a relapse
is like reheating coffee on the stove
hoping it tastes so stale
you won't want to drink it anymore

but even then, I
will pour it on my skin and
hate myself for days.

clothes worn too tight
so it feels like there are needles who need me, who bleed me
a million parasites ******* and taking me.

he is *** and surgery, he is far too in love with life
wants to be inside of everything

but i like the miles
i like being so far that he cannot take things out of me
or even know they’re there.

i am a parasite, i want everything to be inside of me and
that
is why we
fight with him in my mouth (having is feeling.

builds midnight with paper stars and dark attics
because then the sky can be ripped
into shreds, stuffed down my throat and suddenly i possess
the whole world without needing to live in it.

I do not want to be Sylvia Plath anymore.
Her skin cannot fertilize my daises in the oven
or make rosemary’s taste improve
because she has it swaddled in a grave –
the rest has wilted. She has burned and died.

I do not want to be Sylvia Plath anymore
though her words were eloquent
and her waist was very thin. Those insides were
polluted as soon as Hughes discovered them.

Does anyone personify depression?
I would, I think, if I let myself be her again.

Her pretty limbs dangling beyond her head, the
torso conjoined with crimson bars
once metal or iron, once acquainted to
little pollen flakes she swallowed I am sure.
Is anything as pure as a woman above the floor?

I do not want to be Sylvia Plath anymore
but I am sure she is still pure, too.
I bet flowers grow through her throat and exist
in the young body she so hotly removed.

Little beads, baby blooms, figs
writing poems from a nucleus’ dull flicker –
thyme ablaze in patterns of words she has said.  

I once wanted to be Sylvia,
because most of the time I want to be dead.

The air is ****** up: it is a flower’s fault
a peony weeping and recessed
its creases looking like an elderly face –
I play dead, pretend to be aged than earth.

You count my rings as pine trees’
but I have few, if you’ll notice. You do.  

I would say your name if the oxygen was
not stolen away: instead, I tongue at
my teeth and breathe breathe breathe in
secret hoping the garden won’t reveal me.

A fairylike, but natural room I am in –
feel its rotten sap still giving sticky hands.

You saved me, you saved me
but I am still dying –

my head is too humid and
its walls are expanding, rising
found its cot in a mausoleum
gave me air as warm as the

bottom of the sea
deep blue in revival,
and deep you inside of me

have the hedges of your skull
white picket fence turned

red, white picket fence
bleeding and I am welling as
a tear would between flesh
seep to a bruise in the center,
heart purple and ripening

it is obsessive in the way it
drinks me. You
saved me, you saved me
but I am still in the plum sort

of dying –
please get deeper inside or
I will stay empty.

His body
   is a water tower & it holds
   gifts hidden in the bowels, wrapped in
   intestines like a cherry-colored ribbon

     our words fall into
stardust
  and he has black coffee hair
  
dark tea skin
     been there since he was an infant
spoke tongues, the language of romance
         but I was hidden under

   the bed
until virginity was okay
until he coaxed me out, a prophet man

       his fingers knead me
dough
to be a perfect flavor of snow & sadness
     fill his empty corners to the brim.

Your shorts leave their handprints, not a bruise
but the color of a forest fire
where you fell asleep on your right side.

The pinks
as fine as through a fairy’s wing –
orange as when the sky is not a sunset but there is
some resemblance –
a sickly, burning, faded green
where you are not a tree

but you are not dead either, where the days
are ending
on you. The way someone gets when
he throws up, flames vomiting from somewhere
and your skin becomes the fumes.

Even inanimate objects
do not want you to forget them –
we rot other people just to leave our own mark.

I have my heart open like a winter morning, like his birthday gift
wrapped in brown paper bags
clutching at the shreds
as if loving me more will make me less sad. It has not:
see, my bones shatter like icicles,
I am weak. His affection melts like snowflakes on my tongue.

I want to taste him until the flesh pares
and someone can finally take me to the hospital where we kissed
have a glance of what’s intact,
better, what isn’t.

It has been December every day since I last visited you, Doc
but you have good eyes – can watch hell freeze in
my chest. The calendar says July, but my body doesn’t believe it
possessed from memories of a woman
retching in this very room here, behind a screen
you saw my boyfriend naked and behind your back I kissed him.

