i.
i always find a space for myself
in small places:

ii.
in my mother's open wounds,
there i dance with salt and lime
and my father's misplaced angers.

iii.
in the scratched frames
under the nails of an angry girl.
in between cowering sunbeams
i lick the walls clean of dust.

iv.
in the fifth page of thrifted book,
back when i was in love with bukowski,
i look at the stains of a summer day sin
and see a five-feet
egyptian sarcophagus taped with figures;
what is the hieroglyph for pity,
so that hathor takes me back to the tight spaces of her womb?
what is the hieroglyph for homelessness?
what is the hieroglyph for misplaced?

v.
i always find a space for myself
in small places:
in the holes of a tire,
in between discolored knuckles,
in desperate places where a body gives up
and wastes away;
there's a space for one more.

vi.
i always find a space for myself
in small places — they wait with such quiet patience
like a father to a prodigal child —
i always find a space for myself
waiting in small places,
it calls hauntingly, like a well-loved, familiar ghost.

yet i cannot come back.

i am too huge with sorrows now —
too full with wistful human bones.

It all makes sense now — the foolish way I repeatedly gathered my broken heart and laid them at your feet like wild roses, the cold feel of beer bottles, the anguish at the heartbreak trying to escape my chest, the desperate need for your cruel hands, the way new Decembers kept on hurting — it all makes sense now, the miserably intense way that I loved you, and how it was never enough.

I needed to be hurt like that. I needed to live your cruelty in order to love myself more.

this lonely room is full of rosewoods rotting under the july rain, i have knocked on them way too many times, my knuckles can barely remember a period without the dull aching from the splinter — they can barely remember the stray bits of softness left here and there by the girl i used to be. still, knocking hasn't saved me from the insidious caving in of these humid walls. knocking remains an unanswered gesture and i have stopped asking questions. i can only sit, small and in bewilderment of my stagnation.

this lonely room is full of rosewoods rotting under the july rain and maybe my skin will soon be drenched enough to give in and fall, like a giant scab of a wound long healed. i am my own wound, breathing, quiet and careful in its self-inflicted state. this lonely room is full of rosewoods rotting and still, the veins in my wrists are mine to scar while waiting for the calm after the rain. i am the tree bark in a state of decay. i am a storm sewn shut like a bitter memory, like a piece of bloated flesh. god, all this cold is foreboding. this lonely room is full of rosewoods rotting under the july rain and i hope my skin weathers and erodes, like worn ***** soil, just in time for sunlight to look at me — just long enough for me to look back and feel its pity — its kindness — its warmth.

indeed there is a state of calm in an eroded consciousness. it's the closest thing to daybreak. it's the closest thing to peace.