I didn’t hand it over
I neglected to sign a consent
I never said you could                                 yet you did anyway

a cavity within my chest
anatomical rather than cliché
the mask told me it’s a ventricle                then I stuttered okay

hollowed inside thick walls
it gathers substance productively
like a strawberry picker                              but the berries are smashed

I want my heart to feel like the great Salt Lakes, reaching towards each other, constantly suspended in the moment just before contact. I want to build this anticipation, but my patience is shorter than your last haircut, when we sat by the river to discuss model trains.

I want my mind to feel like a hummingbird when it finally lands to rest on the red plastic device filled with sugar water outside my mother’s kitchen window, but I’m quite a ways from home now and have been for a while.

I want my stomach to feel like the tree roots, the red oaks, the ones that dwarf me and that I know would let me get my favorite kind of lost in their home, the kind we planned on visiting after graduation, but I am usually stuck in maple sap.

I want my mouth to taste like strawberries, ripened scarlet in the sun, the kind my tall friend’s mother mashes up with sour rhubarb for the perfect jam to last us through winter, but more often than not, my teeth are coffee-stained and my tongue tends to be too sharp for delicate berries.

I want my skin to feel like satin ribbons, the kind that tie little girl sashes before holy events and parties where they dance on their father’s toes for the first time, and find it perfectly marvelous, but I am covered in scratches and marks from building enormities.

I am a patchwork from the most meaningless scraps. I was a junkyard doll with mismatch buttons eyes and melted cardboard shoes. My head is a garbage heap left out too long, my eyes are scooping all of it up, and my dress is made of someone else’s throwaway linen.  My aluminum can hands stretch out for anyone’s how-town while I think of shoestring revues and paper mache.

You said
The most brilliant thing
You said it was
Like a heart surgery
But he was only a
Surgeon in training
And had neglected to
Mention beforehand
That it was only
Exploratory cardiac surgery;
And it was just for his
Simmering curiosity
(He couldn't have carried
Out a simple angioplasty?)
That he cut the aorta
That's what you said
And his curiosity subsided;
And he left as you bled.

but does he make you feel like you've just woken up / in the middle of your own / open heart surgery?

Just try a nip and tuck
Maybe you'll have some luck
Maybe you'll ward off age
Come on its all the rage
A nip here a tuck there    
Get smaller underwear

You're sitting across a table, in the next room- and it's the month of July.
                                                                                 And as the beads of sweat chip off your forehead
                                                                                                              like a shank of butcher's meat,
                                                                                                                        your dorcel fin peaks                                                                                                         through the sand where my toes peak                                                                       through. The picnic table where I write letters; post cards.
                                                                                                   I take photos, make reservations, and
                                                                                       even after I'm canceled on for walking around
                                                              downtown in my bright neon-pink underwear, I still roll to the
              left side of the bed sit up and drop the cigarette I fell asleep on. You're just sitting, first entry:                                                                                                                                                 Stardom.

                                                                                                I don't have room for you in the corners.

                                                                                                The corners of this room, padded walls,
                                                                                           shifty vaseline sway- the white cotton stick
                                               of a sucker pointing out of your mouth, its red numero forty dye shines
                                                                                                                in the specks of light flicking
                                                                                                  out of the horizon like a carousel ride
                                                                                                                              around and around.

                                                                                        I'm getting a bit dizzy, and even less honest.

                                                                                                                 If you want to see me spring,
                                   like the silly string on my birthday, yellow silly-putty; molding the monster face,
                                                                                                     I observe you through a kaleidoscope                                                                                                                   of dexedrine and morphine.
                                                                                              Your catastrophe with Xanax, passed out
                                                            in alien-green *******, at that party in the abandoned firehouse
                                                                            on News St., how you could lay trust on me after that

                                                                                                (a daydream with sawing you called me)

                                                                                             sixteen-year-old mishap of an afternoon.
                                                                                            &