kill or be killed

he says, you’d be a good

final girl if you didn’t

like it so rough and rips

a large piece of wet skin

from his bottom lip

with the butt of his cigarette

the blood pools like rainwater

in the exposed pink canyon

of his mouth and he swallows

the mess down while his

adam’s apple bobs and I

imagine biting

and tearing

at the tender flesh to see

just how sweet his

ferocity might taste

and I think if

my ability to survive

is dependent

on a willingness to deny

myself pleasure he

will have to bury me shallow

bruised and screaming

and I’ve been crushed

beneath boots so cruel

I thought, kill or be killed

and woke to visions

of freedom and fear

in his eyes and

I’m not a good girl so

I like when boys tell me

I’m bad

while crawling and dripping

with aching want

and he has no clue

just how rough

I like it and how

desperate a final girl

can get so I smile

saccharine

with my teeth and

draw the rest of his poison

into my

hungry lungs

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love is biblical to me. mythological. which is why i’m always writing about God. which i don’t know if i believe in, but every passion i’ve ever known has felt supernatural and holy. which is why i like rock music. i like to feel something huge pushing through me. i like to exhaust myself on screaming. which is why i choose the men i do.

christmas list for jesus II

TONIGHT I AM ON MY ROOF AND I AM BLEEDING ONTO MY BOOTS BECAUSE YOU LOVE ME AND THAT MEANS I DON’T GET TO TWIST YOUR CURLS BETWEEN MY FINGERS ON THE DANCEFLOOR OR CALL YOU MY DARLING WHILE YOUR HANDS SLIDE UP MY BARE WAIST AND I WOULD HAVE SPENT EONS IN THE COOL GRASS DARING YOUR TEETH TO FIND A HOME IN THE SWEAT ON MY NECK AND I HAVEN’T QUITE LAUGHED THE SAME SINCE I LEFT YOU BUT I AM LEARNING TO. I AM LEARNING TO AND I NEVER TOLD YOU BUT I WANTED TO MARRY YOU IN THE COURTHOUSE WITH A LILY OF THE VALLEY BOUQUET AND PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE TO THE CUT OF YOUR JAW WITH A CUSHION CUT EMERALD FRACTURING THE DOWNTOWN LIGHT AGAINST THE WALLPAPER AND I IMAGINED DIRTYING A WHITE DRESS ON THE CONCRETE AND YOU CARRYING ME UP THE STEPS OF A WEST VILLAGE TOWNHOUSE AND IF YOU’D ASKED I WOULD HAVE GIVEN YOU WILD CHILDREN AND PAINT SPLATTERED ON THE DINING ROOM TABLE BUT SOMETIMES WE DON’T GET THE THINGS WE WANT. SOMETIMES WE DON’T GET THE THINGS WE WANT AND WHEN I THINK OF IT TONIGHT MY THROAT CLOSES UP AND A ROGUE WAVE RISES IN MY SINUSES AND THREATENS TO DROWN ME AND DRAG ME TO THE SEAFLOOR OR AT LEAST THE CRUEL BED OF THE RIVER THAT DIVIDES US BUT I AM MUCH BRAVER THAN I WAS BEFORE. I AM MUCH BRAVER THAN I WAS BEFORE BECAUSE I HAD YOU. BECAUSE I HAD YOU AND I LOVED YOU AND YOU REWROTE THE SCRIPTURE UNTIL I FORGOT THAT I’D SWORN I WAS DAMNED OR A SINNER OR A CREATURE UNDESERVING SO WHAT IS THERE TO CRY ABOUT. WHAT IS THERE TO CRY ABOUT REALLY. I HOPE THE REST OF FOREVER FILLS YOUR BONES WITH AN UNSHAKEABLE PEACE. I HOPE YOU JUMP UP AND DOWN LIKE A LITTLE KID UNTIL THE STARS WINK OUT. I HOPE YOUR EVERY DANDELION DAYDREAM BECOMES UNBELIEVABLE FACT THEN OFT RETURNED-TO MEMORY AND TONIGHT I AM ON MY ROOF AND I AM BLEEDING ONTO MY BOOTS BECAUSE THE PIECES OF OUR PAST KEEP CUTTING MY FINGERS WHEN I TRY TO GATHER THEM UP INTO SOMETHING GLITTERING AND GORGEOUS BUT I AM GLAD THAT AT LEAST YOU CAN’T SEE THE MIRRORBALL OF DAMAGE YOU DID. I AM GLAD YOU DIDN’T YIELD AND I DIDN’T BEG AND YOU DIDN’T LOOK OVER YOUR SHOULDER AND YOUR NAME DIDN’T BURN A HOLE THROUGH MY THROAT AS I WATCHED YOU WALK AWAY THOUGH IT ALMOST DID. IT ALMOST DID BUT WE ARE MUCH OLDER THAN WE WERE WHEN WE MET AND SOMETIMES I WONDER WHEN THAT HAPPENED. SOMETIMES I WONDER WHEN THAT HAPPENED. BUT I KNOW GOD IS REAL BECAUSE HE GAVE ME YOU. I KNOW GOD IS REAL BECAUSE HE GAVE ME YOU.

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i once

loved a man for

not owning an umbrella

another for the twitch in

his jaw when he hung

a lit joint from his

bottom lip

a third for the force

with which he blinked

when i entered the room and

my father still says

you like your life complicated

when i tell him the company

i’ve been keeping

well, i joke

i’ve been defanged and declawed

but today i laughed

when the rain

bent sideways

against the wind

and soaked me down to

my underwear

thanked the sky

for the show and

peeled the fabric

from my goose-bumped skin

like waterlogged petals

alright, i forget

my actions will

later beg

explanations

fine, i craft

more apologies

than amends

but i have barefoot followed

the mountain creek

from the mouth

to the Styx and

found godliness in learning

how to claw my way back

night-blooming bulbs

only grow when

buried deep

in disturbed soil, like

i might recoil

from errant hands

but i adored you

and still do

and when i see two

people in love and

she rolls her eyes while

he pulls her in

i think

they look like us

baby

they look like us.