He will not say that sorrow is eating my heart out,
nor have my veins been cut by scissors –
that does not mean that he is not thinking it. See me cold and blue.

Someday
you will come to understand me
and you will love me less.

Lost will be the urgency to see my face every day
then my openness is such as a wound:
nevertheless, no stitching
at dusk can be finished by dawn.

I thought this skin belonged to you
but, god, I never let it

by fearing
sentences would get lost in your ocean waves or
airplane wings or bad phone reception.

So came three years
and someone’s city change, came cattle
the rooster feathers casing one eye in case she
needs her consciousness early.

You told me to appreciate that and now I do
I wake up every morning before you

I never fall asleep
because something seems to find a key to
my chest and I lose my breath.

But still you can see that I never take my dress off
pretty ones with bells and whistles
and pockets for your hanky, when I lay

and you will begin to wonder why I never relax
and you will ask

I say:
(god, I did not really want you to
breathe my air.)

I fear you understanding, and I fear you will not.

Someone should explain to my parents that I have
very good reasons for liking other girls – for example, fields of flowers.
My mother, the gardener, must see the way our long hair
meets and forms an orchard
when I sleep beside a beautiful woman. Translucent
wrists, veins folded into a glasshouse –
if she wants to know how I can hold another girl’s hand, tell her that.
Farthest thing from unnatural, tell my mom
about how she and I build whole habitats when we touch – earth’s
parents, this is our offspring
trailing up everyone’s spine, curling around raspberries
as a toddler would climb onto furniture. Tell my parents that
I am not a lesbian to spite anyone, but
because I loved Mother Nature so much I thought there should be two.

Where the light is almost navy,
we press our shoulders against the wall and I no longer
can differentiate between my hair and his
torso, his fingers and my cellulite.

One of us is a pin cushion
for the other fingernails, I writhe in the motion of
letters that may spell out I love you
(or just, I love your skin I love how your **** makes me
hiccup) his wall
bruises my back and gives me butterfly wings.

We adapt to whatever corner we’re touching
or have come close to denting,
confined to the bedroom not any broader than his heart.

I dye his collarbones with my hair
everything can be black but tongues, he says I should not
smoke because he would prefer if I breathed
but nobody makes me more breathless
by filling my lungs with nameless sort of things.

The shadows turn his sheets into mulch
my flesh into threads: I shift in such a figure it shall
creates twinkling stars out of everything.

He will pull me down in minutes,
when the needles stop injecting euphoria and I can use
my butterfly wings to fly up and down
onto his lap
where nobody can see that I am no longer pure.

how many times do we have to do something
before it becomes familiar
to us?

familiar is a word
quite similar in tone to family

yet it can apply to getting stung by a bee
tasting the inside of another
person
making tea, baking a cake
in your underwear
breaking an eggshell like a bone.

it takes maybe two, maybe three times
until anything feels like home
but is it really home?
i will have lived for two decades

and have
only climbed to the top of a tree once.

I want to spread open your ribcage
and crack the unnecessary bones
separating me from your heart.

I will search for your beating vessel,
if you allow, with eyes like saucers;
I am but a child again, over-fascinated.

I long to caress the reservoir of your life,
whether it cramps under my fingers
or splatters me with infection.  

I would sample your warm blood,
its tang under the care of my intestines,
but I stitch your ruptured skin instead.

I do not dare to interrupt your body’s habits
any more than I already have;
one glimpse was a bandage to my own.

This hotel serves green tea on golden platters
I bite into it like liquid has a spine,
circular piston cradling a ladder to my tongue
the giant beanstalk, I sleep here and awake
somewhere else with morning meals
already stomached in a stasis –

just how ****** lucidly bled the rugged hand
he forcefully bled under her summer dress:
I am here, I am her with you
as I hike teapots and escape each new room.

For the next, it has squeaky cots –
you heave me to the breakfast bar prior to sun
so I do not whine when heat hits my face,
there is not tea here, bottles of Coke are okay:
a slow content because they’ll hear if we churn.

And unlocking the stall from an exterior view,
it is the wall that looks attractive for one
lollylike little girl, the old man warm & ugly,
insomnia only goes when he wants to fly south.

