"Thus fought the heroes, tranquil their admirable hearts, violent their swords,
resigned to **** and to die." – Jorge Louis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths

stoic labyrinthine sparrow-bone;
there is a slalom down your gullet,
bayonet curled around your neck,
you have a beak, you are *****-smooth,
have rubble for skin, an emaciated infinity:
everything is fractal so eat your words
they are you are your rusty toenails
every footstep is a holocaust there’s
genocide under your neurons,
watch them flex and shiver.

you have soft plastic lips,
there is a vacuum in your gullet,
a box cutter carving
through your adam’s apple:
epileptics are just indecisive,
when they seize hold their tongues
they are their words you are a god
are oppenheimer and shiva,
pick favorites it doesn’t matter
it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter
flex and shimmer we are just neurons
flatlines are not ghoulish nooses,
paraplegics are just cowards,
move with conviction each step
is a genocide, you have wooden
teeth and woolen wings,
thrashes are a velveteen sunset
an edible fog, your stomach
is a stomach do not eat the fog
just know that someday it will **** you
softly and swiftly.

it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter:
infinity is not recursive
alive is not our default state
once is the only route
blood makes the blade holy
if you cut me i will bleed,
i won't blame you just know
you were only ever
that very moment.

Her eyebrows are switchblades
My unknown fate her whisper-silver-steel
Dagger breathing intricately carved nows,
Tomorrows lose meaning when her hair
Tastes like smoke fists like ashes
She looks and the signs
Are a fractal explosion
Holding all that I have been.

Won’t you laugh, won’t you frown?
Won’t your whisper-silver-steel?
This is my hand, each ridge
Means I have weathered a storm
Each valley a piece of me gouged
This is my hand, take it,
Take my tomorrow.
Divine, improvise
and whisper, just beware
not to speak out loud.

The way you said my name,
like it was heavy in your mouth
yet worth its weight in vibrancy,
worth the strain a single syllable
caused an undulating tongue
such as yours, that rippling
pink squid beating a solid
leather drum to carve me
into existence, explode the
air into a sweltering thrum,
like you had licked the naked
off my skin and melded  
negative space and clammy
saliva onto scaffolding
lining the roof of your mouth,
carved an arc of sound
only I could fit through,
you said my name  
like you meant it,
like you loved me,
you knew what it meant
and cherished it no less
and because of that,
so did I.

You bound my wrists
With tithe and tides and barbed wire
Draped your braided halo around my throat
Told me you’d never leave
Till you did and fogged my glasses
With recursive memories.

We are strangers now
Or always were
Because I could never
Love a person who’d do that
To someone. Maybe it
Was just the way you
Made me feel like home,
Like the ******* sun,
Like I understood why
I wanted to exist,
Why every other pop song
Is about this corny *******
That really is the only reason
To keep trudging in circles
Trying to replicate
A beginning point
We will never again find.

Because love is something
I only really understood
After you left, when I
Felt my blood harden
And my senses regurgitate
Memoryaftermemoryaftermemory
Until every pulse was a trigger,
When I saw how wretched
You were, felt the sidewalk
Shear my skull clean off,
Even then, and even now,
When you well up inside my head
I feel the skin on my back
Disappear and I am warm
Because you never stop loving a home,
Even when it is no longer yours.  

I don’t intend to ever see you again,
I don’t want to know who you’ve become,
All I know is the girl I loved is gone,
But I hope she’s happy,
I hope she’s happy and I hope she’s loved,
Because I will never forget
What it’s like not to be.

Pinned my stomach to the sky
Strung it up with tinsel and filament
Carved kisses into my sternum
With elastic lips.

I can feel you fading from me,
Morsels creep away,
Nothing holding them there
Any longer. I feel less sad.
It is somehow worse.

You had long since left.
Where did the memories
Of me go when they unstitched
From your head?

My heart beats
Like a stillborn child
Against its mother’s womb.

I am an uninflated punching bag
You have hair like chocolate fire
And a sun inside your face.

I stared as hard as I could,
Burned your chapped lips and brow
Into my retinas, you left
The ghosts of your arms
Around the back of my neck.

I, petrified,
Pretend you are a still-life
And paint you onto my eyelids,
With faded ink from
childhood picture books.  

My stomach is a canopy
Of starless sky pouring half
Digested everything
Onto the robins in my chest.

I see you and smile,
But maybe you missed it?

I am going to a movie
With a girl who wants to kiss me.

I am gathered up inside
All of her arms.
She cries to her friend
In the backstage bathroom.

I do not know how
To make the words happen.
She finds me beside her
And her mouth is on fire.
I wish my hands were holding
The soft of her cheeks.

She says:
I thought we were going to be together.

I know I have a heart,
Because it is trying to leave me.

Lecherous headdress snakeskin
**** whistle of a leer, tape thistles
To my beard, your breath is sweet
And heady but you never did
Like wine, twitch as if
You gave a **** about
That ambulance ride I took for you,
The scars taste of lilacs
And are still mine.

When they love you and they will,
Tell em all they’ll love in my shadow
Lest the kids not be alright
But they never are,
And you, you,
The most cowardly
Woman I’ve ever felled
Myself for, a mistle-toe
Oak ****** house
That you call home.

The best way to fall in love, they say, is by moonlight:
it illuminates the beautiful, masks scars and pockmarks.
As I quickly discovered, dimly lit four-hour bus rides
have a similar effect.
We didn’t fall in love, of course,
but I couldn’t swallow the chalky pill
of recent heartbreak
and you coaxed it down my throat
with your tongue, which to me is close enough.
You were 23, and whether you thought
I was 18 as is true or 20 as I claimed didn’t seem to matter.

You were beautiful, an inescapable mountain
to climb, the other passengers vibrating,
shadow-coated foothills.
We had the ethereal intimacy of two strangers who know
they will never see each other again. I kissed you.

It was to forget the taste of empty mouth,
frothing memory foam,
the way smoke whistles through toothgaps:
a caustic taste, one that I’d had no luck scraping away
like so much tongue plaque.  


What does a year of love smell like?
Sweat, mostly.

Frozen central park ramble, attic and basement musk,
my sweaters turned her perfumed pajamas
turned peace pipe turned dusty relic. Whiskey,
and shattered glass windshield,
the St. Marks hotel because it was cheap
and took cash. All colored by one perfect summer
that I can no longer remember anything
but the specifics of. All this you did not smell like,
but it was dim and you felt cozy
nuzzled into my shoulder.

I held you the way I held her,
so maybe we did fall in love
for two hours on that bus ride to Boston;
call it love by proxy. We burrowed
into one another because we had found
some eternal twilight, a midsummer night
on a Peter Pan bus in the dead of winter.
I gripping your thigh as if I only held tightly enough,
I wouldn’t be ripped back into reality
when the bus stopped. In the bright
fluorescent lights of South Station
we brushed lips awkwardly, exchanged
numbers, I grabbed my bags,
and you were gone forever.

You’d invited me to a bar,
and then your friend’s couch,
but ******* you would have made it much too real.
You and her would be differentiated,
writhing bodies are undeniably unique.
The ripped gut-wrench feeling I felt
the next day would have been unbearable.
Because intimacy informs loss, and
love by proxy only ever serves as a distraction
from the fading marble of plasticine light hovering,
indifferently, just out of frame. But it was love.
You were beautiful, and we’d found a moment
of viscous life. You numbed my pain for a while,
reminded me why I hadn’t swallowed those pills.
In that eternal twilight, it was all I needed.