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i hate tulips

for their velvet infallibility and fragility— vulnerable to careless white knuckles and spiteful slammed doors, the force of the break enough to send the stems sideways over the glass to their premature death, for the slick sap and wet crunch when cracked and discarded, having devolved into imperfection, that anorexic default decor, the uncomplicated choice, approved by unanimous and uncontroversial affection, designated to repeat at the end of the line, over and over and over and over an attempted opiate to romantic dissonance, while in truth a bad omen, a foreboding precursor to contempt and deviation, those underhanded, easy shells, the faultless favorites of the mess-averse, the head-above-their-heart clear-thinking victors, dropped onto a waiting lap, choked and dripping and pathetic, the plastic-wrapped perennial gifted out of obligation and willful ignorance upon a pained smile, a cocked head, a wildflower girl, open and tender, empty of calculation and conformity, attempting and failing to articulate the betrayal of such a misunderstanding, or the ways in which it burnt her body to the root, and so the denouement of the tragedy is this, he loves me, he loves me not landing odd, wilting into my kneecaps, bruising my bottom lip to stay the torrent of tears at the bouquet, and how it was analogous to the whole ordeal

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spaghetti westerns

my old man says

spaghetti westerns

are like if God

went to spin class

but slipped out halfway

through because he

forgot he left the stove

on and the cat was

still in the apartment

and you know that

scene where the couch’s

jaw unhinges like a rabid dog and

swallows that girl whole

this is like that—

the death drag by the ankles

and the foam and spittle

and split skull

shotgun cocked

against concave shoulder

at the riverbed

Jimi Hendrix was a war machine

I’m told, but the short

hand stole my ID

and used it to buy Parliaments

and three cases of

Pabst Blue Ribbon so I

can’t go back and

last week in the

Dust Bowl or Woodstock

or my grandparents’ garage

I sat for a new tattoo

and the sanitized skin

above my kneecaps

having only

ever kissed your lips

ran from the needles but

if there’s one thing my body

and I know it’s

how to put a bitch

out of her misery

so I bleached the

blood out of my socks

and got

gone

I was in the desert before it was desert. I was in the prairie when it was still glacial dancefloor, the wild wheat masquerading under mirage as paleolithic forest, with its big, stale lungs, in and out and in and out and all over me, patrolled by mountain lions and their cradle-robbing scream, purring and arching against wildfire-darkened pine— copycat, I love you, did I ever tell you that? That I never learned the difference between predator and pet? I’m learning now, I’m learning.

It’s all coming back to me— can’t you remember the trepidation with which I confessed my hometown secrets to you? Then, suddenly, how it became avalanche: how the hills sloped against the cotton sky with audacity, rocks jutting out into the carbon-rich air like mismatched poetry, how the gravel curled towards the peak in ever-tightening, garter snake loops, how I stood at the top and thought only of you. I’d forgotten the high altitude crows, or ravens, regardless, those winged messenger gods of good fortune; did I ever tell you of the day they metamorphosized from snow-capped to soot? I was there, smoke singeing my nostrils while they made the deal, so I borrow their prophetic call once more, to pierce through your ear with diamond clarity, let it melt in rust-brown rivulets down your freckled neck, trickle to what beats in your broad chest, and hope.

Let me remind you, you’re seeing things: there is no darkness here. Stranger, you are not alone in this land. Look up. Have you not navigated by Pollux, Castor, and Venus before? Old friend, I know you better. I know you, those lowland dessication cracks splitting from your eyes, coaxed out in jest and elation, my darling, caressed by the warm wind blowing in from Nebraska, what an odd feeling, I’m sure, to be standing so vulnerable to errant forked electricity and the terror of the vacuum, here where the skysplitters meet the plains, swayed by the gusts of those that caught sight of the Rockies and balked, but I know your bravery better. Have I said that yet? I know your bravery better, tasted it when you first crossed the border— you’ve been here before. The col aged you, yes, I can see the trails of raised, rosey skin and puckered blood which the canyon walls left in their wake, dynamite dust staining and polluting the misshapen scabs, but I am asking you to pass through again, to trust that, as you left, your footfalls brought down the clouds and cast a mudslide, eroding a smoother path for your return.

Come through again, and I’ll show you the scars of the prairie’s self-immolation, the sweetgrass sunburnt into fragrant fodder for rebirth; tell me you know the red dirt beneath you is still your home and I’ll welcome you back with supernatural and surrealist blooms, azure and magenta columbine budding between the little bluestem, pull up the roots and you’ll see I’ve grown ever deeper, the stalks and stems turning towards Nevada, baby, did I ever tell you the story of the crow? Come back, lie in the flatland fields, I’ll press my muddy hands to your shoulders and lips to your ear and recite how he was cast into the fire, then pulled from it, in a stroke of youthful forgiveness. I’ll tell you how he was blackened, but breathing, and flew off into the night, never to betray man again. Give me your hips and your bones, bury yourself safe in me, I won’t ask for anything but your western sunshine and a summer rainstorm, or two, just enough to extinguish the flames, enough to begin the blossoming.

He meant young, or fragile, I think. I certainly felt it. I was gripping my bag and a stuffed photorealistic Tasmanian Devil (my favorite animal), which he’d given me as a birthday present that morning. Before I went through the metal detector, the security guard paused and told me his daughter had one just like it.

It took everything in me not to collapse right there.

Eight hours later, I walked out into the spring evening haze, dazed and shaking off a bad reaction to the anaesthesia. I chain-smoked on a nearby stoop while I waited for my boyfriend to pick me up, then we made our way to Washington Square Park and got high off a convenience store joint until the tears steadily falling down my cheeks dried. I remember feeling completely hollowed out, physically and emotionally. We didn’t celebrate my birthday at all.

The entire ordeal was far too much for me, which I didn’t expect. My whole life I’d been staunchly pro-choice and unreligious; I had not anticipated it being as traumatic an experience as it was, since there was no illusion in my mind that I might be “killing” something sentient. It wasn’t even really a decision; within 15 minutes of taking the pregnancy test, I had an appointment booked at Planned Parenthood. There was no debate.

Still, I was so young: 19, under strict orders from my parents and boyfriend to not tell anyone. I carried the whole weight of it on my shoulders alone.

In doing so, I lost almost 30 pounds, though the story of the weight loss differs depending on who I’m speaking to. I’ll say: my hormones balanced out, the nausea was unbearable, it was the pain of it, and that terrible relationship, or maybe an eating disorder. All true, though I can’t remember whether I lost the weight before or after. It must have been before, I think, because a few days later I got off a plane at Midway International Airport and my mother said, “God, Ellie, you’re so boney.”

I remained “boney”, awkward on new legs, for years.

In the three weeks between the test and the abortion, my boyfriend would press his hand to my swelling belly and ask me, “Do you think it’s a boy or a girl? What would we name her? What do you think she’d be like?”

If you’re wondering: girl, Clementine, and I think she’d be a wild and bookish little freak.

