when your child comes out stillborn, they give you 24 hours with him.
24 hours of bleeding lips, 24 hours of fragile skin, 24 hours of cold toes.
they bring you food every three hours with the knowledge that you won't eat it, but the comfort of it there is.. sort of nice.
things like this aren't supposed to happen this far along is what they will whisper while they think you are sleeping
24 hours of he's getting colder, 24 hours of a lifeless, still rib cage, 24 hours of come on baby, just open your eyes for mommy.
making your way to the hospital, you hoped to come home with a bouncing blue boy but instead you come home to a cribless room.
they say it's easiest if people get rid of the reminders for you but his empty things are the only way i will ever feel whole.
then they start asking you the hard questions as if you didn't just press the button enough times to tame an ocean with waves full of guilt that will swallow your lungs.
24 hours of limp limbs and unreturned breathing patterns, 24 hours of there's some more flowers here for you, 24 hours of please just leave us alone.
we have 1 more hour together and your unresponsive nerves are growing colder. they made molds of your hands for me like they didn't know i would hold them forever.
we have 1 more hour together and the nurses will never be more apologetic in their whole lives than they are the moment they have to take a sleeping child from a mourning mother.
we have a little under an hour and as you wail, people watch from afar wondering if they'll ever be able to understand that sort of pain, the pain that makes you feel god has ripped your body open and left you for dead, the pain that makes you feel that this life really isn't worth living, the pain that there is no or might not be any god at all.
hours, minutes, seconds, days, time can't even begin to describe how long these panicky flashbacks of the moment they told me they found no heartbeat go on for.

there are no classes you can take, wiki how links you can read up on or people you can seek for advice, to prepare yourself for walking in on your lover consuming a bottle of pills.
hypothetically i think we can all come up with some things we say we would do to try to organize ourselves for a situation such as this, but when you walk in the bathroom and the lips you love to kiss are blue, i think we all forget procedure.
they mumble "i am sorry" as the light is flickering on and off in their eyes and there is no ******* way that those can be their last words.
your lover lay cold in your lap as you cradle them, you're comparing them to summer when they would sit in your passenger seat and rejoice silly songs, to now, while they are shivering with deaths voice playing like a music box behind their eyes.
she looks like a gutted building you think to yourself. you forgot to pay the electricity bill and the lights are going out, she's not breathing.
you plead for them just to stick their fingers down their throat, to get rid of the pills, to live.
this is the part where they stumble out a sum of words that maybe form a sentence of something that sounds an awful lot like "did you really mean all those hurtful things you said?" and you can't help but sink so deep inside of your own body that the ringing in your ears seems to stop, but it doesn't, it's just hollowed out by the sound of your own absence.

ever so lightly he lays a finger on my lips and tells me to stay quiet. he tells me that his body pressed on top of mine is what God would have wanted, he tells me that my little girl face is so sweet like a scoop of vanilla ice cream, I have no flaws yet, but he had a spoon.
'no' can't resonate from my lungs when I barely know my left and rights and my ups and downs.
lying down in an office, the therapist gives me a stress ball that has the world painted on it. our snacks are light but the subjects are not, I tune out the sessions but I hear a question out of the blur, "do you remember what he did?" I squeezed the voodoo stress ball so tightly my world starts spinning, -I reply- he taught me to keep my silver wear drawers SHUT. I'm five years old again and I don't know my lefts or my rights or my ups or my downs. Life is not a box of chocolates it's a bowl of melting dairy.
-I'm grounded- for lying. two weeks in my room and they take my blankets; that's what the doctors told them to do. While I shiver in the night all alone, I'll think about what I did wrong. We are so disappointed in you Savannah.
Im starting to feel less vanilla and more... rocky road. I'm to be seen and not heard. I have two ears and one mouth and I am to be using them in that proportion.
I've gotten so used to hospital socks and cold spoons and the mindset of 'you're the problem' and 'boys will be boys'
Later in life I'll get to tell him that I no longer have a vanilla scoop for a face, I have bags under my eyes and tobacco in my teeth, the only thing sweet about me is this menthol flavor in my mouth. I fixate on anything other than speaking so that the world can't hear what I have to say, even if the law believed me, even if my friends believed me, even if our parents believed me, a prison cell could never hold you.