My hegira, the sweet parasol of which wind takes hold
it walks me in a gingham pattern skirt and
I have enough pills stashed to swallow for months:
a jingly bottle beneath my cleavage
the cups of my bra overflow, is like a Christmas meal.

******* have enough bounce to make me seem happy.
Content, at the least, beginning this journey
to rinse away as a paint stain or something worse
use a sponge to separate and sort all the fragments.

He does not mind: he does not see.
And I still have a piece, one cloudless psalm needs us –
“Of all the things you **** I’m the most empty,”
I say, my body is but a slave for a bundle of nerves.
Turning head left skipping right speak cry *******
to the thought of anything full, even wine jars.

The human form sure can deceive, I am a pink corpse
and corpulence is all my ***** will ever be –
but! I shall discover a new life with chiseled wings
when the breeze comes along to grab my umbrella so.

My hegira gives this hollow spine a tug, a tug.

doubled & folded a two way mirror
see the blush on a pale bottom,
it is as white as me

read a book on “how to be a ghost”
working as crows fornicate,
black, love made with dead bodies

i floated over the lot of them
and i was so afraid, i did not know
what was seen on the other side

car lights, a saint to pick up roadkill
do not forget that ghosts watch
the birds echo, they might

verses were rehearsed & daresay
written on a couple dimes
we both have wings

while we both have wings,
i cannot fly –
oh, crows not the white of doves

i am dead & they eat my color, alive
fern to shield beads and eyes
*****, pricking red bowels inside

should not know for literature
god’s couple of miles higher than
what the good book claimed

and he watches us from a mirror
the other side of a stage
we look so ugly, the crows eat my face.

That is my favorite shade of red
how your eyes go when you roll them back,
tilt your head back, a little to the left –
hurting the leather and yolk of a chair abandoned
in the backseat of an alley, right of downtown
numbers impressed into the branches,
must code every time I spread your legs there.

Enough hours to decompose a body bag,
but I was alive the entire time
and you had enough blood in your face to supply
sisters in an orphanage, glittering privately.

We sipped coffee some evenings,
it became black sand slithering up your dress:
I did not add enough cream.

The mugs were left organized in an aisle
to be gathered later, overcrowded in the glovebox
maroon droplets fall onto my toes as I brake –
imagine a mouse having cut himself
and drowned in the miniature pools you left
of my not being good enough for you, but there
it is nearly my favorite color again
stained between my feet so you cannot fade.

wavelengths, not centered
must have taken a wrong turn or otherwise
built a bridge where school girls
sleep on their backs, spread their legs in grass

he sings so close
the lullaby becomes my earring

it hangs, it hangs, it hangs
drip drip and drip going into the latrine
I am a sea

I am wet and wide and opening
to a grey by breeze and through age
he has as much youth as a leaf still on the tree
we are farther from

each other than we are from the sun
but honey does not spoil
so neither will we

yes, yes, please do not leave

this is a love poem
for the parts of yourself you despise.

how I believe you are a man
more so than any other man I have seen

because you do not bribe wasps
into not giving you a sting:
because you do not touch fragile things
rather lend little strengths and
because your sweat smells like incense
or raspberries on trees who breathe.

god, nature opens the
whole wide world but keeps me from
you

but you did not complain when
I appeared,
this red-shouldered placenta globe girl.

I love your inward feet
because you can walk faster to me
I love your pleated hips
because they have handlebars for me
I love your thunder laugh
because it means summer to me.

me, me, me

I love how you love me
and do not care when I cannot seem to
remember or believe.

this is a love poem I will never
finish writing.

My first inclination
is to write about rifles and *** and ankle socks with frills
around the top, but I do not know
anything about that – much less all three at once.

One time I had a dream, or nightmare, or fantasy
of getting ******
by the barrel of the gun.

Instead of bullets,
glowsticks entered me.

Guns are shooting stars, like *****. I have to steal cartons
of iced coffee to stay awake and
bend the caps
into heart-shapes to have any hope –

morning wood puts me in mourning, that is all I can
ever understand about myself.