We played this game often. I’d lay my head on his chest in a twin XL dorm bed while we planned an alternate universe life. We’d have the baby, move in with his family in Vermont for a while, then save enough money to rent a one-story bungalow by the beach in Southern California. He’d act, I’d write, and we’d have a slow little life.

That night, he folded me into his arms and said, “If it happens again, we’re keeping it.”

That being said, the baby never felt like his, or even ours. This is important for me to clarify. Outside of the physical act of fertilization, he was barely an active participant in the matter— it was my body that had suddenly decided my uterus was viable, my body that chose to begin the process of bringing life into the world. Why would my baby belong to him at all?

Further, the pregnancy came to me at an incredibly lonely time in my life. I’d just moved back to New York, was discovering that I kind of hated my friends, and that my boyfriend of a year and a half was not the man I thought he was. Depression had sunk itself deep into my bones, though I lacked the vocabulary to describe it at the time. Despite the malaise that pregnancy brought, the growing fetus was, oddly, a comfort. A companion. I could curl into my bed at night and know I wasn’t alone.

I had my own alternate universe secret plans: I’d leave my boyfriend, move back to Illinois and stay with my mother, then get a job teaching social studies in the Rocky Mountains and raise my girl in the woods by myself.

But I knew better.

On my 20th birthday, I walked into the Planned Parenthood on Mott Street (which has since closed), and after several hours of doctors’ appointments and waiting rooms, the anesthesiologist asked me to count backward from 10, and I fell asleep.

I only woke when they accidentally knocked my foot against the door while rolling me out of the operating room. I grabbed the nurse’s hand and asked her if it was over.

She squeezed my hand back and said, “It’s over, baby.”

I didn’t stop crying for several hours.

The first year was grieving. My heart was convinced that I’d lost something precious, that was just mine, and I’d never get it back. A part of me felt permanently soiled, like I’d corrupted some cruel virginity that I didn’t even know I had. I never felt guilty or regretful, not for a second, which made my constant melancholy all the more difficult to comprehend or explain. I’d been almost flippant about the situation before, then all of a sudden, I was crushed.

There wasn’t anybody I could talk to about it. My boyfriend couldn’t begin to understand what I had been through, nor did he try. I was petulant and irritable with my mother for, from my perspective, forcing me to handle it alone. I wasn’t capable of clarifying that, despite being entirely confident in my decision, I was still bereft and consumed by rumination about what could have been.

My boyfriend and I stopped having sex (his decision) and began what would be three years of a senseless and toxic off-again-on-again infidelitous cycle. During one particularly gutting breakup, he told me that our relationship had permanently fractured after my abortion. To his credit, he was right. He grossly mishandled the situation, and I slowly began to see the cracks in our relationship, without having the strength to leave it. This made him resentful of me, while I starved for him, and we took blow after blow at each other, each argument returning to the moment of collapse: the abortion.

I asked him once why he stopped being attracted to me after the operation. He shook his head and said, “I don’t know, just seeing you that weak…”

All that went on for a while. I was still grieving. It took a year, but I eventually sought help in the form of an “abortion circle” facilitated by the Chicago Abortion Fund. On my 21st birthday, I sat on my couch in Crown Heights and logged onto a Zoom call with women who had also had abortions. They discussed their experiences and stories, giving each other comfort and advice.

Eventually, I spoke up. I told them how I’d had my abortion on my birthday, and now felt as if the day would forever be marked by one of the most painful things I’d ever gone through.

One woman turned on her mic and said, “Well, when you think about it, it really is the best gift you could have given to yourself. You gave yourself your youth.”

I hope, somehow, she knows how often I have returned to those words. My mindset completely shifted after that meeting. I became proud of my strength and stopped looking in the mirror and seeing damaged goods. Now, I speak about my abortion as often as I can, in the hopes that I can be a resource for other young women. I was extremely lonely and isolated; I don’t want anyone else to feel that way.

The second year after the abortion was nothing. I don’t remember it. My relationship spiraled into domestic violence, in the truest sense, and my brain shut down.

I left my boyfriend in May of 2025, and for a while, it felt like a limb was missing, like whole chapters had been torn violently from my life.

After an abortion or miscarriage, the DNA of the father remains inside the mother for decades. Bits of him now rest in the tissue of my heart or lungs or liver. I used to think about that a lot. Sometimes with fondness, as if, despite him being gone, I’d always have a piece of him with me. I found it difficult to hate him; what an ego-death gut punch to think that I gave an evil, abusive person all that love and adoration. I couldn’t have been so wrong and idiotic, could I? Other times, I thought of it with a sick fury that threatened my sanity, images appearing when I closed my eyes of tearing at my veins and physically exorcising his presence with dirty, blood-stained fingernails.

I don’t feel that way anymore. Time heals, and all that.

Three years later, it doesn’t really feel like anything, just something hard that happened to me when I was too young to know how to handle it. Talking about it frequently benefited me, too. The key to healing complex trauma is corrective emotional experiences. While I never went to therapy for my abortion, talking about it so often, in safe environments with people who handled it with care, rewrote the memory into something more palatable.

I am one of those sickly optimistic people who believes everything happens for a reason. Though time has not given me any clarity as to why I got pregnant, or why it affected me so deeply, it has given me peace and a deeper understanding of myself, what happened, and my own strength.

Now and then, I will be out with my friends and think to myself, holy shit, I’d have a two-year-old right now. I’d likely still be in love with a malevolent, terrible man, and my life would have been truncated by being somebody’s mom.

My perspective on motherhood has changed drastically in the years since. While I was with my ex, I secretly hoped to get pregnant again, so that we could have that house in Southern California and be together forever. Once I left him, I debated getting my tubes tied. Pregnancy had been miserable, and I am, honestly, quite vain; why would I ever put myself or my looks through that? Besides, I am impatient and mentally ill and have been known to act cruelly when pressed. Motherhood presses. I could not guarantee that I would not traumatize a child in the ways that I had been traumatized. Why risk it?

The dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin in my brain have since been regulated, thank God. I no longer meet the diagnostic criteria of the mental health conditions that I saw as prohibitive to being a good mother. The bad girl inside me, that I was sure was a permanent and cancerous fixture, slipped out the back door without a word.

So, maybe. So, I love this world, and should things start looking up (politically, culturally, environmentally), I’d love to be a mother and raise a wild woman like me. Wouldn’t that be fun?

Everyone’s abortion experience is different. I think I took mine much harder than most. There is no correct way to process it, and I am forever indebted to the Chicago Abortion Fund for allowing me the space to process as messily as I needed.

