I was not allowed to be angry, so I bottled and drank
my rage with wine chilled by too many ice cubes--
I suppose that’s why I shiver at inappropriate times.

My parents said: You have to be the better person.
Even as you ***** those girls, called my sister a liar,
mocked my mother and father as they drove to town,

attempted to arrest me for “demeaning of character.”
But I lost my temper, once, I felt it hot like nausea
creeping all the way to my fingertips before I

screamed and shouted and shattered two glass bulbs
hard against the tallest pine tree in our backyard.
I cut my ******* picking up all the chips,

incidentally making me rethink my plan to punch you.
Instead, I imagined myself holding my father’s pistol,
the one he showed me how to shoot from 100ft,

complete with target acquisition training--just in case
you tried running--we both know you never
took me seriously enough for that. I bought a faceless

target shaped like a man, picturing your acne-skinned
cheeks warped with that smirk you wore when I tried
telling you to *******. All this before my anger faded,

fog rising from too-hot blacktop pavement when the air
cooled, snowflakes falling as I stuck my tongue out,
swallowing each crystal like a word I could have said.

I have two bruises on my shoulders
blue as the oceans and marbled white,
storm-foam spilling from my head
and eyes.
That’s not your responsibility--
but what else could it have been
when I knelt silent, scrubbing, palms
red as my sister’s sticky wrists, clorox
wipes balled and piled in the corner?
I am not
steel-skinned, some mechanical being
mistaken for a human with her eyelids
torn from her face, blindless to trauma
and the callouses it leaves behind.
And yet
the oceans on my shoulders blow salt
healing the wounds to smooth, pink scars,
reminders in every mirrored surface:
I am still standing.

Midnight falls in sandbags on my chest,
piano covers of old favorites reverberating
past the old grandfather clock as it chimes:

Open your eyes.

I am sleepless on the living room carpet,
knees held against ribs once broken, healed
wrong--bones bent too close around a heart
prevented from growing the way dandelions
spring again and again from beneath mower
blades spinning, cutting the lawn once a week,

sunshine blooms stubborn as my stifling ribs.
And my persisting heart. Emily Dickinson once
claimed: “hope is the thing with feathers,” yet
my chest aches with the weight of it’s elephant
existence bearing down as the moon travels
slow across an expanse of flickering stars

too endless for small minds to comprehend--
and it’s all so much and so present that I can’t
help biting my nails at the importance of hopes,
wondering how they’d fare on a scale,
countered against infinity itself.

I will tear holes like stars in the clouds,
swallow the moon until I burn inside-out,
and become a midnight lamp guiding all
the eyes that cannot see the way home.

I remember the velvet Dark like a funeral
dress baggy around my waning waist,
the veil of which blinded me completely,
my windows turning one-by-one into walls--

trapped--yet I’d rather have been locked
because then I would have a door to kick
instead of walls simultaneously too small
and ever-expanding with fine print reading:

Do not mistake pity for love.

Paranoid assumptions connected dots,
nonexistent constellations like vines
around my ribs. The Dark permeated fear,
filled my Self to bursting before I pulled

the veil from my face, stared into violent
light that burned the lids from my eyes,
left me blindless to all the terrible truths
bearing down until my shoulders bruised.

I’ve since begun sleeping with all the lights
turned off and my curtains fully drawn.

Here is what I am:
a survivor whose sun-soaked back tans
darker than her porcelain face;
trauma traps like wet concrete ‘round ankles,
dried shackles facing only shadows.

And a jackhammer would break the mold,
but not before shaking me up hard--
all crises stirred together, and my ribs
shrinking beneath sandbag weight,
breath heavy as blood’s penny-coin

odor; and I am suspended, head back
to face the rising light burning slurred
memories, blackened silhouettes, gone--
my face washed warm and
golden in the inevitable morning.

“Half sick of shadows,” cried the Lady of Shalott,
half sick of darkness growing, doorways
twisting, with faces grotesque on yellow wallpaper

and speaking woe in whispers passed
dream-thin through limbs and veins and minds
because a window is a stop sign until

opened, and locks are stitches sewing chapped lips
tense as the web woven, intricate designs
layered vibrant color on a lonely loom in a tower

otherwise lightless, heavy with pressure,
bearing down on the Lady of Shalott and her art--
made up in the image of Camelot.

And I think about my grandmother,
her weathered hands with deliberate strokes.
Maroon and purple flowers,
dead grasses crunch under the hairs of the brush,
decaying branches grasp toward the vast blue.

A rustic fence separates the decaying foreground
from the wet mountains one day I will reach

The background in my close distance
but her shaking hands glide over
easily navigating the rocky terrain
with ashen color, to touch
the tops of the mountains that tease the sky

She will paint her way to the clouds
alone her brush will travel
creating every stroke along the way.