Face like a road map. Pock marks like valleys and the little blue vein by your nose like a river rampantly running down through the mountain of your defined cheek bone. Face like a night sky. Freckles like one million diamonds flecked across a porcelain night sky. Two crystal clear blue eyes like full moons reflecting on an untouched lake in the middle of July. Face like a razor blade. The edges of your jaw line so straight and sharp and defined they cut through the flesh with the pointed tip of your chin. Cutting the pads of women's fingers as they trace the delicate lines leaving faint pink traces of their D-N-A. Face like a Brillo pad.  Face like a baby bear cub. Fuzzy and innocent in its nature to be nurtured in the way of the world. Like the framed moment of a woolly caterpillar being cradled by a toddler in the backyard on a fall afternoon in a pile of leaves freshly raked. Face like an anatomically correct hear. That ruptures and burst with each glance at beauty only to reanimate itself for the very idea of said beauty being some sort of purity. Some sort of saving grace. Re-iginiting in crater of eye sockets like coals that become diamonds under the pressure to cry. Face. Face like hands that hold mine firmly. Face. Like. F-A-C-E. Face like my person.


*Prompt from poem by Dorianne Laux

after anti-lamentation by dorianne laux

Regret nothing. Not the true-crime shows that kept you up in morbid curiosity,
Anticipation and cynicism you couldn’t help but chase like Pandora’s box,
A price you paid with the death of childhood ignorance.
Not the hours you spent trying to delude yourself into forgetting,
Trying to bring the fantasy worlds in your fictions to life as a distraction,
Only for them to be tainted by the blood of your supposed savior,
Not the nights you woke up in the purgatory of consciousness held down by restraints,
Inescapable regardless of how much you tried to urge your muscle nerves to just move;
You broke the rules - your mind your prison,
something you could sense but would never truly understand.
You were born to live an unfulfilled life,
Half of you chasing comfort in the warmth of the radiating body in the sky,
Only for the other to seek its death - to watch a being of vast power, provider of light,
devolve into infinite darkness - emptiness warping space and time, void of destruction.
You’ve been here before, sat in front of fate dealing her cards,
Only for her to reveal the fool, just like she had the last time, and the time before that.
Regret none of it, not one of the countless sleepless nights you’ve endured,
Not one of the days you walked through the world with your vision spinning,
Permanently blinded by the haze that stood between you and affirmation.
You’ve been blessed with a beautiful gift, so relax.
Don’t bother thinking about escaping the fog,
The way that it consumes your mind with unanswerable questions,
An uncontrollable desire to chase against your rationale.
I mean, you asked for it, didn’t you?