Only one worry remains: that this experience (both the abortion and abuse) forced me to outgrow everyone. Which is not to say that I believe I’m the only person who has gone through intense difficulties, the only person who has survived hardship. But I’ve noticed, within my peers, a deep misunderstanding of complex trauma: an eye-roll, get over it already mentality. I try hard to take accountability for my actions—I am tremendously flawed, and have been exceptionally hurtful to others as a result of negative patterns formed under duress. But there is this gnawing feeling inside of me that, in a few years, once they’ve watched someone they love die slowly or become heartbroken to the point of borderline insanity or woken up on an operating table, excavated and broken, they’ll understand me a bit better. I’m sure this is naive and that I’ll eventually feel differently, but I don’t know.

My life is still before and after the abortion. I was wheeled into that room as a child and wheeled out as an adult. But I love abortion, thank God for abortion, thank God for the women who fought and starved and protested so that I could go through something so challenging, but life-saving. Motherhood does not end personhood, but at 20 years old, it certainly would have ended mine. I do not regret my decision, and never ever have, and should I get pregnant tomorrow, I would do it again. I do not daydream of the life I might have had, except for momentary blips of ugh, wouldn’t that have been terrible?

It might not have been. But it doesn’t matter now, does it?

Abortion forever, at any time, for any reason.

Planned Parenthood Donation Link

Chicago Abortion Fund

New York Abortion Access Fund

National Network of Abortion Funds

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bird

on houston, i asked a man who has been inside me at least twice if he remembered me. it’s not that i thought my game was a disappearing act, just that memory is tricky, you know. i was never bride, nor friend. bedbug, maybe, critter. bird, he called me once, so you can see why i would ask. he laughed and said, “Sadly,” but put his hand on my lower back and let me slip in the door. i wriggled from his grasp quickly, knowing better than to search for warmth or recognition, and rather, wanting an admission that my absence was noted and returned to, with frequency. last summer, a blonde bumped into a lamp and splintered tiny violent mirrors onto the dancefloor. her eyes were shiny and cerulean and young and i screamed at him for making her cry. i pushed through the throng of bodies with both hands, then smoked three cigarettes as he watched, not speaking, my chest splotchy and flushed with rage. i kicked the curb in farewell and never looked over my shoulder.

later, on Driggs, i told a man that i only ever masturbate with the covers over my head. he laughed and asked, “Do you fuck like that, too?” i told him no, but now, i think it was a lie

I am aching to release this before the new moon rises, before I light my candles and slip beneath the salted water and come back to myself, solidly honest and true.

These days, each time I crack my neck, I feel the cruel patterns pop and dissolve into my bloodstream, to be filtered out through my kidneys and liver. I’ve outgrown the ever-present clawing need in my chest, which has time and time again pushed me into recklessness and embarrassing desperation.

This need is, unfortunately, the same force that pushes my pen when I write about love. I’ve been a Love Poet, titular, since I first spoke my poetry aloud in an Illinois high school classroom. In recent months, my interests have expanded exponentially to the point that if you cracked open my skull and examined my brain, I’m certain you would find stretch marks and baby-pink growth. I am still in love, still a lover; it is so deep in my nature that I find it to be inextricable from my personality. But if I continue to be a Love Poet in the way that I was, I will spend the rest of my life tucking my tail between my legs and failing to write over my mistakes.

My purpose on this Earth is not to make beautiful that which is killing me. I’d very much like to contribute more to the world than poems about longing and heartache and want. But rebirth demands exorcism, and even if I should be misunderstood, I am leaving the last of my love poetry to rest here.

The story goes like this:

The last time I drove by the old Victorian farmhouse on County Line Road, it was the milk-left-in-the-bowl-of-cereal end of summer: the shadows sweet and spilling across zip codes, trickling with saccharine leisure onto the midwestern roofs. I was barely clothed, white cotton bunched up around my hips and thighs instead of your hands, with one knee tucked to my chest in a characteristic disregard for traffic laws.

The pit of you was already lodged so deep in my stomach that I couldn’t breathe from the fullness; I had all the windows rolled down to keep from gasping, was chewing on my skin at stoplights, called to the house and her big purple shutters like a believer in the pews is called to pray.

Back then, I only knew the hunger, the basal careening ache of want and wish and tongue, not yet schooled on the intricacies I’d come to take for granted, like how it felt to hear you call me sweet girl and mean it, tearing out my insides with the wide scope of kindness in your soul. There were one thousand lines to be written about the yellow-gold dripping off your curls under those East Village streetlights, even more to be said about the tilt of your head and each galvanic step you took closer. I knew I was greedy and wild; the daydream left me wanting and sunburnt with craving. I was willing to damn myself if it meant I could sink to my knees in your brilliance for a while.

I didn’t risk filling my lungs again until I’d left the neighborhood. I pushed my toes down on the accelerator and closed my eyes on the highway, exhaling your name and matting my hair against the headrest, imagining you mirroring my desire and moving inside, and I never admitted it to you, or anyone, even when I belonged more to you than I did myself, that it wasn’t the August heat that made me wet, but the crystalline mirage of you stringing up Christmas lights, fishing our dog’s ball out of the gutter, cupping my face in your hands in that giant bedroom I could see from the road, slipping into the sheets and kissing me goodnight.

i.

prairie cloud baby they say, and mean it, like dust storm, like when you stand in an open field to watch lightning split the mesocyclone in half, like the church bell laughter that erupts from your throat when the decibels tear through you, eagle eye, your father says, and means it, like the forked tongue of truth was yours first and yours only, like each batted lash spilled prophecy, volcanic temper, she says, and means it, and though it is delivered with mirth, you see it, like crouching coyote or hubris swallowed whole, incentivized by hunger until you learn to bite too deep, sheepskin devil, he spits, but means it, an honest sight-seeing curse, and it lodges in your skull, ‘til the trunk grows around the infection, prairie cloud baby, they say, and you can’t hear it, scalp-deep in the dirt and gasping for air.

ii.

prairie cloud baby sprawled naked with damp grass in her mouth, aged and aching for her mother’s milkweed, pulled from the newborn crust by little more than sky-given spite, witch, now rising to soiled knees, whispering soliloquies against split knuckles and emboldened by compunction, having cannibalized whatever rot was causing the decay, blood-sucker croup coughing into well-known hysteria, sap-letting, but improving, night hag, previously acquainted with the secrets of the moss though now denied access on account of being animal but foreign, unrecognizable and uncanny, how long has it been since you’ve been yourself, changeling, on two feet now, not without effort but at least with strength, shaking off the misnomer and presenting her warm candid palm like a fairy gift, clotted synapses still misfiring against remembrance but trying, girl, trying.

