when i was in college i wrote all the time and even the littlest moment or glance or potato chip or drink could make a poem gush from me but now the gushing is just words and it's usually i'm sorry and i can fix that but now when i try to write i don't get much what am i going to write about now would you start a poem like if you tug gently on the shade with two hands you'll hear a click you didn't break it you just reset your cordless mechanism or let's go ahead and uninstall the driver so we can update your soft-

ware shit that's a good start maybe we're getting somewhere

9.8m/s2

I never understood
unrequited love--
          when someone didn't doesn't love me
          I am nourished by my love for them.
loving is enough.

until I met him--
          I gave him a
          new name
          so i could speak freely:
Seth. easy to say and smooth
and vulgar--keeping my tongue at the
front of my mouth between my teeth
so it's always close (but not too obvious!)
to his skin. Dear god,
i do all the work but i could use
the exercise.

i walked by
a periwinkle house
with a navy blue door
and a black mailbox,
trying to will my feet
to keep going and
my heart to stay in my chest.

it was 73 degrees
and of course I wore
my sweatpants. and the sweatshirt
he lent to me that's four sizes
too large.
i passed three people.
          none said hello. i must have been invisible,
drowning in clothes like that. being swallowed up
even though i was never one for
biting off more than i could chew, til recently
when i stopped chewing and only did the biting.

i've heard it said
that our hearts
are wild animals
which is why
our ribs
          are cages.
numbers pull at my (wish)
          bones-- friction against fabric
fwup fwup of sandals
sweat licking down my back.

i got to a road i'd never seen before
and the sign said STOP
          so i did
but not after i laid my hand on it.
the metal was cold (a quick reprieve
from the heat) but it wasn't enough
to soothe my throbbing
left ventricle or relax my
spastic diaphragm.

i walked past
a periwinkle house
with a navy blue door
and a black mailbox
(downhill this time!)
and wondered if this is
what's it's like to be digested.

his skin is under my
fingernails, turning
black from oxidation.

my blood is rusting
in pools at the base
of my throat.
his teeth talk pretty to me.

when he talked of
taking,
he should also have talked of
giving. i was not warned.

i suppose the illegality is thrilling?

i am a poacher.

i stole my name. my real name.

i went on a name safari,
wandering through the deserts
and rainforests searching--
but i didn't have a guide

so i got lost a few times
and there were a few
mosquitos that almost drained

me completely--
hoping i would stumble upon
a name to make me feel myself.

i found one. it was so beautiful,
drinking there elegantly. gracefully

extending its soft neck with easy vowels
its smooth tongue caressing the inside
of my cheeks
at the waterhole of all the names in the world.
it didn't see me though. it didn't suspect anything.

i shot, i struck.

i skinned it alive.
i took it home.

i read once
that to
unlock a new creativity
i should write with
my opposite hand.

i tried it.



it wasn't readable.

now i'm tortured
by what i'm missing.

#maleentitlement #childrenarebrats

The mother of two
tries to encourage her children
to pray to the Christian Savior God
every day. on schedule.
To her, faith is incremental
and manufactured.

The boy child reaches for the cupcake
that the three of them are sharing.
He tells the girl child that
the icing carrot on top is his
          and he is going to take it.
The girl child says "we can split it!"
he says "no we can't it's mine
         GIVE ME MY BRIDE!!!"

The mother of two obliges him
(perhaps his screaming is embarrassing)
and offers to let the girl child
have a cookie instead.

They sit next to each other by the fire:
the boy child eats the whole cupcake
and the girl child eats an M&M cookie
with a lost, forlorn look in her eyes.
she gets up and walks away
after the boy child asks
"how does that cookie taste?"
with a blob of white icing
on his nose.

On Love and Gertrude Stein

my lipliner is. has the same shade name rosewood-- A not torn rose-wood color.-- and I wore it when i first second met him

because he understands my phrases like 5 is an even number because there's 2 on each side and two of us (and it) makes an odd pair

I turned into an amnesiac

at 10 pm on a friday.

if you asked me right then
i couldn't have told you my own name
the day of the week
or a list of random words.

but if you asked me right then
i could say your name--
          yes,
and more

but grasping for words never
was like flesh,
and a hunger for italics or bold
never matched my blood
          but metallic kind of
comes close.

i never could get into
comparing feelings to strings
like tying and knots and
connections were somehow
a bad and taboo thing...
these things have always been
the basis of my existence; i built
my strength in connections to other people
and there have always been more than two.

i'm trying to get better
at thinking before i speak:
like normally i would tell you
that i'm deleting all your text messages
even the ones that say 'love' in them
and the ones where we're making plans
and i'm erasing all the memories
from earlier today and how
you asked me my ring size
and we talked about fetishes
but now i won't because i know
that saying that
would only make things more awkward
and neither of us needs that right now.

See? growth.