In a meadow where all of the plants have
the pattern of calico cats,
where the birds sound almost watery
have the tweet
of a smoke detector with low batteries,
where dandruff is just
the sky chipping as nail polish,
I realized
my palms could hold a tree to the ground

It is watery, and yet so much like honey,
the height gained rivaling mountains
but peaches frame you –

something more smooth than a kiss,
saliva pinked with blood, drooling down
one chin or tongue, I have touched

close, but not quite smeared with
my fingerprints, not even a wrinkle or
particle of body’s flaking dust,

just a sphere of constant traffic,
you meet the veiny shapes when all
else blackens, the chime of hearts I know

one I have handed to you, chirping
beating with no highlights of an earth
just keeping brunette, blonde baby blues.

I watch humans fumbling to make a connection between the universe and our bodies, as if without their metaphors and poems likening birthmarks to galaxies, we would be two separate entities, a collection of particles that inhabit entirely detached spaces from one another. Truly, the connection is evident in far more than freckles that resemble specks of dust and planetary material; our skin is not just branded by our environment, but bloated by it.

We are made of mostly water.  We are oceans, our insides are swampy, and when we bleed, the sight is reminiscent of sunsets. There is a universe beneath our flesh, internally, like how we exist within the flesh of our universe.

I feel this connection most when I consider him. My body deflates into a cloudlike existence –soft, floating, pacified. His touch warms me, it calms me, it grounds me but in the sense that I am still free to kiss the stars, and my lips become soothing to them.

One of our final nights together, about midnight on Valentine’s Day, he took me to the beach and faced me in front of the ocean, stood me below a dome of astrology in the skies. Lucid blue from the constellations and water stretched for what seemed like days, all-encompassing me. But my eyes could not leave him, especially his mouth slipping into smiles, because somehow he appeared even more beautiful than the immensity of our earth enveloping me. He cradled me there, he lifted my dress, and still I felt warm against the backdrop of the Pacific Ocean in winter.

He is a dream, and he is an angel, and I believe he steals ornaments from the sky to gift to my heart so that I can feel as beautiful and as grand as all the universe combined.

I am not here: I am exhausted,

I become a clothing heap on your floor
the silent mountain of snow & dust,
you can pick me up,
but surely, I will glide back down.

I am not here when I need sleep,
rather an exact, watercolor painting
that does not match my soul.
Too sharp, or too fuzzy –

my eyes are oceans glazed by iceforms,
I have not the courage to see.

I am not here: I am exhausted,

I am intoxicated by your memories,
handsome bubble and the falling under
you are the tightrope I am walking,
want to love, but cannot breathe.

Morning keeps me guessing,
and feelings are  
                                        sliding.

When I was in school,
we would plant hundreds of seeds and
put them under lamps
until they grew
to be as long as our limbs.

I wish I
could move that fast now
and get the **** away from you.

Eyes, lethal
but a baby bird sort of mouth
tugging at sap for minutes
and frowning for seven more.

Tick, tick, tick:
the sky-clock haunts her hunt.

If one is not fast enough,
there will be plenty to eat for
those who survive

like aged gold
tarnished, useless, just the tip
of her cupping hands –
catch the glance of imps here.

After an attempt, I will probably lay
like a god either in Heaven or the hospital –
no matter what I will no longer be human or alive,
rather a piece of air held under pond-water
and drifting to family members with soggy eyes.

No matter what the man I loved will not
be there to greet me: he, too, is kind of in between
timelessness and *** positions and breathing.

Should I ignore the rabid plea for that reason
or let it brush against my genitals?
The tensing muscles, the ******* goes high & low
like the mood of a tide confused by morning.

No matter what it will not feel pleasant
and pain will accidentally touch my shoulderblade
ignited from the palm of Father God himself –
my mother ate from it, then she died
so she could welcome me like an ambulance.

my kind is wholly
found in white weather, with scarves
                 clasped around our air

The biggest lesson in nothingness I have ever received
was your hands clamped down on her ***
expecting me to still be able to breathe, six hundred miles to the east
when all my insides were insects
feeding off my feelings and trust in your love.

I did not even have a phantom of a thought
that could touch you or flow like autumn wind in spring. There
was nothing as far as I knew
and so there was nothing, although
her mouth around you should have left a bruise.

I thought of you as something as isolated as the moon, except more
beautiful, less haunting to a girl with nightmares
because you stayed still during the
night when it’s too scary for me to open my eyes –
I believed there was nothing to see (I was wrong I was wrong).