once, i stood

on a stool in my kitchen to

put our hearts parallel and the weight 

of your arms fell on my desperate shoulders

what kept the earth on her axis, then? if not

the momentum of longing and your lips

to my scalp, if there was ever a moment where

we belonged to each other, it was then, though

never before and never again

calling back slumber lost, ‘til your hands found my thighs 

and we were us once more, starving and selfish

and young

the thought is phantom now, bodies and bodies between us

the cruel scene cold and cobwebbing over, but i 

return with certainty,

with belonging, to capture what glittering reflections 

remain, what i can reach for without 

drawing my hands back, red 

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i threw a dart at a twenty-two square mile corkboard and it hit the center of your skull. you pulled the metal rod from its bullseye, called it sex at first sight.

i was writing gore ballads about walking corpses, your hands dripping red onto my floor, and i’m in love with a californian now, my whole life spent and everything was just about going home to the ocean. i peer over cliffs and follow hillside roads, i kiss my lover and never cry. you put appalachia in my path, spit, then told me to climb. i used to be thankful. i used to survive on snowmelt. to be inside you required self-cannibalization and an intimate understanding of maple root growth patterns. a diet of trillium root and yellow trout lily. i have big strong bones now. now i avoid the green mountain. the mist has eyes, has seen my soft belly stained watercolor with wild strawberries, back arched and nails black from clawing at the dirt. the oxygen depleted air rotted me from the inside out.

but the salt air cleanses. i hear that, they tell me. the salt air cleanses, the sun’s a panacea, don’t go back to the forest, what is waiting for you there but mold, what could be calling you back but teeth, one sandy foot in front of the other, halfway through the downclimb, you’re so brave, baby, you’re so strong, suntanned and sparkling now.

i keep my mouth shut these days. so they don’t see the earthworms on my tongue.

• I go to a bookstore

• I spend way too much money

• I see the most beautiful sunset. Ever.

On days that I want to kill myself, it doesn’t matter which bookstore I go to, just that it is very crowded and that there is nowhere to sit.

This is vital.

It limits my options: get creative about my definition of “somewhere to sit”, buy all the books in my hand ($65) and go to a coffeeshop ($10) or a restaurant ($35), or kill myself on the spot.

Today I have chosen to get creative. I tell myself that my unwillingness to fully drain my bank account is a good sign.

Bookstores are spiritual, especially in New York. They’re what I imagine airports in heaven look like: one hundred thousand portals to salvation. The Russian roulette of it is picking the right one. Choose the wrong book and all hope for you is truly, terribly lost, and you will find yourself in the same precarious situation you were in when you walked into the bookstore.

But choose the right one…

On days that you want to kill yourself, the veil between you and non-reality is at its thinnest, and you are susceptible to believing in things like fate and chance.

You are susceptible to believing that the words of strangers might save you.

I drag the pads of my fingers over endless covers and spines, half-expecting a shock of electricity, or for a glowing tome to present itself to me. It doesn’t, but my eyes follow my fingers, and they, without fail, catch on something.

The book is usually thin and achievable, modest, in case next week I am not so brave. On the cover, there is almost always a girl. She is waifish and forlorn, but sexy, paled in black-and-white. I bet she smokes cigarettes. I bet she has fallen asleep in her own filth and been split in half by heartbreak. I bet she’s tried again and again and again and again.

When I want to kill myself, I gravitate towards memoirs of New Yorkers and Angelinos, former (or current) psych ward patients and addicts. I search their eyes for my own sadness. When I find it, when I read it, the camaraderie I feel staves off the demons long enough for me to make it to the last page, or at least next week.

If you can make it to next week, you are going to be fine.

Hopelessness is no stranger to me. I received my major depressive diagnosis (recurrent, severe) before I hit double digits. When I look back on my life, my footsteps are zig-zagged and jagged, constantly dodging suicidality and “the darkness”. In a way, I am lucky for this. When the aching pull creeps up on me, I can roll my eyes with the assurance that this too shall pass.

But that doesn’t make getting through the blackest days any easier. I’ve learned that distraction is best and often the healthiest choice. I get out of bed and think:

Okay, if this is my last day on Earth, what do I want to do?

I know it’s not my last day on Earth. I won’t let it be. But there is a sick relief in pretending that it is, and I end up filling my day with activities and places that bring me joy. By the time the sun starts to set, I am (at least a tiny, itty bitty bit) excited for the next day.

I remember every book I have bought on days I want to kill myself. It comes a few times a year, usually in the fall, right when the last of the bare-legged days are behind me and just before I can make it back home to my mother. The books sweep me up, preoccupy me with prose and hope until I can unclench my jaw and breathe again.

The most important part: you must pick a book with a happy ending. Treat it like manifestation, like witchcraft. You are choosing your way out. There is a way out.

But I don’t know. Today I still want to kill myself, like I did last year and the year before that. Today I feel oh-so-small, today I miss my grandmother and want to curl into her side in her big red chair and sleep forever, today my life is the blue-black of the Atlantic and I know exactly how delicious saltwater is.

That seems like a lazy way to waste a Wednesday, though, doesn’t it? Especially when, if I’d killed myself at 3pm, I would have missed the pinkest sky of my life at 4pm. Especially when I’ve got a new book ($13!), and Tolstoy is calling my name, and this chai ($8) is cold but kind of delicious, and tomorrow might have an even more beautiful sunset ($0).

So anyway, I might as well see what 5pm brings.

Some books I’ve bought instead of walking into the East River:

• The Collected Schizophrenias (Esmé Weijun Wang)

  • A reminder that there are objectively more intense psychological disorders than suicidal ideation. And even still, there is magic and love and hope to be found in them. I recommend this book to everyone.

• Better Than Sane: Tales from a Dangling Girl (Alison Rose)

  • The opening line is something like “It is a known fact that all New York girls self-mythologize” or something. Found her in The Strand on a day that I genuinely thought my heart would give out on me and that I would die of sadness. I didn’t! Alison Rose is a gem. I reread whenever I feel lost.

• Sex and Rage (Eve Babitz)

  • An autobiographical novel that is so self-loathing and yet so self-assured that you can’t help but root for Jacaranda, and in turn, yourself. May you also keep falling upward,

• The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Tolstoy)

  • Today’s purchase. Sometimes I am just a 19th-century Russian man in my heart, and he reminds me of my Grandma.

