I think I try too hard sometimes,
she said.
The words can’t flow
The lines aren’t straight
The black doesn’t blend with
the white
like I wanted it to.
But I’ll keep trying and beating
and breathing,
bleeding and crying
‘Til my cheeks are flecked with little
diamond grains of salt.
Maybe if I hadn’t stepped on
that needle when I was eleven
I could try to walk, too.
But I can’t.
Get up and walk,
my mother said.
But I guess she hadn’t noticed
the needles imbedded in my
feet.
They scratch at my bones carving
little words of love and hate.
I choose not to read them, but I can
feel them.
I think I try too hard sometimes,
she said.
Trying to forget and
restrain,
Refrain from feeling the
things that cause boys
and girls to give me strange looks
like,
they can’t understand how
my heart swelled to
this size.

I need to breathe

I fear the muscles and tendons and organs are closing in on me

Almost like I’m drowning

But more like the weight of the moist soil suffocating me

Underground

With the worms and the fossils

Ancient bones that tell so many stories

Sometimes my bones feel ancient too

And brittle

But they tell no stories

They are just too weak from holding up my flesh

This useless body of flesh that has so many functions

Yet why is it still so hard to breathe?

I can feel them working

My lungs

They heat up the air and push life into my body

Yet they cannot force the pressure off my heart

Let them burst

Let the air flow into the crevices of my body

Cooling my muscles

Relieving my heart

The skin that stretches over her cheek
also
stretches over her hips and knees
But she covers it all in light denim jeans and a loose t-shirt
covering all the nerve endings of her skin so
no one
sees the goose flesh creep across her chest
at the mention of the word.
A word that would cause any machine to tremble with fear
but she fears it, too.
She too, is a machine.
Her fingers work through the knots in her hair quite efficiently
Her knees and elbows are abled joints
She does not tell her heart to beat, but it does so with a rhythm
filling each tiny, twisting vein
that trail like lace throughout her entire body.
And so she sits there, in her clothing, hoping no one says the word
but she hasn’t even realized, she’s already begun to rust.

Your teeth gnaw on my bones

The sound of grinding is the only thing that fills my ears

But it fills them from the inside out

Like a white noise

I am disconnected

I am impervious

Yet not immune to the sun

My skin bakes and cracks

And it gets filled with oil and grease and dirt and honey

from the bees that I crushed with my feet because their wings made too much wind

and it almost blew me off my feet

but I stayed grounded

I am the bark on the oak tree that the insects burrow into

They gnaw from the inside out and they make their homes and bear their children

I’ve raised a whole family inside of me

They’ve hollowed me into an empty vessel

The kind you leave under the kitchen sink that you pour grease and fat into but when you want to use me as a vase for your roses

The soap cannot remove the oils and I slowly fill your flowers

I **** them from the inside out

That is my revenge