SISTER
Of you, by you, for you. Thank God, I am obliging. How should I know what incompleteness feels like? When will you answer me? How should I express this to you? Through another handsome letter? By fighting against myself? My soul? Your soul? I couldn’t care less about telling them apart. What I care about is you so long ago, the light coming through your open window and the freckles on the back of your thigh; the sense that life was ending soon and we would meet our fate.
Selfish Girl
If I am being honest, I deserve this. As much as the next person, I deserve the slowest, hardest, vilest death possible, and I deserve you. I deserve the fireplace, the furnace, I deserve the footnotes, I deserve to be reduced to my own faint glow, dimming, dancing, deceiving. There was something there. I was sparkling, spilling out over the horizon. I was golden bliss, in the late afternoon or the lousy morning. Let that be all that I see, when the wheels turn and break. When I am thrown from the foothills of my chariot. Let my last reason be my first, that I love you, and let all things evil and innocent be worth justifying my life over this faint flickering light. Let me forget. Let me learn again, what leaning into flames can feel like, so that with the knowledge I am reborn. As something better, equally worthy, but reformed. A woman reformed. Ash for snow.
changeling
there you will find me, the changeling changing her clothes
the other one got snapped up in the jaws of transformation, just like that
speaking on all my empty platitudes
but just like every other law-abiding girl, she got caught
radiates, vindicates, a hound
iron-rich clay from the monumental motel door-frame you stood in completely naked, stroking the inside of your calf making this noise it was a bristling kiss of a candle on wet wind as it lit, two lips; like that, baby.
horrorifying questions to ask your lover
have you too seen the top of the ivory tower? that acute bliss of creation, made right from your own mouth? the breast which hangs half-heartedly from the towel? the suspension of disbelief until it arrives quite like a friend?
for the: bubble fairy
bless you, baby-blue! the sky stretched a mile high
the day dance ended at bare tapping feet and the crowded ball-room
wrinkly pictures to bend but no performer could, bust an arm
open season on love
wrung high and decrepit as a sore man-child
might still dream upon a splintered soul
he prays still, body of blood when all is to spoil
mama; newborn
mother lives tonight—yes, for now she breathes in bed
together we watch the fan blades spin
into the flesh-red, she breathes-in dark and hums
thank fuck for the death of men
i am unfolding like a purple tangerine, peeled backend black and pale.
listen-out, i’m dust
someday there is going to be a big yard and i will beat you to it, bathe beneath a tree or a breathing body of light but
i made myself bleed so i could cry beside you
our met kiss was wet-lips but no touch; we took a break to stare at each other in the rib-cage, i was trapped in.
so you’d find god, not a mother
i follow myself across a blameless bridge and dig my toe into the part of the plank that’s breaking in
the shooting star
take me to the tulip fields and make me drink that sweet tea you love
do not pick at my irises
nothing burns like a bitch's fangs playing father in the skinned backseat. we're all watched-out, enough now.
i will tell you goodnight instead
i’ve been a stoned fool, cold, breaking-out at the melbourne airport bitching about being a sad seven-year-old
gagged girls at a gas station. we’re remembering everything
gagged at the gas station. salt said she is sweeter scrawny