an aestival whisper

I haven't slept for days--
each bat of my eyes eats at my skull and churns
like a thicket of crickets--

and thunder caught in my stomach,
my skin cracks and curls and chars
away both lungs, cradled
in my nettled and torn hands. My soul is a bride,
still and quiet and tied inside, laying
against each and every knobby bone,
white as the marrow and sharply turned joints--
but the twisting twine unravels
into seeds and straw and
grasses that cry wither and dry
when I step on them, feet arched high as Ostia Antica--
they crackle like fire
even though it is yet dark.
I am yet dark.

But my skin is pale as the statues
that have fallen into sand and the seaport
is as wet as my filmy eyes--
the mirror is not kind,
the windows are not blind, but
I refuse to see the shakes
and the stutters of muscle
carved into each crowlined tremor

-- the groom waits, redfaced and featureless,
blooms in blackened hands and bone charred
and he has not forgotten, does not forget, will not forget
his vows.


~Thank you pengulove and jaggys

i am a skeleton in a closet
hidden and wilfully forgotten,
tumbled into enjambed lines,
dry wood bones and memories
etched into the lines of each joint--
i am fossilized and kept and smoked like the cigarette
butt snuffed into the side of my skull.

Lucy visits me, scrapes her old fingers
like i am a cane waiting to be carved;
she has so much trouble walking,
and her tendons tremble with a quiet weariness,
bones brittle and gnarled and
just as dry as mine.

they locked the door,
broken locked and double
locked but she pries it open with her twisted teeth
and her wartime grief
and she stares in my eyes, lonely and forgotten
as her own.

i am haunting the house,
reminding the unspeakables and
unforgivables that they exist.
lucy has lungs full of smoke
and a cigarette scar on the inside of her wrist,
aged and silver like her hair.
she pries open the lock and
she talks, and she tells me
her secrets.

our footsteps crosshatch
and darken like sweet
slumbered through nights,
and I found the lips
of a bottle on mine last night
like some long lost lover
that found me again once you were gone--

they kissed me
with an amber echo and it told
me that you looked back when you left,
but I was too far gone to see.

I don't want to sleep, too scared
to dream of you and my little lovers,
whispering your name into my mouth.

dusk is lonely
like a window watcher
who has forgotten how to close the blinds
and open the door--
the glass is cometed
and meteroed with curiosity,
gunpowdered with dust like the big books
that grandfather used to lick the tips of his fingers for;

he told you how to read people,
letters in the bite of their lip
and stories in the corners of their eyes,
and he said that war
is a seething mass of anthills and molehills
blessed into mountains,
that curl in and wriggle like earwigs,
scaled and black and shiny and writhing--

war sheds its carapace like a second skin,
a withered and rotting cocoon,
grieving, and he shows you picture
of a harvestman--
daddy long legs, no,
granddaddy long legs, and
he tells you that they scavenge
and they have a skull
on their back like a banner,
translucent legs, because war
has no name or face and
it spins its webs in a single night.

but dusk--
dusk is where you grew up on window sills
and you read people like you read your books,
balanced and crosslegged,
wondering how you were so numb--
if you should be crying.

a cellar spider spins its web in between the panes
and rattles lonely stories of strangers and
in your books, war rattles off a pop-pop-pop;
you think that you can see the
sorrow in those strangers' eyes,
though it may just be the
glass needing cleaning.

rusting skin in the shower;
she forgets what she looks like
and startles in the mirror,
wide eyed, sleepless and pouched.

scraping the rust away,
she examines its dullness in the light,
wondering if this is where her insides have gone.

frowning at the metal encasing her body,
her scarab carapace, she creaks and cracks
and whirrs when she tries to sleep.

when the doctor asks her about her dreams,
she tells him that she doesn't have any
and she rusts her face with tears.

i.
she needs me to tell her she's beautiful
because he won't.
I can't lie.
she is beautiful-- her legs slope like elms and
her shoulders turn into bell jars when she's still;
she reminds me of dried leaves in books
I kept from last spring.

but,
she is a moth
nestled
in gray summer.

wrapped in uncertainties,
more bandages
than anything else,
spools of thread
that brush her bell jar shoulders
ready to be sewn into memories and heartache
for someone that she doesn't know.

instead,
she wants ribbons
to tie
and
butterflies.

winter bites too cold,
freezes the rise of a breathy chest;
she shivers and learns how to hold hands to her
skin, another person's hands,
not mine.




ii.
he holds her like glass.
thick glass, not the delicate hand-shaped glass
from a pipe, but rugged brown and sand-cut.
she is bottle green and thin, but he does not know
and he cups her breast with a calloused palm.

she is shedding coldness
and unravelling-- no one has told her that she is beautiful,
not for a long time so

she casts a line for it--
a beautiful fisherman,
slippery as a fish
and thin as her line.






iii.
I am caught
and mute,
and mute,
and my hands are too soft to hold her,
and she cracks,
not cut from sand at all,
crackling between the spines of my books
and she does not know
that the words are mine.




