consume my medicine
gently
touch parts of me
not luminous
**** my shadow
into
a sacred offering

I want to send you an album.
But I can't.
I can't ignore the fact the we kissed
and let more go unspoken.
I hate that if I never said anything,
neither would you.
I have a paralyzing fear of your silence.
I think of that day that I watched your back as you walked down the E hallway
and we didn't speak for months.
I'm still sorry for that.
She sings of the telepathic desert
and I feel that.
My mouth is dry from the silence.
Ten years of words unspoken
(and feelings felt).
I can always feel you,
but will you hear me through the desert?
Part of me wants to be screaming,
feels like I need to.
When I listen to you sing a love song,
I try to decode if it's about me
because I just wanna know how you really feel.
None of them have been about me,
so I have to ask,
how do you really feel?
It's so hard for me to speak
because I'm afraid of you taking it the wrong way.
Have you kept the walls up because you think I'm waiting?
Because you think I'm seeking more?
Sometimes I think I'm crazy for even believing there is one there.
Is there a wall up?
Please, tell me I'm not crazy...
Everywhere else I feel so **** grounded,
but somehow you still shake the Earth inside of me.
Maybe there is a way to understand this cosmically,
the way your stars intertwine with mine.
What time did you take your first breath?
And did I feel it inside of me?
Sometimes I think of how sad I'd be if I ever lost you.
(Sad is a sick understatement).
Sometimes I think of how sad I'd be if I never got to put it all out there.
I don't want to grieve something I never said,
but I've been grieving these words unspoken to you for years.
I always want you to know how much I love you,
and that you are a special to me I can not explain.
I remember the first time I felt you,
sitting in history class sophomore year,
you said something so simple.
It was the first time you shook the Earth inside of me.
I found my sister in the hallway later that day and told her I found my soul mate.
I have learned a new definition of that over the years as I have picked up pieces of myself in the souls of many.
Something of our souls is made of the same dust.
We are like the fireflies,
ruled by super natural forces,
in perpetual cosmic sync.
Our lights will always understand how to shine together,
how to find each other in the dark.
You and I predate this lifetime,
and I guess some stories never finish getting written.
But I long to know your side of it,
the pages you've burned
and the one's you've tucked me away in.
I long to know in hopes that we can find ourselves on the same page.

You are never late to the ritual
The ritual is the tenderness in which you greet yourself upon waking
It is the moment you catch a glimpse of the day moon
and remember
You were not constructed to be the same every day
The sun is now a remnant of Summer’s heat
that filled your belly
made you golden
And Autumn’s cool now flirts with the night
The scent of her temptations lingers in the evening mist
You can taste her after rain
Persephone is calling you to join her
Narcissus flowers in your dreams
Teaching you to court the darkness
as formidable as it seems-
In it there is a medicine so sacred
One that begs for your descent
Take her hand
Stained red and sweet
from the pomegranate’s seeds
Go,
Go meet the winter as a lover
Lie with her late into the night
Listen to her teaching
that you are never late to the ritual
“the ritual is in your body”

...
Sometimes the days are so tender
And you feel so far away from everything you know you are
(Strong, resilient, beautiful)
And you just want to crawl out of your own skin
And return to the Earth and star dust you are made of
There is a vastness you are trying to find
Like the ocean
And the mountains
An ancientness and forever you can taste
But are struggling to be
The crashing waves are just the same as the tears that roll down your cheeks
You’re not sure why or how
But you know that it is just the way it’s always been
I believe pain only come from two places -
Love, and lack of it.
How far have her ashes traveled since the day my father poured them into the ocean?
I watched as the waves crashed over his boots
And he didn’t even think to move
It was the most beautiful and utterly heartbreaking thing I have ever seen
I come here stand face to face with the deepest pain
I have ever known
And to be reminded that angels exist everywhere
In every form
When we let them in