In late July, in the middle of my heat-stroke summer, you took me to the beach.

You took me to the beach to wet me without touching me. To leave me soaking, nothing between our diamond-drenched skin but sky and sand and waterlogged nylon. You dragged your eyes over the sun-bleached peach fuzz of my thighs, averted your gaze and put your tongue against your teeth to keep from salivating. Call me double dipper, I wanted more. I’d tasted your touch, once, twice, maybe, but in dreams, in metaphysical dalliances, I slid myself into your inseams, stitched my name into the creases and cotton, carved new paths with my fingernails and lipstick. I brought four apples, two to sink your teeth into in lieu of my flesh, an eye-fucking Eve in that Long Island oasis, laughed when you took the bait.

You circled like a dog.

How much of this is conquest, I wanted to ask you. How much of this is a game? You’d torn up my insides with little more than a Dickensian love-bite, non-verbal puritanical passion and classified attraction, each of us two steps further than the other and looking back for confirmation we were still playing. We pressed our wave-battered bodies into the milled shells and waited for the coastal winds to push us closer, aching to make quick work of the intricacies of shared pleasure and lay claim to what we’d hoped was ours. How ridiculous of us, to be so impatient, to manufacture something the sea had known about for ages. It was coming in with the moon, stronger than the pull of the tide. But you know this story.

So, I’ll tell you this: Now, months later, I still turn you over in my mind, though with greater fervor. Now, having learned the intricacies, having perfected them, prodigious to each other’s bodies and still seeking more knowledge, I find the smoke expanding outward. Carry on, catch me, catch yourself, stolen bits of my blackened lungs heaving in your broad chest. Write it again and again and let me memorize the pen strokes. You chop onions and don’t cry. You smile and wipe the slate clean. When you laugh I can taste it. How can my words, my tongue, tear into the pin-pricked paper and reach the light source. How else can I chew and get to the meat.

Tell me how to do it and I will.

I am standing on an empty street corner in late June, watching a very tall, very nervous 24-year-old boy make circles on the concrete with the rubber of his sneaker. It’s 4:00am, we’ve shut down the bar, and I’ve just lit a cigarette.

His name is Charlie. Nerdy, glasses, a mess of curly dark hair, head perpetually slightly dipped as if to better hear the flowers grow. I met him online, charmed by his paragraphs-long responses and open flirtation. I’d sworn off men, but there he was, begging earnestly to buy me a drink and talk my ear off about August Wilson.

And I thought to myself, Who am I to deprive him of a good time?

He works in film; he’s on Prozac and in a band. He moved here from Philadelphia three weeks ago, was dumped by his girlfriend two weeks ago, and is now spending his Thursday night with a stranger to walk off the ache of loneliness. I have similarly damning credentials. My ex-boyfriend nearly killed me, I’m in therapy three times a week, and I’m now spending my Thursday night with a stranger to take the burden of babysitting me off my best friend.

I find him endearing. The way he trips over his words and circles back to ask me questions about things I’d said 10 minutes ago is deeply refreshing and sweet. We’d spent the night hopping from bar to bar, me giving him a midnight tour of my haunts, wandering from the Lower East to the West Village. My jokes aren’t quite landing, but at the very least he can keep up. Now, at the end of the night, he’s unsteady and unfocused, six beers deep, searching for the courage to kiss me beneath the flickering lights.

He finds it somewhere in the concrete and finally crosses the pavement to be toe-to-toe with me. The man thinks he’s two steps ahead, smirking mischievously between stolen puffs of my cigarette. In response, I turn on the twinkle, the i-know-exactly-how-bad-you-want-me eyes, blinking up at him while politely smoothing out the edges of our conversation into an ending.

I offer him the last hit of my little Marlboro Gold. He declines, so I stamp it out beneath my boot.

Before I can raise my head to bid him farewell, he’s hooked a forefinger beneath my chin, and is kissing me.

And I mean really kissing me, in a way I haven’t been kissed before, in a way that sends rational thought all the way across the Hudson, in a way that makes me wonder where he’s been all my life. I gasp and he gently pushes me, with just enough force to light a fire between my hips, back into the awning of a walk-up apartment building.

For a glittering moment, we are irrevocably tangled together, exes so far in the dust they are indistinguishable from tumbleweeds, and we bask in the heat of it. I’m embarrassed to say how hungry I was, but I’d been starving for what felt like decades. I wrap my arms around his neck and pull him closer to me, giving his hands permission to start wandering.

His fingers find purchase on the curves of my waist, but he pulls away. He steps back on one foot, breathless, a wild and honest grin spreading from ear to ear.

I choke out a laugh and turn against the wall like an embarrassed schoolgirl.

He laughs, too. “What the hell was that?”

I turn back to him and cross my arms over my chest. “I told you I was a good kisser.”

Shaking his head to clear it, he replies, “You know, I’ve never done this before.”

I don’t know why I believe him, but I do. There is something so forthright about him, a desperation he hasn’t been able to hide all night. I wish I could write that I was brave, that I grabbed a belt loop on his Levi’s and pulled him against me again. But I didn’t. I just stood there and watched him look at me.

What a drug, to have your most basal desire for connection mirrored in another person, in a stranger. I get it now. How a game can be made of this. How a virgin could get addicted to the taste of unfamiliar lips. Carnal, strange, undeniably delicious.

I have been uninterested in any lesser passion since.

He closes the distance between us again, and I tilt my chin up to him in invitation. This time, he doesn’t kiss me.

Instead, “Please come home with me.”

My decision has already been made, but I feign coyness with the truth:

“I haven’t shaved.”

“I don’t care.”

“I’m on my period.”

“I don’t care.”

I knew he wouldn’t. Re: recently dumped by his girlfriend. Boys who have been in love fuck better. This is fact, this is science. They care less about manufacturing a PornHub worthy “love” scene, complete with clean bodily fluids and pre-pubescent smoothness. To love a woman is to be comfortable with a crime scene.

Ten points for Charlie.

I look up at the pre-dawn sky as if searching for an answer there. I think of my ex-boyfriend, the one who left me bleeding, and I wonder what he’d think of me now. He’d be disgusted by me, I’m sure of it. The thought of this, of him knowing someone else’s hands so quickly found the spots on my body he swore only he knew, sends electricity up my spine. I’d like very much to erase the bruises his fingerprints left with the kisses of somebody even slightly more deserving.

I find his eyes again. Tilt my head, bite my lip. Pretend to calculate.

