN YOUR ABS and 10 TIPS THAT WILL MAKE HIM WANT YOU. To hell with the mythology of thin—this vile word, this grotesque title, this dismissal of your vibrant heart and humming brain, this slaughtering of your entirety. To hell with the numbers that made you ill. To hell with calories/ scales/ grams/ portions, the formulas that stabbed you and wrecked you and violated you in ways so wicked you still cannot breathe them aloud. To hell with it all.

All this time you have been confused by yourself, thinking it ugly, despicable, criminal. All your life you have suppressed the sunburst inside you. Now, it’s time to release the latch. Time to push the lid open. Time to make whatever noise you were never bold enough to make, because none of it matters, you know? Size and measurement and all that soul-splitting *******. You are not bone or blood or cell; you are dizzy blue light and skipped heartbeats, the intersection of potassium and sodium, that chemical eruption of color, that running down unnamed streets amid stars and heavy breathing, that feeling of pushing through bodies of strangers to where there is the sweet negative space in the eye of it all, waiting for you to pull your hair off your face and dance like you are waterfall upon waterfall come to life.

You are not an equation. You are not pounds and inches. You are breath and sight and noise and movement and growth, and you cannot squander another pounding of your sweet, open-palm heart loathing your body for the misdeed of not being something else. The extra flesh protecting your vital organs is irrelevant when all the world is an electrical impulse roaring its beauty for you. The precise width of your hips is immaterial here in this place where sleepless people are kissing and comets are screaming through the atmosphere like fallen gods and tomorrow is unfurling in great, glittering swaths of potential.

It had been too long since I paid close attention to myself.

As I sat by the water, small nymphs of some bug pattered down from the leaves above like a soft rain

Kinder to my skin than any water.

A fowl plucks himself, and the littlest spider begins a journey to cross me like my denim is so many stretching lands.

I am interrupting nature as humbly as I can manage, two cigarettes pass and I'm tired of self-ness already

But for a moment? I breathed.

If I had to describe myself,
I would say...

I'm not just the 50+ scars
from blood-stained razors
on my left arm;

I'm not just the countless tears
I cried when I pleaded
with your deity;

I am ";"

";" is never-ending.

I am ;
because my story doesn't end here.

I am ;
because I am forever evolving.

...so until
"."
arrives,
I am ;