"you sack of crap,"
i spit, broken cigarette clamped between
my lips.
speeding by the rIver at maybe
or 60
street lamps whipping
by like faeries.
i'm drunk
we're all drunk
beer cans in the glovebox,
on the seats under us,
filling the car up to our ears,
filling the trunk,
i swerve and suddenly i'm home.
i clamber up stairs,
throw the door open
collapse on my bed
and pass out.
and that's when i dream
these visions come to me
of grinding teeth, flames, screaming
there's a beautiful woman, completely naked
but instead of human legs she's got horse's legs
"what the ****,"
i say to here,
"let's get goin"
and she says
"you'd take any woman that could fog a glass, wouldn't you?"and i say
"no, just ones with horse legs"
and then i wake up. it's morning now.
i feel sick, hungry, hungover, tired,
and forget all about the ominous dream for the time being.
i put some eggs to boil
i go outside and have a cigarette
and while i'm sitting there i remember that night
there was a bunch of people, and drinking
speeding through space time,
what strangeness this all is.
all humans,
some of us drink to forget
but
i drink to remember.
it's metaphysical, it's important,
more important than
money or what the **** ever.
i go back inside
i run cold water, peel the eggs,
it's difficult, the shell keeps pulling off
chunks of egg with it. i get frustrated and
spit
"sack of crap,"
and take a bite of the egg.
mouth full of shell shards, cutting my gums,
the egg wasn't fully cooked. i pour mustard and
paprika on it anyway and eat it.
i get the sense that my life is a metaphor but
instead of thinking about it i go get drunk.

Twelve years old and I knew I was too much.

A body too much- a stomach that stretched and stuck
and a waist left red, dented, stinging after a day in jeans.

A brain too much- a thought process that took flight
without permission and dropped rogue missiles of ideas
in phone calls with great aunts, deep in essays
during state funded tests and leaked from brown paper bags
in middle school lunchrooms, leaving me silent and sticky and
only just fitting in.

Any conversation was secondary to
the fuzzy way I could feel
my mouth tripping hard to keep up with a dizzy brain
and even before a sentence finished
Feeling regret like warm honey coat my throat and
seep down hot and solid to my roaring gut.

I was a heart too much.
Tears ran forceful and free for
so long. There was the heavy,
lonely feeling that grabbed root at my pelvis
and lounged, languid for days- ******* any hope I could muster
out of tan hide until only leather shell remained.

Dawn would find me ushering in chilling spells of misery
triggered by the whole wide world-
a boy with a gun on the news,
a teacher’s tight forehead while mean kids flexed their puberty,
Or finding a picture of my parents before they were my parents,
and wondering if they ever actually knew love.

At twelve years old my soul was stretched out and sagging.
At twelve years old I held tight to being less
At twelve years old I knew only one way dull the aches sprouting
as fast and fresh as ivy inside my bones.

At twelve every birthday candle and eyelash,
every wishbone and 11:11
was devoted to smallness and simplicity
So certain that the less of me there was
the less I would have to bear from the world.

More than half my life I’ve spent in pursuit of sharp
bones to shield and a lithe tread to conceal.
I have itched to be a sole shrinking girl among
the growing and gaining of peers-
to finally find quiet in a body that
was beginning to ripen in a shrill,
panicky way that would just not do.


More than decade I’ve spent with bile on my breath
and scrappy knuckles desperately begging
the arrangement of meat and bone I live in
to contract; to fold back in on itself and strengthen
into a place where I could catch my breath and
learn to tend.

Now, too many seasons and too many
mistakes later- I do wake up in
a smaller body. Twelve year old me is
beaming as she sneaks glances the XSs
stitched in labels and the chorus of likes that
coo and comment how darling I look in dresses.

Twelve year old me is quietly,
solemnly psyched about the bruises that bloom across
my paling curves after a good stretch on ground.
She even nods her head gleefully
to my swaying pulse as it dances to its own, faraway music.

Twelve year old me could care less about the bone-buried knots
entombed along my spine and the putty-snap cracking
bones I show off like party tricks.
She sees the yolky shimmer of eyeballs and trail of hairs I shed
like bread crumbs marking my path and she doesn’t bat an eyelash.
She’s glad she managed it-
and anyway the price is worth the discomfort,
health in youth is mostly over-rated.

But I do wonder what greedy, vicious
twelve year old me would think if she knew
I am still, secretly, too much.

Could she muster any pride as she feels
my heavy, fatigued heart expand to fill the bits
and dark corner secrets I starved away?
Or any pity as she watches empty-word fog crawl
between ribs and bellow out like a pirate’s flag under raised hipbones.
She meets the murky mass that fills my frame- heavy and suspended
like a dark towering cumulous
waiting for the bow to break and the storm to fall.

Maybe she’d find my brain chemistry unnerving.
Seeing desperate fists pawing at ideas as they are born and implode
and holding numbly to loose bits, reeling them in stunted fervor like kite strings.
Thunder cracks and I’m not nearly electric.

So I grip tight;  sinking decalcified teeth
into the catch of the day, rowing a rusty canoe out of the
whirling, mirrored lake of my mind and back to shore.
I will attempt to fit my
hard won ideas into any and all variables.
I will drive myself crazy with inspiration
but never create a **** thing.

The thoughts coursing through my almost-there body are
flexed horses. They gallop around
the same dirt track for days on end and I have bet
what’s left of my youth on photo-finish losses.
I’ve got nothing to show for who I am these days.
Except for the dresses.
I look good in the dresses.

In tea shops your skin is like cinnamon
sprinkled over chai,
every separate part of you.

Your kisses are a leaving.

Rain pelts pedestrians,
the sky is falling.

At breakfast you crack an egg for a smile
and the yolky richness unfurls on the pink of your
rosebud tongue.

We pass old women hunched over,
their eyes are a starving.

******* bags rot,
we’ve always made waste.

In bed your eyes are a frozen lagoon
flecked with clouds of grey.

I wade you to the ocean.

You call me the bed bug, patient insect
as you hunt down pizza
and gather strepsils for my cold.

How far are we from the cave?

I roll in the duvet.

the sun always hung lower in september
        but high stayed the moon
      the tug of war of steady and ready    
that was to precede the fall to come soon

the lower it hung  
the higher it rose
telling me it'll fall soon
like i'll fall, soon

sweet chandelier sun beautiful and rising and painting my sky in her light
thank you for the fight you put up every night
     mixing yolky colors with the darkness ahead
and i stare at you till the sorry in me is dead
    and it feels so good to have sleep in my eyes with you singing to me in fading lullabies  
                    telling me in september
every tomorrow is our own reprise

     but it hung low, i admit
and stifling, too
too low for my own good
and i was holding a sticky sorrow in my hands
knowing about the fall soon

and the days went on with the sun over my head
   with me  trying to  stop  staring over it and ahead
i was done with it i said
   i was done with it

i can't believe i used to
think    it lingered close
because it loved me