Monthly Archives: November 2017

as if i am a choice, nothing more than breakfast cereal in aisle 5 or white-laced sneakers, rubber soles waiting for feet to call them shelter as if i am safety net woman a phantom to rest your head when no beds bid you welcome when no one wants to tuck you in to sleep,Continue reading “I AM NOT AN OPTION”

there is something deep and dark and delirious living inside my skin. a parasite of sorts. maybe a starving bacteria. it takes everything i have– my peace, my safety, steals the quiet moments and momentary flashes of what resembles joy. even the bare, brittle bones. sometimes i wish it were cancer because at least someContinue reading “cancer”

they are all ghosts now, all of the lovers i have lost left behind in the bruise-purple valleys of aching memory every man i have donned my home is no longer a home but a name which has sacrificed its syllables for suffering the only place i call home is not a man at all,Continue reading “ghosts”

the first one i cannot call you mine so what is there to be thankful for? your mother’s embrace is more like home to me than a brick-walled house could ever be how she clutched, hair fragranced by dinner– i miss eating at your table how much of holy communion that was. you showed meContinue reading “visiting your house on thanksgiving eve”

i will always think of her and remember the golden-haired goddess-like angel, giggling manic, flirting with the cute boy at the candy shop, phone number scrawled on a pink Post-It note how we walked like two independent women, fierce, unstoppable, laughing like little girls on Christmas morning meeting her, face-to-face, was, in fact, a ChristmasContinue reading “katherine”

perhaps one day i’ll be a brilliant poet and volumes of my words will call bookshelves, far and wide, home. and i’ll wear polka dots and flowers in my hair, dark red lipstick. i’ll wear my hair up. i’ll learn to love the angles of my jaw. i’ll wake up at 9:30 every day, sipContinue reading “9:30 FANTASY”

blubbering through tears, slimy suffocation coughing up disbelief, pain receptors anesthetized– dead inside your skin there is no feeling here, only static and unlike the panicked cry, the good cry know no names nor colors, all of the fine-tuned details blurred away, swallowed along with phlegm and emotion obliteration i cried so hard, so stormyContinue reading “A GOOD CRY”

The violin, the parting of curtains in pitch black darkness before the first string is played. The applause. My mother’s tomato garden, picking ripe fruit with four year old hands. Red and orange and yellow. The yellow ones were my favorite. They almost looked alien, as if they had no place in sandwiches nor earthContinue reading “I miss”

Ponder loss. The weight of its calamity. Loss can render us artists. It is that potent. Loss can incite brilliant poetry, feeding off mania as if it is food. An alien sort of self-empowerment. Loss commands with an iron fist, forcing us to salvage obedience. Loss can feel warm to the touch, realizing more existsContinue reading “It’s what I do at 2:30 in the morning when I can’t sleep”

is not today. Even after my roots silver, bones melt to wax, birthday candles long since sacrificed for sleep, I will still be dizzy light and altitude, propped upon my father’s shoulders, chasing the cobalt shore, fitting my feet inside his bigger prints. Still a baby-faced stickler for perfection wretched eyesight, hunched over clicking typewriterContinue reading “My last day as a child”