there's too many fingerprints.
too many smears of blood
and sweat
and spit.
too many bruises,
marks and scars i can no longer name.

i am now fragments, built in the shape of a person.
too much debris, and not enough woman.

and i haven't figured out how to fill it.

i will look for you everywhere i go,
just as i hope
i never see you again.

Do we create to destroy or destroy to create?

(Does it matter? Does it matter?
We bleed and burn for
art and music and poetry.)

And in between these trying times,
we learn to love, and love to live.
Does it matter? Does it matter?


(The answer is...

...yes.)

I woke up to find a lipstick print on my bathroom mirror.

I wondered which color,
which shade,
which shape,
would leave such an imprint.

I wondered whose aunt,
whose sister,
whose mother,
would leave such a gift.

However way it ended up there, I’ll say this for sure:
when I kissed the mirror, in return,
my print wasn’t a match.


(Whoever you are, I love you.)

i'd like to think that death is like love.

"to love is to rest," they say.

"to die is to sleep," is what i hope for.

i've been alive a long time. pain has dulled to an optimistic distillation.

but then there are those nights. alone, aching with love i cannot share. alone and abandoned to thoughts of "otherwise" or "elsewhere."

alone. alone. alone.

and afraid.


(i've been dead a long time. the pain never really goes away.)

i never made it off the bridge, but my body ached like it did. and because my brain was too waterlogged with the river i failed to drown in, i was sent to the school nurse the next day.

she took one look at the bags under my eyes, at my cracked fingertips still bitten from the cold.

my lungs burned as i watched her call my father.

i'd only ever seen the man cry once before: when he tore down the door to his crumbling childhood home - tears only reserved for goodbye situations.

later, he sat me down under the glow-in-the-dark stars we pasted together on my ceiling when i was ten. he had just turned forty-three, yet his hair was whitening faster than it was supposed to.

"nothing's unfixable as long as we're alive," he told me, a plea. and i believed him. i believed him.

i believed him.


(neither of us knew it...

...but he was already talking to a corpse.)