I took a picture of myself in the mirror today
An Ode to the algorithm Gods and immediate gratification
I just want people to read my poetry
And I will get more views
If I succumbed to my body as the poster child
Holding up flashy signs pointing to
my words
“Please read!”
There’s more to me than what you see here,
I promise.
But it is not the algorithm God’s fault - not at all theirs - that a picture of a girl undressed in her bathroom mirror
elicits more &  immediate emotion
And that black words on a white page get glossed over (I get it, I really do. Sometimes I don’t have the patience or the capacity either)
I want so badly to make you feeling something.
My sister will, of that I am entirely sure.
She will soak in every word and get to know me even deeper.
There are a few others who will do the same, and I appreciate you deeply.
Because this was never about my reflection.
I just want the words I’ve laced together that I love so much
To be read & loved too.
I want to tell you that yesterday
the butcher asked me if I wanted the beef heart cut into slices
And I said no
because holding it whole in my hand allows me a moment
To drift away and dream of when it’s the heart of a steer I’ve loved and butchered myself
I want to tell you that
My dog always takes the chicken foot off his food bowl first
and runs away to another room to ingest it
as if it holds wisdom he must keep to himself
I want to tell you that I prioritized writing this morning over breakfast
Because I had to get this all out before I could even consider
Taking anything in  
I want to tell you that
I wonder all the time why I get to be in a body
That wakes up to so much love every day
I want to tell you
I moved into a new house
and there are altars everywhere
and I started bleeding as soon as I was settled here
Because my body knows everything
My body is the actualization of my ancestors ceremonies
I want to tell you that
My body is moving me through each day
and I am finding poetry
In places another version of me could have never imagined to be beautiful

There’s a hunger in my stomach
and it tastes like you.
Like memories,
just can’t satiate the same.
Although it’s never quite filled me
in just the ways I’ve wanted it too.
I want to know you,
again and again and again.
I long to feel closeness,
to fill the gaps between us
and **** up all the air you breath out.
I’ll never let you slip away
through the sieves in my mind.
But, if I know you at all,
you’ll find a way back in.
We’ll walk together in dreams
(and the hunger will follow me).
I want to swallow you whole
so you can feel how you somehow
still shake the Earth inside of me.
You are a home that I am sometimes
speechless inside of,
and almost all the walls are down.
We stand on opposite sides,
almost always.
And I long for one of us to walk around.

I do not feel the Earth beneath me,
do not feel my feet touching down
being pulled in
to something deeper.
I do not feel the cold Appalachian air in my lungs
I do not yet know
the name of its life force.
I did not see the leaves turn from green to honey’d shades of gold and ember.
I did not watch the leaves fall or witness the sky give itself unto elder-hood
And take on its winter shades of ice and gray.
There are yellowed ginkgos
And maple leaves like crowns strewn across the street here
I feel stuck in this loop of left turns back to his house.
Odin pulls me out and in,
Calling me when I have lost my way
He eats the fallen leaves
And I wonder if he knows something I don’t
about the importance of ingesting something so close to death
Something that will never be quite the same again
(I’m sure he knows)
I do not feel the Earth beneath me,
But I look at the trees,
Barren and cracking
And I understand.
Without rest there is pain.
Your own body will turn against you
Put you in agony
Just so you will please. slow. down.
It will reconstruct all the peaks and valleys you’ve made in your mind
And the pulsing of a newness within
Will push you to what you think is your limit
Make you believe you can’t bare another second of the crippling pain
Even when you know that is the only way out
Must give into the pressure growing in your head,
The thuds,
the pounding,
A new way is being constructed
(I cannot look into the light because I am supposed to be walking into the darkness.)
Your body will expose all you’ve held in to the outside world
Until the only thing left for you to surrender is blood and bile-
nothing is yours anymore.
You belong to the current of the seasons now
and if everything here is giving away and dying
you must too.

The butterflies
In my stomach have cocooned again
It’s not safe for them to be so gentle
Their wings no longer flutter
To the sound of your laughter
Each strand cautiously spun for every day
You offered me silence
They gestated to your absence
And now
I can feel them ripping, choking through
Their silken coffins
Emerging as little parasites
With viscous voices
Making me nauseous
So I have fed them
Raging fire
A single flame for every time
I’ve been abandoned
I have loved them
Into new formation
Refused to let them
Be a poison
Chosen devotion
As their medicine
I have fallen to my knees
At the altar
Of my own sacredness
Fallen asleep to the cadence
Of cicadas
And my heart
Still beating
I’m still breathing
In deep
One prayer after the other
Trying to mother
All the wounds
And conceive
Something sacred
From something broken.

I am digging for the devotion
scratching myself raw
to find the pulse beneath my skin
I want to feel the rhythm
of the moon and tides
building my blood
and letting it shed
I want to be in it-
the cosmic, sacred space
where my prayers and rituals
feed so **** deep