“Alright, fine.”

He jumps for joy and calls the cab, and this is when my memory starts to splinter and crack along the lines of my inebriation.

As far as I can remember, the cab ride to Williamsburg is brief and almost silent, both of us shocked by our own uncharacteristically indecent decision-making. When we arrive, he leads me by the hand up the stairs and into the one-bedroom he’s subletting. He shuts the door behind us and runs to the bedroom to do… something or another, and I’m left in the kitchen, wobbling ever so slightly. He will be the first man to undress me without meeting my parents first, only the fourth notch in my belt at 22. I have never done this before in my goddamned life.

A quick scan of the room reveals his landlord’s questionable taste in decoration. Worse than that, it reveals his ex-girlfriend’s things, piled in moving bags on the couch.

An intense pang of guilt shoots straight through me. Who the fuck do I think I am?

She was just here. I’m committing a crime against a girl I don’t even know. I imagine her, standing in this very spot, yelling and screaming at the boy she loved, exhausted by his faults to the point of defeat. I suppose I’m meant to feel triumphant, or at the very least indifferent, but I don’t. I’ve been her. I am already on her side; even I can see the cracks in this boy we now share. He is apolitical, unenthused by almost everything, a little too nice, and in a state of post-grad arrested development. I wish I could talk to her, compare our similarities and apologize for whatever hurt I’ll cause when she inevitably learns of me.

Charlie returns from his bedroom, ducking ever so slightly to make it through the door. He’s now shirtless, and in two strides has pressed himself behind me. One hand wraps pleasurably around the base of my neck, while the other moves my hair to one shoulder.

His lips find the vulnerable slopes of me, and I am totally and completely gone.

I’ve been fucked, sure. I’ve been leaned over the bed or the counter or against the wall or the shower tile, I’ve been fucked like they were trying to avoid a $10 charge for every extra minute. I’ve been dominant and I’ve been submissive, I’ve had it rough and I’ve had it soft, I’ve done whatever I could to get them off. I didn’t complain. Sex is sex, and I’m not difficult to please.

But I’ve never been wanted, never been pinned against a surface and explored simply for the pleasure of it. Never have I been the object of that uncontrollable, hearth-baked ache that only could be remedied by discovering the sounds I make when my back arches against bedsheets. I need to feel that craving. I need to feel like I’m alive. I want devotion or nothing.

We fuck, then fuck again, stopping only when the morning birds and airport-bound taxis drown out our sighs. We fall asleep naked, spooned into each other, him whispering words into my ear kinder than I’ve ever heard from a man before. He lets me sleep in. He leaves for a meeting then comes back, slipping into bed only to make me gasp his name a few more times. When I finish, he retrieves my clothes from where they’d been discarded around the apartment and watches as I slide my cheetah-print underwear back over my thighs.

It feels so natural to me. So simple. We wanted each other, so we had each other. I’ve got a poet’s heart and a philosopher’s brain, and it dawns on me how little any of my preconceived and overdeveloped notions of casual sex matter in this moment.

Typical I had a good time, when can I see you again pleasantries are exchanged. He asks for tomorrow, I tell him next week. I may be reckless, but I know better than to start giving him all my time. I pack my bag and try my best to make sure my hair does not betray how I spent my night.

I’m about to walk out the door when he picks me up by the waist and seats me on his counter, pushing aside the clothes I’d only just put back on and laying claim to my skin one last time.

Finally, a man to match my appetite.

Between labored breaths, my eyes catch on the contents of the sink.

He’d made eggs. And bought himself a coffee. Huh. Okay.

Forgivable offenses, to be sure. He probably didn’t want to wake me up. His teeth nip at the hollow of my collarbone, and all is forgotten.

Some immeasurable amount of time later, we break apart. I straighten my clothes once again, hop off the counter, get on my tiptoes and plant a kiss on his cheek.

“Wait for me, one sec.” He says.

He runs into his bedroom, and returns in inside-out athletic shorts and… Nike slides.

This irks me. This irks me deeply, for reasons that are still lost on me. Maybe it is seeing his bare feet. Maybe it reminds me of my boy cousins as teenagers, flopping around the house and screaming over Call of Duty. Maybe it is in such stark contrast to anybody that I’ve ever loved, and anything in their respective closets, that it sends a cold shock to my system. I swallow the bile rising in my throat and let him escort me out of his apartment, down the stairs, and out onto the sidewalk.

We stand side by side, twin beads of sweat running down our foreheads. I call my own cab.

“You’re all good if I go back inside? It’s kinda hot.”

I blink up at him. “Yeah, sure.”

A few minutes later I’m buckled into the back of a yellow taxi. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t happy. Exhausted and sore in the best post-sex sort of way, I carried an orgasmic glow around with me for a full week after.

But I never saw Charlie again.

I was not and am not looking for a boyfriend, a husband, or somebody to take care of me. I’m ashamed of my beliefs in archaic standards of how a man should be, and how a man should treat a woman. I actively work to dismantle my desperation for the security of girlfriend-hood. But there was something about the way he left me on that street then sauntered back into his apartment, footwear dragging audibly on the sidewalk… I couldn’t get past it.

Does that make me crazy? Am I bad at casual dating? Should I just accept that, if I want somebody else to make me finish once a week, I have to sleep in the beds of boys who just aren’t good enough?

I don’t know when I’d become so ruthless, so cutthroat. Charlie was a perfectly fine kid who liked me a lot, and he certainly knew how to make me feel good. There would have been zero harm in keeping him around. But as soon as he was willing to give me less than what I deserved (no coffee, no cab fare), be less than the man I imagined myself beside (Nike slides), I no longer felt anything but vague disinterest toward him. It was like somebody had taken a squeegee to fogged glass, and I am much more comfortable in solitude than wondering if a man is going to give me what I want.

What a boring way to live.

Also, I lied. What I wrote above was more cutting, but here’s the truth: I did see him one more time. A few days later, only to retrieve a book I’d left at his apartment. I got too stoned before and ended up back in his bed. What’s a girl to do.

He called me today, two months since any words had been exchanged between us. The call was brief; he was out of the country with family. He’d called just to tell me that he was thinking of me. Quickly I learned that, in reality, he’d called to tell me that I was the best fuck he’d ever had and that he needed to see me when he returned to New York or all hope for his soul would be lost. I enjoy this language and he knew that. All this was whispered in the same desperate tone that had charmed me months prior, and I very nearly fell for it, but I guess I’m a bigger girl than I was then. I am a slave to my passions, but my passions have chosen better priorities. I politely declined, told him I wished him all the best, and that maybe I’d see him around sometime.

