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Hayley Neininger Dec 2013
It’s their clothes
That’s the worst thing of theirs to get rid of
Each removable of a garment from their closet
A different  scent  hits you in a wave
That you have to push back just one more hanger more
But then after the scent passes
You remember Easter
Christmas
Thanksgiving
When they wore that blouse
Or button down shirt
When you go through their drawer
The one you couldn’t a few months ago
Because then it was still too private then
That watch that was probably a few links too small
You remember the sides of skin around it that were
Lightly suffocated highlighted the veins that flew through them
They seemed  so alive then
It’s their clothes
When you pack them into boxes when you
Donate them to charity because the sight of them on anyone you know
Would send you into a spiral of remembrance
That you’d rather not slip into
Those truly were the slippery slopes
Ones that tiptoed on a double take
Ones that made you think if only for a devastating moment after
The initial realization of those clothes on someone else
That they were no longer going to wear them.
Yes, their clothes are the hardest part
Not wanting to slip into everyone
Garment they owned when you were forced to pack them up
Jealous of that cloth that touched them last
Them after you did for the last time
Yes, their clothes are the hardest part.
Hayley Neininger Nov 2013
The Places I’ve been
I’ve been in rain, I’ve stood
In puddles and I have watched
As the pools of water climb up my pant leg
I’ve traveled to different continents
I’ve hiked up the mountains that separate them
And I thought I had seen most of everything
The dips of this world and its highest peaks
And after all of this seeing
After all of these places of being
The place I remember seeing the best
Was a place I wouldn’t have guessed
Some rink-**** of a church out west
And even now I cannot tell you what
Art looks like inside the Louvre
But every detail of those nuns I can tell you know
The sound of their forks hitting metal plates
The sound of those same forks when
They were pulled between teeth
Their black coats fraying against the ground
Their protruding knees as they bend down
When they were praying the tiny mumbles
From a distance sounded like sweet-nothings
And I thought that this was their version
Of making love to the Lord.
Hayley Neininger Nov 2013
Kindness and goodness are only genuine when the motivations they come from are born of morality and not fear.
Hayley Neininger Nov 2013
I dreamt that I wrote to you last night. I woke up with paper cuts in between my fingers, lemon juice that stained my bed a ****-yellow color, ink embedded underneath my fingernails,  and every time I reached down to scratch my ***** I left a shameful line of old black ink. I think I’d have mailed it to her if I knew that when she read it she would scream with a horrid realization. A realization of finally understanding the monster she use to sleep next to, before the **** sheets before the ink stained boxers. I’d have mailed it to her if it wasn't just in my dreams. I imagine that the lines in my letter were laced with layers of lucid logic that stringed together feelings that con-caved in on themselves. That ate themselves whole;  but instead of making them disappear entirely they grew twice their size and spilled over the pages and underneath my nails. The diction I imagine I would have chosen to write with would be read with a southern twang.  Slow and drawn out. She would have to read it with extra syllables that her tiny lungs could not possibly hold. It would make her choke, for the first time, on words that weren't her own. My words would finally fulfill the dreams of my hands; constantly wanting to ring around her neck like I was seven again on the playground and her name was Rosie. I wouldn't have rhymed in my subconscious, to me that always seems fake and I can’t really rhyme without having my voice break. I might, however; use from time to time red bold words laying in the middle of long paragraphs in hopes she would remember her red dress. Of how, before bed, it grazed over her slopping neck and slid off onto my floor. In my dream it’s still on my floor. I hope in my letter that I wrote out a picture of her seeing me seeing her put it on in front of our window the next morning and even though that dress was too short for autumn and she would wear it anyway. Because she knew it drove me crazy and because she wanted to remember me even after she walked out my front door. Mornings like that I begged her stay even if we had just fought over how much she snores, even if I had called her a **** one too many times the drunken night before. My letter, I think, would tell her that I wish she didn't have to bundle up and leave that she could instead cut up my bed sheets and make herself a new warmer dress. One that would have matched my pillow too perfectly for her to not lay her head on it and call it a hat. For her to pretend that my bed was the world outside the door. My letter would go like that. It would make her scream at first then make her remember that monsters can love too and knowing that; she would punch her new mattress and tear up her new pillows ones that I have never touched. She would scream, "*******!" preceding my name every time she landed a blow. She would say that so many times that she could never look at her new bed again without thinking of me, and of ****. When I dreamt last night I dreamt I wrote you a letter, but dreams don’t have hands that can hold pens. So I instead sent you my bed sheets, my boxers, I signed them with lemon juice and old black ink. Wear them, sleep with them, read them for what they are worth or toss them out because monsters with words like mine give you nightmares.
Hayley Neininger Nov 2013
Nightmares are a hell of a thing to happen to a person. They only exist in the perfect storm of conditions, elaborately timed coincidences that spiral into a world they know can’t possible exist. And yet, at the time, in the eye of this perfect storm, the fear of things that are not real is completely rational. It must be dark, pitch back even; there must be noise like floorboards creaking or perhaps something more obviously ominous, a skipping record player for instance. There must be a thing, an unknown thing with terrible intentions, malevolent and insidious, unknown to compassion or love. These are the things that breed goose bumps that render irrational people into rational cowards, what a thing to happen to a person.
Hayley Neininger Nov 2013
Isn’t it strange how we as humans choose our favorite things based off of their ability to **** us? For some its cigarettes, others choose *****. Mine, my self-appointed executioner is a woman, a girl really. Her face is not beautiful it is fragile, nor is her body it is frail. She looks almost dead to me, freshly buried; hair thin and untouched; skin just now starting to fall off her bones kind of dead. I would think she was but for her eyes. Perhaps they are too close together and perhaps a little too big for her face but either way they echo the most wonderful hue of vein-blue. They are beautiful. They ruin me. They make me want to start a militia. Run down the street naked. Proclaim my love for blood. Open up my veins that on the surface promise one color but spill a completely different one. She makes me hate my body. Makes me realize its trickery, that it would promise me her eyes in my bloodstream but when I cut myself open to see them, to touch them I am left with nothing but me. My body, blood red when my favorite color has always been her eyes.
Hayley Neininger Nov 2013
I know I am not really lying on the beach
Eyes facing up towards the sky
Where I really am is in Vienna
In a small classroom filled with fourth graders
Sitting in a circle in a room
That was decorated in glow in the dark stars
And a fake camp fire next to a cardboard cutout of a wolf
I remember learning about the Oregon Trail
And how cowboys would campout underneath stars
Guns close by so other dangerous creators wouldn’t be
And looking at the fake stars in that room
I was in another world, a realer world
Where the cosmos didn’t make stars
Bullets did
Silver bullets meant to hit werewolves
Who were so compelled to howl at the moon
They forwent the odds of being gunned down
And so easily they could be when the moon
Lit perfectly their silhouette  
Naked in plain view
All the stars were silver bullets
One that never met their target and flew
Past the wolfs and up into the black sky
Where they pierced the world’s barrio
The bullet holes became not stars
But un-mendable scars
From men who wanting to mutilate
The sky’s beauty with weapons
There to remind me
When the lights turned on in that classroom
The glowing little stars melted into the white popcorn ceiling
And as we, the fourth graders, disconnected our circle on the floor
The reality of the origin of stars I had just come to know
Never left me and the stars I see at night now
Are not as real as the ones I saw that day.
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