the kids in this town
like to crawl into the woods
with the scraggly trees
balding earth
snakes that feed
on futures
and they stay there,
hibernate
in this sleepy hollow
until one day their tongues have
slid back into their throats

your father got drunk at your graduation
and i wanted to keep holding your hand.
you in your blue robes,
a white star in the sea,
your heart so palpable
like an artist's dreams.
your step-father pretended he cared,
but muttered under his breath during the procession
and i wanted to keep holding your hand.
i wished my fingers would grow like vines around your
palm
so you'd know i'd be there all along.
the ground may feel broken and your successes
made into background noise,
but you're my white owl
who carries all that is unseen
in your forest-touched eyes
and i believe that our hands,
as long as they're stuck together,
will give you the wings
to leave the rubble behind.

the blinds hang heavy
transforming the room into a
baroque style painting
intense lights, intense darks
and your features hard.
you're angry at me because i didn't stay the night.
you're angry at me because it was 3 in the morning
and i wanted some place else to go.
i carry my heels as i walk into the
local truck stop
big burly men fat like flies
reek and stand in line with doritos.
i want to hear your voice crackle
over the pay phone.
listen to your static lecture
and i'll tell you i cut open my feet on
some rocks
and you'll hang up,
and that would be
my last quarter.

he liked how she wore rain boots in the summer
and wished to build her home in the marshes
where she could sing with the toads
and play a cattail harp, reed symphony.
she kept a journal
she would draw rain clouds
and snow,
he'd watch her fingers loop around the pencil,
brow wrinkled with concentrated focus.
i guess he loved her.
as much as anybody could.
loved the bottlecap eyes
and wide mouth full of crooked teeth,
cause when she smiled
his heart went crooked too
and she was the type of girl
who he could visit museums with
and they'd both stare at
the same painting
and think something quite
different.

in your home
dead moths
line the window sills
destined to a grave of dust
outdoor light gets
caught up in the grains
of rust
so nothing grows there.
your heart has rusted too,
splinters in your blond
hair.
splinters in the world you see.
the world that i have gone from.
it took me so long to be able to say goodbye.
to stop looking for your car to drive by.
now you're coffee dregs,
the stuff i wash down the drain.
i do not think of you when i smile,
i do not wish for your touch when i am
in pain.
no longer am i under your hex.
for this is salem,
and the witches hang.

i am in a world
where he will only do.
no one else could make me love,
could make my body float like petals
in a river.
even when i'm gone,
he still has my heart
and my lungs breathe his name
in the dark.
you see,
at the end of it all
there is no other whom i'd rather
argue with.
it will always be him
for me.

im a bag of meat scraps.
you know, that **** they throw to the pigs,
so it becomes a sick scene of hog eating hog
animistic cannibalism
i'm the girl with cobwebs in her hair
and the bruises on her ankles that she claims
she got from "falling down the stairs"
the kindergartner whose valentine box is empty
and starts to expect a life without love.
all the things that go wrong in the world, all the mutations, and outcasts,
i become them all.
i am a breathing mistake
and i am what the artists paint.
i and you and we
are beautiful