A(nother) Poem

He says he was born
a robot, but
I see an inhuman tenderness
when he signals his turns
as I follow him home--
          even though we've both
had it memorized
since the first time
we traveled
together.

Boiling Frogs, or An Open Letter to That Asshole at the Bar

If rape culture didn’t exist, neither would you.

I sat next to you because there was no other fucking seat open. It wasn’t because you were uniquely stimulating, I promise. You smiled at me; I smiled back. You asked me if my nose ring hurt, I said not particularly. Your eyes were red and speech was slurred, but your friends vouched for you saying you weren’t really that drunk. You asked what other piercings I have, I said I have two more. You assumed they were genital piercings (wrong!) and told me I should show them to you. All your friends laughed nervously; I was unsure of how to proceed, so I laughed too. +20 degrees.

You got to talking more and you offered me drugs. “I got 2 eight-balls last night, real good quality. You’re welcome to join if you like.” I declined politely. One of your friends left to go home to his wife, the other turned to the person next to them; I never knew what stuck meant until that moment. You insisted on showing me your full back tattoo even though I told you I didn’t want to see. +20 degrees.

You drank 3 (more) beers while I tried to eat silently, your random words and questions clinging like napalm to my skin, burning and burning from the fire of your lust until I forced out an answer. I didn’t ask for this, I thought. I didn’t want this. I just wanted a nice dinner alone. You commented on how delicious my dinner looked. I said thank you. You said I was clearly after your heart, doing that, and clearly we should have sex. I wrinkled my nose and said no thank you. You said “Oh honey, it’s ok. We could just do oral or whatever. We wouldn’t have to go all the way.” I said no thank you. “But really, girl. All you gotta do is come home with me. We’d hang out on the couch, smoke a few joints, and have a real good time.” I said no thank you. You let it go; I thought I was done. I was getting ready to pay the nice server and go—you touched me.

God. Ew. You had to go and do that, didn't you? I had just put up with your invasiveness and all around general disgusting-ness until this point, but your hand on my thigh finally hit my limit; the frog jumped out of the pot.

I pushed you away and told you not to touch me; I hadn't told you that you could touch me, why did you think you could? Your answer made me want to die: "It wasn't like I touched your pussy or nothin'." OH SO THAT MAKES IT OKAY?! I said it didn't matter, that you never touch people without consent. You called me crazy, a psycho bitch, you told me you had a million dollars in the bank (ha!) and that I had just lost one of the best opportunities of my life to be with you. You told me no one would ever hire me with a nose ring (they have and still do), that no one would ever date me (they have and still do), that no one actually finds me fuckable and they're all lying to me if they say they do (they have and still do. i'm noticing a pattern). Even writing this has me in stitches; I honestly don't understand how someone can be so goddamn full of themselves.

You got loud. You got belligerent. Your friend escorted you outside to the car; hopefully you went home. Or tried and got stuck in a ditch somewhere, I don't care. The person next to me saw it all happen and had signaled to the bartender to grab a manager to forcibly remove the man harrassing me; the person next to me bought me a beer after the offending party left the building. Nobody said anything to me except I should have known better than to talk to him. They all said "well honey he's just like that," whatever the hell that means. It wasn't my fault. I didn't ask for any of that.

I never went back to that place ever again.

Sillage

Of all the things I pictured us doing, sleeping was not one of them. I still hate you for eating my mushrooms. And for not leaving when you said you would.

I knew

it was final

when I did laundry

and there was nothing

left of you

I don't even

miss it.

he said my eyebrows
raise when i'm thinking
and he sees replicas of me
in porn.

a different he
for a different day
gave me his shirt
to sleep with and
his scent holds me
when he can't.

a separate he
for a separate time
wonders how to flirt with me,
and makes me wonder
if i've been doing it all wrong.

He takes care of me
like a scientist
takes care of petri dishes:

on a schedule,

meticulous.

in a pattern,

leaving nothing to chance.

but i don't guess
that he had a control group
before he met me.

there have been some...
          unexpected
difficulties.

For Michael

smoking by the tailgate,
i looked at your truck
and i noticed
that the paint was perfect
--except for one small chip near the handle.
and i noticed
that there were
two cigarette butts (Pall Mall Blues)
in the truck bed,
and when you pointed them out to me later
i pretended like i hadn't seen them before
so you wouldn't think i was weird.
and i noticed
your license plate had blue letters
and i said them over and over
to myself so i'd remember it.
and i noticed
the bradford pear trees molting
next to the driveway
that i'm sure you powerwashed
(you confirmed that for me a few seconds later)
and the puddles of rain water
and flicks of ashes
and lazy smoke tendrils
twirling towards the sky.

i looked at you
and i noticed
that a wrinkle was forming
between your eyebrows

and i knew then
that i'd missed the moment
but i was too busy
trying to notice
every detail
so i could write this poem.