*ugh*

I need you hopeless--

cold blood color careens
beneath the reach of light,
somewhere tip-toeing underground
like a sightless mole with shovelled paws;

still-- still,
they said,
still as a prairie
with a darkening sky,
still as a sleeping newborn
just drive to life,
motionless as fear,
heavy as the flood on its way--
it roars,
closed mouthed and teeth grit.

"I was supposed to die,
seven times,
and each day scars my wrist.
I miss the taste of it,
but they need me, they need me."

it was me but it didn't matter--
we cough quiet,
close mouthed,
sob self consciously
because you must, you must
rest;
your open eyes cede
to soil and I--

I need you hopeless and still.

the yellows of the eggs are eyes,
staring wide as they are whisked and
flipped into another home.
flour blooms scattered white petals
on the sides of wood
like homespun hearths, warm with
mother’s hands working;

it clings to my skin like an ethnicity,
imprinted into pores like childhoods
and traumas and old smells that cling to
the sides of nasal cavities, decades,
dozens of years later—

the spine of the fork crushes bananas
into lumpy gold, impure and
blackened and bruised,
stringy with white copper. it comes
out warped and bent, but it is a baking fork,
and each steel scratch is another batch,
another lick of the fingers.

the oven is a metronome
ticking off Celsius seconds until
it is done;
its stomach is fiery and warm,
and the bread is browned,
but not yet burnt.

Spoiler

Banana bread is win. This poem is not. xD

You sweep
small splintered palms
across Milky Way dust.
They are dark and
cratered,
coated in things unseen,
bright pollutants,
little words like
“I always thought they were planes.”

something inconsequential
paws at the rivered bones
in your throat--
you choke on it.

it trips your tongue and
lies across your language,
languid, sprawled,
creek boned and watery.

you chew the ends
of its words,
gristly pronouns and
sour sentences,
childlike. it can't say five lettered words
has fingers that do not flex;
they erode and eat the breath from
others' lungs.
you ask the waitress with ocean eyes
for a toothpick and spit out the fat--

they remind you
of the splinters in your
palms, pale scars,
etched from each chapter of every book,
a paragraph and a half of driftwood
thrown back to the ocean.
your scars are the eaten glyphs
hiding under the bark,
creased broken lifelines that the tent woman
told you won't last long, not at all.
her hands shook on yours
and pulled back to her chest like the tide,
curled and furled and
sallow like shells.

you spit splinters,
woody, wormy words
and they eat at your lips.

your river mouth teeths at the
things that you have to say, like an ocean,
and your river bones break
and choke
and drown.

O________________O

That is my face. Because... oh my god.... these are so good. KEEP ON WRITING

you are a bathroom mirror ghost,
steam lunged and open mouthed,
wondering where all the years went,
how many lovers are carved
into the lines of my face.

you linger as the fog rises
and choke on the dry air.

I am from loneliness.

I am from a mistaken
motherhood, a child broken
to splintered stars in each pupil.
I pierce the ends of her fingers
like a needle, sew myself
into her skin and pattern
and wrinkle and age
as she does.

I am tattooed into her breast
and her chest and
rest in the broken cave
that parts the cages of her ribs--
I am hibernating, only sleeping,
only sleeping.

She clings to each bone,
growing and stretching, and
I watch my muscles turn white,
and ache with it.

Spoiler

Failing hardcore at writing. This is a genuine memory for me, which always muddles my writing, even disregarding the fact that it's prose.

I eat apple cores. I always have, figure I always will-- mother used to tell me there's cyanide in the seeds, maybe arsenic, that'd they kill me as soon as I touched them with my teeth; but, curious as I am, I soon learned that apple seeds are apple seeds and nothing more, unless you ate bushels and bushels of them. There were traces, little seeds of cyanide in the seeds of the apples, but, we all carry a little darkness inside us, right? Nothing to be scared of. But, he still gives me mistrustful looks when I finish my apple and turn it over so eat it from bottom to top, lastly pulling the stem from between my lips.

Autumn apples have always been my favorite; there's an apple fair in the town next from mine every year, a place that I've always grown up wanting to live before I realized that I am far too alive for a small town as quiet as that one. Reality hit the day I read the sign as we drove in: 7774 people, a number halved and halved and halved again from my city, which is already too small, too familiar, too easy to not get lost in. The drive is nice, though; sometimes, as we pass the old highway, lined with barns and cows, huddled together like mother and child, I can see the apple orchards tucked back in the hills and wonder if I like apples for their taste, or their texture, or just the plain and simple ideas of trees and fall, childhoods spent eating the pies and crisps and cakes that my grandmother made from these, sitting at picnic tables, wondering if there was any more.

Sometimes, I settle on the color; it's the color that draws me in, streaks of green and red and yellow like sunsets and autumn trees and dried grass and the crunch it makes when you wander through it. They taste like that; the hills they came from, the soil they fell into, the hands that picked them-- the great wooden crates that splinter my fingers when I read them sideways, like woody books in a library with a title that didn't quite fit in the width. As I nurse all my sharp little wounds, I am handed apples and they press on the little dots of palmed blood in a nice weight, another streak of red with the green and the yellow, and I consider not eating them because I am on them, in them, soaking in like the tree soaked water into its stem, the soil soaked itself into the tree, the sun into the leaves.