I hung up. This time, I felt triumphant as hell.

Tavá Kaa-vi, Colorado Springs, on Nuche land.

***

know the timberline by taste alone

press the last of the oxygen between your teeth with your tongue

norad, that blinking tiger’s eye

your martian protector, let her carry you home

follow the loping aspen’s honesty

split her leaves, find the paper truth in her scent

lift the crown above your head, remember with reverence who raised you

the dinosaur bones, the petroleum, the astro-dust

slide into the leylines, close your eyes, feel them warp like desert roots

you hear them whisper your name, you hear them whisper your name

crave the recognition, ache for their phantom caress

learn to breathe under snowmelt stream, learn to see 14,000 feet into the earth

dynamite, beetle, and wildfire scars tear up the ancestral visage

yet you trace the rebirth, lap up the budding green placenta, call the sapling your playmate

watch the tornado tear up the swingset while you fry an egg on the driveway

your grandfather only read one book, but knew how to aim a shotgun true

you find the shells in your grown-up shoes

call your father a witch, mean it, when he says the river turned white

when they laid their eternal souls to rest, when they gave them back to the red earth

believe him when he says the brakes failed, believe him when sweetgrass smoke fills the cabin

believe him when he says it’s safe to drive again

he will watch you run across the rocks until your feet are watercolor roses,

watch you reach into the Colorado River and pull out a block of quartz the size of your torso

stumble back to your mother and sister on the bank, little arms weighed down by the gift you’ve been given

don’t say you don’t believe, don’t speak the word “home” in vain

the mountains have ears, have i mentioned that yet

they’re listening, they’re listening, they’re listening.

Then, the dead man, before me. I ask him to teach me my limits.

He nods, coolly.

I berate him.

Did you believe you were indigenous to the sky? What did he owe you? What were you trying to earn?

I, too, could fall in love with an assassin, I say, A warrior. I could fall in love if I could make poetry out of the glint of sunlight in his hair. You two grew up together, didn’t you? Ariadne and Icarus, intransigent twins with bad taste in lovers. Icarus, did you adore her the way only a little brother could? Icarus, when you were falling, did her adorned hands and dark curls flash before you? Icarus, you know intimately the power of the gods. Who were they punishing? Did you wonder why they didn’t save you? Why they chose Poseidon to catch you, why they let your father taste the sky, then made him watch you fall from it?

He reaches over and yanks my pen from me, discarding it behind him.

Alright. There was you, and then there was the surf. I understand.

I pause.

What else would you like me to know?

He looks up, exposing his powerful neck. It looked cold that day. White-blue, unmemorable, flat.

Icarus, were you excited?

He levels his golden eyes at me, and I wonder why Aphrodite didn’t pluck him from the seabed for his beauty. Yes, he says, through clenched teeth. They called it Hubris. They could have called it something more unique.

It is not unique to defy the gods, I remind him. And you were immortalized nonetheless.

Yes, he says again, then leans back as if to think. Yes, but not for anything good.

They named an island after you. They made you beautiful. When they draw you, sculpt you, they make you look like a god.

He scoffs. Capitalize it. Something clouds over his face, bringing out his hollows, and I’m reminded that though he learned to walk on gilded Cretan marble, he was the son of a slave.

I wasn’t a God.

Wasn’t your father some kind of God? An inventor, a creator, the closest thing a mortal can be.

A tingle erupts atop my scalp, and I feel myself pale; this is the first time he smiles at me, a coy and disarming thing. Darling, focus.

He continues, A god, maybe. Maybe a god, maybe a good man, which is rarer than ambrosia, rarer still than spilled ichor.

The Gods don’t want me to write that. I can feel it.

I don’t care, he says back. Write it, write that they killed him. Write that I was wild, and he was innocent, and they killed both of us for it. Write that he tried to go in after me, write that he invented necromancy to get me back, write that he—

I hold up a hand, the heat of his wrath palpable against my skin, scalp still tingling, the sensation moving with a fervor down the rest of my body. I have to end this. It hurts, and I know they’re listening, and I am fragile. I pray to different Gods, and I will not draw their attention.

Fine. But I’ll give you what you asked for. He points directly at the heart pounding in my chest, and it jumps into my throat. You are ordained. Rage and love are tied together in your bones. You are discerning but you are naive, controlled by whim and—

I pull myself out of the trance before he can finish the thought. Icarus returns to his earthly form, his atoms now some fish in the Mediterranean Sea. I gasp for air as if it’s me who’s underwater.

You really should be taking your meds. I think to myself.

I rise and retrieve my pen from where the ghost had thrown it. I left an offering to the sky last week. Some quartz, a shiny bullet casing from a Remington rifle, and a strand of my hair. I didn’t know who I was talking to, just that I’d been praying, and should leave a gift for the guidance. Was he answering a call? Paying a visit to a kindred spirit? Who heard me that day?

Thank you, I say, Thank you, what do you want in return?

Like the thousands of witches before me, I know nothing comes for free, especially not from a God.

A gun, a voice calls, and I laugh.

A sunflower, then. Quieter, calmer.

That I can do.

but do you know the aching pregnant bulge the hideous pull the cracking weight the wide-mouthed parasite have you poked it with a pin watched it splatter puss on the walls bathed in the terror made yourself clean in the filth clawed at those walls until your nails peeled back until even your reflection couldn’t look at you without recoiling in horror have you have you have you i have do you know how to do that i do i do i know how to yank i know how to tear i know how to strangle my own sternum my ribs have seen the sky kneecaps kissed the dirt esophagus sighed in the cold newborn air the insides of my arteries are cut drunk i know so well i don’t scream, i smile, the blood stains my tile i lick up the remains leave the skeletized scars for you to decode to decipher to dissolve it is a competition it is a competition and i win i win it’s erotic i know how the crushed velvet droplets sew themselves tapestries how they lace into my spine which arches on command at the word at the thought at the smile at the knife of you and turns still to immortalize the craving i know i make the bloodshed look sexy its okay. come here. give me the rope. i’ll find the rafters. you don’t need me but you need your ghostly pendulum cultural pulse-counter my corpse will tell you what’s cool as i swing this is the point you remind me with a wink the spectacle the courtroom reporter the frontline journalist, you call yourself a poet. you call yourself a poet with clean hands, muddy yourself on me then stand in the mirror and think yes, all this red is art, but the red is the loathing, the red is the itch, the red is the earth that birthed me, the red is mine.