It is the morning after the morning after
and he has left cinnamon sticks beneath my pillows, I
inhale and exhale when I sleep
until all their dust has been swallowed –

dissolving into me
like water from wet linens onto skin, to be a naked
root love has taken everything from.

I am not your savior, I am
not god with **** and small hands and a girl’s moan.

The good things about me are not here
to redeem you
or be your solution or stand in the exact light
less nice women would not flock to
when you said the lightbulb
was shattered by a ***** with razor sharp claws.

I learned this
with rope burn breathing on my wrists

and biceps screaming at me when they flexed, they
could have given me a black eye
but now I just have
a black heart
mourning the family man I could not rescue.

I tried to chain myself to him, be
the good girl who woke up a child and laid down
a *****
hiding his tears with the dampness.

I did this so well I
never knew I was hiding my own, becoming a pink
orb of plush, sponge, a ******* machine.

It did not put a baby in my belly
just a ghost in my womb
of everyone’s sadness and pain and large hands that
are believed to protect
when a shadow casts from your bed at night –
see, the same shadow casts over mine.

Tell me cheeks like mine
are made for smiling, and I will tell you to go find
a ******* smile
of your own if you need it so badly.

somewhere there is a girl
who is saying, prove that you love me
to someone who watches her sleep
and makes sure
she feels wonderful when he
slides his **** into her *** that morning.

and I know that may not mean much
to other people
but having that would
make me stop visiting my palm-reader who
says I will birth triplet boys
when I can hardly handle
loving a single man, who is saying

I adore you
why don’t you kiss me harder when you are
angry.

but he doesn’t just **** me hard
when he is sad
he just waits until I ask.

prove that you love me, the girl will say
just don’t be surprised if
I forget that
you need me anyway
because caring this much is the same as
drowning in holy water when
god keeps pulling your head up.

the room was kind of yellow, but pale
shade of a misty afternoon grey
and dully highlighting your face –

I knew it was you,
by the direction of your palm and one
single eyelash slept upon the floor.

it is the blues being in love some days,
but that day was yellow and grey,
raining and hazing your eyelids over.

I thought it would be more milky –
secrete some special substances you
could taste, sweet and as nice as love

breathing wild: how could this
be okay, not comprehend a difference
of one kiss and one yellowing touch,

yet same somehow, yet the same
the room ate some parts of your head
and I fell in love with it despite that –

yellow and grey, bitter rain, I knew it.

Once, all I saw were train-tracks the way falling dust
looks like tiny sprites pirouetting in midair.

That is what I recreated every time
he could not walk from the loading port into me,
sparkles in a cardboard box for Christmas, birthdays, anniversaries
crowding like fairies and lightning bugs during summer.

Just like it.
Three years ago, my hair was shorter and it could not
get knotted in razorblade patterns:

your hair was longer then, we added all of our strands together
and decided it is all very equal now.
You can rope me to train-tracks and wait to pick me up,
until then, I am an insect fossilized in amber
my body is the shape of a soapbar, my consistency hot wax.  

Sometimes the train comes by
without me even realizing the time is 12:53am.

Sometimes it is 4:08am, so I ask why you have not arrived.

You have had two hundred cups of tea since I
last tasted you, and every single one was a gift from me in
one of those containers packed with glittering beads.
The bottom of your mug holds herbs floating like sprites in midair.

Just like them.
Sometimes at 1:44am I think I am the same
flying by wing to you.

If only ripping out a heart was like
removing the pit from a peach, I would have hundreds
in a police lineup
and could point to hers —
officer, she is the one that ruined me.

Those black spots on my lungs
was not because I smoke, rather, they came from
the time she put a cigarette lighter
to my chest and set all my love on fire.

And that kidney I am missing, it would not be the
first ***** she took
to be able to **** right onto my soul.

He wants to kiss my eyelids while I sleep
but I have none,
I have not closed my eyes for almost a year,        yet
the whole time I have been
having nightmares of burn-holes.

There are arrows made for killing and
arrows made for loving –

I was oblivious to the latter
until my heart dropped and bled on the floor,
crying, give me over to someone please!

