i used to be good at cartwheels.
i used to be good at somersaults.
i am a goddamn mess.
i am a god’s damned tra-ge-dy.
j’attends le printemps
j’attends l’été
je s’accroche à l’automne
je redoute l’hiver avec mon corps tout entier
more than your parted mouth
more than your pretty bird
maybe a pretty baby
with every step you drag your feet through the slush and snow as if to proclaim ‘i was here. i was here, and here i felt heavy.’ the skin on your bare ankles felt soft when i drew my feet near and freezing when the radiator broke. that was last winter, before all those tender realizations collapsed over me: the great spring avalanche.
three steps further backward and i watch my footprints dry out and the swells bite my ankles. “salty dogs, salty dogs.” twinkle, twinkle, twinkle, twinkle, little charred bones we threw into the night sky. “salty limbs, salty limbs.” angle your legs just a little longer and a little lighter, sway just a few degrees that way. “salty angels, salty angels.”
Honest people are always more beautiful. They appeal to me more than honey or alcohol.
You’d think I live for blind spots, you would think I have lean eyelids from all the blinking I’ve done. They’re closed like the world is burning, like the entire fucking world is turning into swirling black smoke and all I can do is stand there and let it consume me. “Everything is trite and cheap and a waste.” My arms used to be so pale, my heart, heavy, and my hands, outstretched. All the vultures and their scavenger friends fed from the palms, getting greedy when I felt lonely (could they smell it on me?) What was that smell? Was it discomfort or frailty? It was connected to my shortcomings and I drew their strings up neat and tidy, tilting and shifting and burning them. I’m still burning with the world because the sun also rises to greet the day. This is the same as my acquaintance with failure and empty visions of all the things I detest. I can be so terrifying with my destruction, you’re eyes can’t leave my side. They won’t remember my face. They won’t. So I should slow down to meet my little death. I am so pure, I always burn, but never burn up. Hold me up to your candles and your marquees. I am so pure. I am so fucking kind and innocent. Still burning. I think I need to remind myself more than anyone else. I am so purehearted. I take every beating I chance upon. I am so wistful and beauty beauty beauty, there’s nobody near me, there never was. And you don’t know.
Our just desserts
Everyone I meet, they have to know about you and me.
‘Look at my marbled limbs!’
‘Look at my gluey veins!’
They are all polite. They are all polite to me because I’d been burned once or five times, and dropped on the floor afterwards.
‘It was a cooking accident,’
‘We were baking cherry pies and apple turnovers.’
But what I won’t tell them is how I turned up the dial, how I turned off the timer, or where you hid all the knives.
the uprooting started long before your interventions, and besides, you’re still just little, tiny rocks. even if I wanted to, there’s no place for me to settle, i’m no cactus, i’m no daylily.
Green broken beach glass
when the numb wind blows me over, it’ll knocked me down, of course. i could crawl up on the shores, rubbing my wounds with your sand, hoping my skin, in time, would grow to love every grain I’ve passively embedded. it would be another trick up your sleeve, another maneuver you’ve pulled to bury my legs and construct the moat and wet sand walls around me. I could play along, braiding my hair with seaweed and whistle when the tide approaches, but when will it feel like solid ground to call home? then i’ll stall the dizzying ebb and flow of the rivers and their estuaries.
when will this feel like home?
Gently, I placed old broken glasses in the cupboard with the plastic bowls, behind the rotting wood and rusted hinges, and pressed tightly to make sure the doors would not fly open at the sound of your name that I say in my sleep and held it firmly to reinforce my faith in floodgates and physics.
A girl about expectations
we tried campfires and flashlights,
but we left either overwhelmed or uninspired.
we tried roman candles and lighthouses,
which were worthy, but also unwelcome
by the transient ghosts and overbearing mothers.
so i chose paper lanterns to assuage and allay
because they make red silhouettes and
i feel infallible beneath it.
your face and shoulders look forlorn and wistful that way,
homesick for the curve of my neck and collarbone.
but me, i’m gut-sick, for the
fate of the blossoms in my body, in bloom for seventeen years.
with no intentions to cut back our tangled vines but instead,
to cut our hair to hide how much we’ve grown.
we measure our height by the kitchen door’s frame,
and our hearts by the resonance of gratitude,
but i somehow confused the two when they called me a lamb.
you always favor the spring’s metaphor and
the smallest words.
last night there was no gold glow to my cheeks,
no evidence of blood flow or sensation on my lips.
only blue, blue light from our living room television set
because i can’t fall asleep
without watching the inside of my eyelids.
darkness can’t belong to us,
if it did we’d see by the moon’s reflection and
navigate by the echoes of our solitary names,
but we already claim too much,
so leave something for the bats and owls.
no, darkness doesn’t belong to us
because we need to drink the sunlight and warm milk.
we must uproot our bodies or leave them
to shed some light in a room.
i only wanted to be the light in a room.
