mold spores sleep
in the blood of a girl
three floors and
a wing away, leaching
poison into her bones.
they will cut them out
in pieces, shine light
through them like
ice cores, and still
she will die. until then,
she is beautiful.

we look more or less
alike, shadows splitting
the spaces where ribs
should be. girls wrapped
in red stripes visit her,
reading poems, leaving
trinkets. I haven’t had
a visitor in weeks, and
probably won’t again.
across the hospital,
they send me ***** looks,

cursing the unfairness of
it all – she is beautiful and
she will die, I am ugly and
they might be able to save me.

you chew on coffee beans to cleanse your mouth of this
one long silence
it is open like a wound
it festers

when your breath condenses in the cold air you feel its presence
with icy hands it holds yours
it is patient
it is strict

chewing gum is not sufficient; it is sweet, it makes you wonder
about sugar crystals
they grow like bones
they are brittle

but the taste of blood, of coffee, of chocolate with no milk is good
you can remember without remorse
you can sit and think about dreams
without letting them in

and all your pain can stay subcutaneous
as long as you don’t speak

haven’t you heard what happens to girls in heat?
those sweaty painted-palmed girls
who slide through slick, sick summer days
as though light were some precious commodity
and traded hands instead of staining their backs

and you, little firecracker, fought fahrenheit
with fire, counting the days on your slow-burning fuse,
and in the meantime taking those
romanticized long walks on the beach
holding hands with nirvana
stealing kisses from his pockets
and ultimately concluding that he was too dry,
too serious, too much like thunderstorms
without rain, and not dipping his feet
in the tide, lest the sand stick to them

so you walked off into the horizon,
dragging your worries with you

you said “bring me the blanket,”
and i opened the blinds,
drawn for days,

spilling sticky wine on your skin and
stuffing sweet cheese between your cheeks,
we held a picnic in our third-floor apartment,
sunlight filling our nicest china.

i. you were made of heat,
chewing the sun in your breath mints,
spitting its seeds in the dirt.
a fog clung around your head, the air
entranced by the warmth
coming from your fingertips.

ii. the river ran by a meadow
of crushed glass and pavement,
black and dusty, and blooming everywhere
were broken necklaces and aluminum
flecks of dew.

iii. footsteps and drawstrings,
when you lost one you’d inevitably
take the other. a soft thread of wind
to cut your throat, a dragging adventure
to nowhere.

iv. if you went home and wrote a poem
about your eyes, you’d forget all about
the wax weighing down your eyelids
and taking away your sleep. it was never
a part of your ideal appearance,
lying on a tile floor and looking for a
one-way mirror to take you back.

what if you were the architect
and i was just the dreamer, dissociative,
passing seamlessly through the clumsiest portions
of someone’s mind

and we were both cubists
kissing ourselves when we were
supposed to be in love

the confusion came easily when i
in your eyes was no different from you
and a talk was the same as a touch

if you were standing in my way i
could always step around you and thus
be right back where i started with my hands
always on my own throat, always

you were not the saint your yellowed hands
and stained, creased eyes would make you out to be.
you told me you had kissed some other girl and that she
was nothing like me and that’s what you liked about her.

you called her chaos and said that every time i locked my
thumbs together the bones began to decay. you said that you
hated when my hair covered my eyes because i never wore it back.
you said my voice never rose above a whisper and you were right
even though you never asked me why.

you were lying when you pretended that you were something
better than me. your ankles had grown together from the years
of letting them hang languidly and some ugly weeds (wildflowers)
had held them there. every word you spoke was folded carefully like
an origami bird that you spit out from the back of your throat, polished
in a sugardrop gloss sticking to the seams. you knew the presentation was
just as important as the message and maybe i knew it too once.

i started off planning to write about me but it never works out.