And I did it fast. I was given eternal love
all because of an arrow in the ***.  

One day I will die for the same twig –
wooden, pending, poked through my spleen.
Even open wounds have needs!

I beg like a girl, please oh please,
if you make me die I can live in a dream.

Perhaps I will have love made to me
soon by a kiss that sloshes like sewage
and feet hung limp over the carpet:
our entrails laced in its plush, a spiral.

Mine tried so hard to reject yours –
as you sipped my pink flesh, coral hit
a very funny part of us I thought I
would bleed. But it was just me
opening, closing, opening & shutting.

The words were local: I need I need,
still enveloped an umbrella above
our pea-shaped, wintery things.

And spherical as scallops or stone,
I had mind enough to breathe in body
air, dust, slivers of your bedroom –
the corner where another love
will be warped & coiled inside of me.

Eyes that storm through vicious seas
look brighter than lilacs or lilies,
and perhaps they smell just as sweet –

one nectar branch, it has its wood
carved by man or animal or weather

still like a stem the corneas stand
in their emeraldness, tornadoes cut a
trail from open arms to that branch –
see its width and drop tearlets inside,
the descent is what turns you bright

as stars petrifying the sky, lilacs and
lilies bloom in the heart of an eye.

A strawberry bud chest and
orbs of blueberry earth: the terrain,
it earthquaked with flutters. A coquette,

will you throw me in the air like confetti?
I am a tear you do not see swell,

my saltwater tastes sweet,
honey branded twists of left to right –
fill your spoon with this sadness
make believe you are swallowing what is

left of me. Just a wall of stars
melting the apple-grip or banked cloth,
I move with wind breath, bud chest.

I am not a poet today, but a ghost.

These are nervous hands that open walls and
create cracks in their foundation:
I apologize, I will use the wood to build your child a treehouse
where he can create a reservoir of his girls’ perfumes
or the happy moments in your unhappy divorce.

If he jumps, I will catch him.
He thinks he is a friend of the wind but I am just a girl
who hates violet bruises but loves pink rogue
nevermind my translucent effigy, he is picked like an apple

saved from garments that bleed if dropped.
I will catch your little man and remember how you wanted to
catch me. A lessening song,
he comes rushing to you, “Father, father.”  
Just like you, a story-teller, “some kind of breeze saved me.”

I am not a poet, but a phantom.
But, no, there is nothing between you and I.
The dead are dead and you and yours are alive.

Log-trucks reel these houseplants.
The dog will bark, weeds flood a window –
tires resonate as though in a metal pencil box
                  but at least I am not alone.

There is something to be said about me loving women:
I did not love them gently. I had rage and
though their skin was smooth, their hearts could be as hard as
a man’s. Then, there are the men who I held when
mugs of green tea were only something we could burn our
tongues on, we would slide them together
and their wounded bodies slept on the other’s welts.

I have learned it is okay to be soft to those who can hurt me,
that there are hundreds of ways to love someone
that his hurt and her hurt is not always similar to mine.

I have relationships with and in watercolors.
The paints are conversations we could never bare having or
dishonesties swirling, permanent on some canvas –
picked up colors as wiry black hairs and straight auburn ones.
She folded my dress on the balcony but
a grey windstorm violently stole it. She made it happen.

I have learned that purity can hurt me, too,
the skipping stones that stub someone else’s toes and make
their feet taste like salt. The women I have loved
saw moonlight brighter than I ever would,
just so they could dim it themselves, like a dull knife.

When the soft bodies became too hard of hearts,
someone told me that I was going to love again soon
but it was not the same. I do not hit my pillow when my head
becomes insomniac, thinking of their faces.
I love men who are as fragile as tea leaves and taste so
sweet: their hurts feel just like I am vomiting my breakfast.

I own no broomstick, cannot afford a car,
and sometimes I walk in circles
or a couple miles too far,
but every step I take is another in your direction –
a realm I will eventually belong to,
the demesne of desperate affection.

Once I touch my arrival, we will speak of my walk,
seven hundredth time’s the charm
even when you talk,
and soon your lips won’t do all the telling,
as we meet our hardened hands now –
a mere, simple cause of hearts’ rebelling.

