traps

I want to light you up, be your source of electricity and feel you bloom over me, to drench myself in the rain of your body and fall away in a clatter of shaking bones and mending moans to be pushed, a violent stain the color of want on the wall. I want you to excavate my soul, breathe religion into me as I exhale under you, bury deep into my skin and slip into my flaws and nuances in a crumble of gasped surprise and lightening eyes to pull the stubborn flutter out of me and tie it to us. Mashed; we are mouths, but oh, so much more.

fennel for you, and columbines.

there's a lot of dripping

dropping around my feet, so funny

since i don't go swimming

anymore

and i haven't cried since

we buried that bird in the

backyard,

the one the neighbor's cat caught

--despite not even being hungry--

we were children then.

where the water comes from, i don't know

its not in my nature to know

i'm not a woman of water, i don't move with the

tide,

i am like ophelia, yes, but not because i fed the river.

there are other ways of being ophelia,

you don't need water to drown.

caged tiger

i woke up with the weather sticking to my skin.

last night still powders my hair and

echoes in my tapping fingernails,

ruinous debris of limb-smashing, hot-breathed, god-yes,

dancehall embattlement.

i wanted you. but that's not good enough.

there was a chase like tigers

a clawing, a sabre-toothed trade-off of

exotic animal perfumes and pheromonal purrs.

i breathed in what you breathed out

and my teeth disintegrated

into powders that wafted right up into your nose

taking you to heaven, taking us to the Congo

i mean it must have

how else can i explain the pounding and the

hot scents that burned me and evoked the jaguar howling

when my bones pushed through my skin

in a vain effort to get closer to you,

to be gnawed on.

you wanted me too. but that wasn't good enough.

i slept in my own tent and let myself be coated in indian summer.

caverns

and it was into the cave

salt crashes and ex-train tracks and stuck in the mud

and light, the cliche light

at the cliche end

and i wasn't afraid to not hold hands

to break against the ledge

alone, in the debris that roared roared roared

i thought,

this is how i'd kill myself, if i thought i deserved a death that good

there was hemming and hawing about

tide traps and skulls mixed with foam, smashing against like jelly-filled shells

shivers and

fear of footing

and i thought, that's how i'd like to kill myself

but i kept mute because

landmarks are supposed to light you up

tighten your grip on what is and isn't natural

pat our backs for keeping one littered run-down piece of geology from turning into

burger kings

beach houses

big, beautiful frothing landfills

but

that doesn't keep me healthy.

i want my body to nourish the scrambling soil, my bones to be

a cragged beach spine

because the only time i feel as alive

is when my muscles snap from poor decisions like

him

poor decisions i want to make.

i would toss myself into the whirlpool

when and if i deserved to die.

psychotherapy

water draining from between my toes and smoke billowing between each breath

like some red-lipped girl in a three-star film, the porcelain holds my bones in place

as your bones rattle my brain.

lung cancers and broken homes aside, some people never learn

and the cycle which has left ashes in my bathroom

and bile in my stomach

is born, without so much as a pat on the back or have a cigar.

"you're better than this," i pout into the camera

but what is it i am better than?

point of references aside, i don't know if i'm actually all that good at all

or the angst just makes for a fine photograph.

matins

i'm not scared of you anymore, or the blanks in my brain. i waited, and you never came, and that was the worst that could happen and now i've numbed.

you forced me into a nunnery of the psych and i can't say i'm ungrateful, spending my days on pressed flowers and knit gloves and heavenly verse, there's nothing worse than lies treated like gospel, and now i know what i can live through:

anything.

but still,

i would prefer to still be unaware of my own powers if i meant you still sometimes pushed the hair off my shoulders and whispered things someone else wrote but you meant more into my skin.

shady

i used to be filled with stupid factory romances

marriage to me meant our names in a tree

there was an unspoken sexiness in our childlike blood oathes and

newborn bedroom war cries

you'd whisper, but i don't know

i don't think you really knew the weight of your own mouth

and how it pillowed over my lungs

traditional blooms of the femme, you attributed to my bareness

little did you know

i'd be content just lying in the shadow of beauty, not even being a shade of it

you pushed too hard

when i wept on your grass, i felt a spin

but i didn't feel you

you had gone

you had gone long, long ago.

and i knew that i had to grow up and take some responsibility for cracks and floods.