lay down and try to blink back the life into your eyes, eyes, he once asked if you had "captivating blue oceans" on your drivers license for the color of your eyes. lay down and try to blink back the life into your eyes, blink, blink 182, I miss you, the first time I heard that song my single mother was driving and she pulled over to ***** because her boyfriend didn't love her enough to say I miss you, *****, remember when your first lover held your hair after you ate a burrito that was too much to handle on your first date to try and impress him, this is, too much to handle. lay down and try to blink the life back into your eyes.

committing suicide isn't laying on your bed of lies waiting for your prince to arrive, it's wondering if you'll wake up alive or if you even want to.

•watching people's hair move in the wind
•the way the washing machine rocks
•light shining through my window
•clean dishes / warm clean clothes
•James eyes scrunch when he laughs
•watching the wind blow things around
•a tall glass of cold water
•watching what people do in their cars
•seeing other people's graffiti / street art
•other people's hand motions

maybe it's just something about moms who smoke, maybe their lungs are just too clogged to say I love you. the aroma of smoke stained walls and stale furniture smelt just like home to me but unlike the stickers on the wall, love is not found here. people tell you it won't be like this forever but when you try to sleep it off hours feel like years when all of the mattresses in your house smell of rotting lungs. she's taught me what it was like to feel like the tree in the forest. hospitals have become the only home my mother actually welcomed me to, sticky socks and open backed dresses, is this really what you call stable? backwards isn't your firstborn direction but with a family like mine you would see me go backwards and think it was magnificent. they say you can get out in two weeks but mentally you never really leave. I used to joke and say that I loved it here, I showed you how much of a joke it was when the second day after I got out I was writing prescriptions for myself again. when I arrived they took a photo with the flash on and I told them to title it "a breathing irony"  they asked me what my real name was and I told them "vacant baggage" or just Vannah for close friends.
restraints feel so right when you can't even trust yourself. endless hours on a cold ***** floor, this feels like home.
the same questions, the same answers three times a day
no I'm not a harm to myself
no I'm not a harm to others
I'm calm cool and collected
no I don't want to go home
nobody seems to understand that having the emergency brake on is a good thing.
I slowly realized that the girl inside of the plastic mirror is only who my mother wanted me to be.
Fast forward and it's a girl, I'm due in 4 months, I pick up my mothers legacy and light.

What is it to be born into Stockholm Syndrome? You say one day I'll thank you, they say there's a 76% chance that children without love from a mother become serial killers; one day I'll **** you. One day I'll grow out of this fatal mold you've put me in, like the corsets you squeeze me inside because you're ashamed of what I've grown to be. Mold isn't the only way you can describe what you've made me the mildew inside of me feels like the last forgotten sock in the washing machine, you always did dampen the mood.

You say I'll never amount to anything, do you mean like your bank account? you can't stop buying ***** to try and bring yourself to slaughter the daughter you never wanted. she was poisoned 10 years ago by a mother that always had her hands around her neck but her face looking towards God. Just because the bible says you should taste the flesh of your sons and your daughters, doesn't mean you should actually do it. Never fall in love with your kidnapper, you're not worth her love.

You say that I look like a slob, but don't you know that being plastered off your own shame is a little messy too? I find it a little sloppy that when things don't go your way you throw objects around the room like your own chaotic thoughts, dents were always something you were good at. Will I ever fill your void mom?

You say to stop singing. You killed my little girl dream, the only thing I ever wanted was to be a singer, you turned my melodies into loathing; so I became a slam poet. Will my voice ever be loud enough to make you shutter mom!

You tell me to do the dishes but do you really think that scrubbing your leftovers will make me forget the years of going hungry? My hunger wasn't just for food, it was for a taste other than copper when sent to bed without dinner. Can you ******* decay mom?

You say that if I called myself pretty it would be a lie but didn't I come from you? but I think you're pretty too and if I told you that this poem was filled with hate that would be fabricated because I think you're jaw dropping, not in the sense that you've broken mine but you'll always be my kidnapper, why don't I hate you? The worst part is, I'll still say I miss you. I love you mom.