She carved the words into her skin that she couldn't say out loud and she painted murals on her arms that she couldn't draw on paper. Watercolor portraits of blood and tears. She was an artist in the most tragic of ways.

We like to decorate the female body
To disguise it with some metaphor in order to prove its validity
To see a woman as a flower that needs to be picked
To see a mother's arms as shelter for our souls
No, my friend.
Do not think that words will come to tuck you in at night
We are flesh and we are bones.
That is beautiful enough

When you are in love
Write an ode comparing your emotions to the weather
But do not speak of her as the fallen leaf of the auburn tree
Do not speak of her as the wind that cracks your window open at night
Do not speak of her as the blood your veins need
Do not speak of her as anything
Other than who she is,
A woman

If you were to compare her to anything
Tell her that her smile, that the life in her eyes
Does for you what love does to the human mind

she left me with a wound on my tongue ,
which hasn’t stopped bleeding blue since i was four
(i can’t blame her for everything)
(only for a few sick days).

my blue tongue flings out words that shake like the world is too cold.
my blue tongue isn’t connected to my mouth and
you can find it if you look hard enough,
you can grab it if you don’t mind a loose barbed-wire fence,
easy to sneak under and tresspass and destroy with the right words that leave me a blurry brown.

these stanzas sing about new mexico as if i were a new muse,
neurotic with drips of life drip drip dripping out like a drum.

my blue tongue is blue.

my blue

tongue

is blue because i became a blue corpse when i was a bumble bee child,
stinging and dying and repeating repeating
repeating until i’m ornate like the teepees i visited, oh-so cyan, oh-so turquoise, oh-so royal.

oh-so

blue.

There is a void outside my window.
Pitch cascading into itself.
No. I am mistaken.
It is just night.
Someone was knocking on my door at some point.
Nipah. Nipah.
Nevermind.
A curious hollow groan runs through the house.
Perhaps a tap is being turned.
Hiss.
A moth catches in a stream. Wet dust clambers for existence, affirmed in the moment of death.
Sometimes it escapes.
There is a glow.
A streetlamp lights up the void, strong enough to reveal a small part of the world, but too weak to remove the grain. The noise of existence.
Blood rushes through vessels. Neurons fire.
Silence is merely the body experiencing itself. The self subverted into the other.
Oh. I have slept through the day.
A train rumbles in the distance, sonorous and bleak.
A bird cries out into the void.
Nothing responds.
A miasma blankets the city.
The choke of lack.

She frolicked through trouble, and dandled with mischief. Alison Wonderland; everything I wished I was and so much more. Ever emanating her doe-eyed façade; proclaiming our jests mere “mischief.”
Yet, an unspoken verdict (Foretaste? Conception? Notion?) had cloaked the truth: wickedness rippled beneath our parade.
I nuzzled her contours; my peripheral eye – nailed to her profile, her blueprints, her chassis. I stalked her mirage – dancing with vapor.
She glissaded about, no fool to my truth, varnishing my mantle.
I belonged to Alison: perpetually at her side. Our couplet became a “we.” So, We regretted nothing. We veered for the pyre: caroming(skimming?) those embers alit with vice.
She narrated my mental seminar. Discarding my dogmas to uphold her own; and thus, my mind was hers.
My mind was her mind.
Alison made heads turn, and mouths water, as we sidled – hand in hand – down the street. She was my Christmas morning: each colloquium – giftwrapped with finesse. She personified paradise, she illustrated utopia. Hatching our Carnival; netting us, enamored, sidling the Carousal. We’d skim, we’d sail, her halo – my fossil. Her lips, her eyes, her hands… they echoed the innocence of a child. Niave, innocent, and giftwrapped in wonder.
Little Miss Wonderland: my very own fairytale. She was mine alone; she was mine to keep.
Did I want her, or did I want to be her?
Alison Wonderland.
Her aura – so celestial – paralleled my prose. When she banished my husk – Maple Thatcher – I cackled good riddance… And I grew a new personality to accommodate her own.
For, without Ali – devoid of our we – I doubted the very existence of me.
On my composition, she bestowed rhythm. She gave tune to my silence; her chimes, her cadence. My ink was her song – fusing a symphony. A symphony of Alison: the melody to solidify our tryst.
My mind was her mind.
And yet… somehow, I missed a carriage – or two – aboard her train of thought. For, the same felon spiting my existence, was the angel I loved to life. Gladly, I huffed, and I puffed, and I blew Maple down.
Fused against Alison, I needed none of Maple.
Carnival infatuations…

Alison Wonderland.