Will you look me in the eye and speak a lover’s psalm
or will I stand in a corridor with my head held long?
Do I risk this chance of falling out of tune
by pursuing trust in a vacated room?

Well, whatever it may be, we shall certainly see;
I’m willing to gamble everything
for the moment our eyes meet in eternity.

Bellyaches originate in a forest
of as many organs you can imagine, assaulting each other
tree bark hung like Christmas lanterns on the border
that fall and kiss the **** floor come January.
When you cry out, remember anyone can kiss and make up
and I will remember too. Even your most painful places.
Inflammation is clouds billowing on sunny days,
digestion is their migration to the next downtown over,
your body is just nature, and nature is always, always right.
All too often, we believe we are a cathedral
of glass that can be stained and hit by baseball seams:
bellyaches are hiccups that do not dance out of your mouth
earthquakes are from monkeys hopping
from vine to vine, realize hurt exists because you are alive.

I am as big as my parents
were when my elder sister was born, I am also
the age my elder brother was
when I was born.

He had a black notebook and black eyes
before he was blind, yet
he already wrote about what he could not see.

I, the little sister
the uninvited birth
the blood our father slipped
between some
  younger woman's legs — my
mother, not ours.

And my elder sister
thought most about rescuing pills small as
taste buds and opaque rocks
that color-change your mind, the happy
          opals.

She told me liquid cough syrup was bad
yet she taught me to pour
water on my father's recliner, so he may think
my mom had an accident again
maybe she will stop drinking
maybe she will stop drinking
well, maybe, sister
you could stop rescuing pills
and rescue me instead.

I felt like a murderer at age nine
starting big fights about stained seats and
fake **** — my dad
had my mom against the washing machine
but any time she gave him a ****** nose, he'd
have to wash his own **** shirt.

By then,
my brother could not see at all.

One day, he stepped into his black room, locked
the door shut, tied his beard to it
and I lost all sight of him —
my belly could have split open for
seven babies
from the last time he remembered
my name.

I send my siblings birthday cards
they cannot read,
              just to keep track of my age.

I am about the age of trees. When I scream,
my breath smells like my mother’s when she drank herself to sleep
and so I spent the night in a neighbor’s garage because
his cat just had kittens, one was like
a pumpkin in color whilst I had the roundness on my jaws.

I showed him the green canopies I
would jump from, and he got caught: the man I called dad
had to work his way through the jungle (-gym)
or the McDonald’s play area
to fly us by our potbellies like Superman in the cerulean above.

I never thought what it meant,
that I was already sleeping in an old man’s covers at six and seven
but now I feel those nights like bruised elbows.
Now I am the same afraid girl trying to find wombs in men
the age of trees, yet I still climb them just to ask to be carried down.

I hope that if I were to **** myself,
you would regret not setting up the voicemail on your phone
so you could get a tattoo of my last breaths –
the kind seen in hospital meters and beeping machines –
trailing up your spine. You could never see it on yourself but
somehow it would remind you to inhale, exhale.

The worst kind of man
is the one who saw you cry over me on the train back home.
You did not cry because of my broken heart,
not necessarily, you cried because my broken heart
exchanged your arteries for glass all clogged with peach pits.

You cried because your handprint was
on my bottom still, inflamed and saturated in the
seven deadly sins. You have committed every single one.

I hate the man
who did not realize what he was witnessing, even when he
heard my porcelain bones shatter from sobs
and allowed me to say you were the pathetic one.

He must have thought you were, too.
Or he could have believed we spoke another language by
the slurs, the utter nothingness to everyone but
you and I
who had our first fight eating the remnants of a 2AM touch.

But you are not pathetic, baby,
to have reversible organs under twelve acres of red skin
divided up in three parts. You thought it was
different. A man watched a chamber of your heart close up.

I hate him and I hate her,
I hate everyone who has stolen your oxygen from me.

Your bones are trying to capture me
like a cage –

I supposed I should let myself gape open
the way you do, and swallow the
whole city’s disappointment

as a pill. It turns acid in my stomach,
I imagine the bile is scarlet
but the powder is a faint green –
wrinkled up and dissolved into my drink  

I become the same
locked, aging inside your hay fever.

Until I can plead for you to not separate –
do not open yourself up or
let me slip once I’ve gotten warm.