Young Writers Society

xiv.

But sometimes at night
If I sleep still
And mute my dreams
I can remember the color of your breathing,
and fill the space where your hands
Crept under my pillow
Because your fingers were always cold
And my thoughts were the warmest thing in the room.

xv.

I will hold your heart in my hands
And transmute it into a battlefield.
Here is the truth
In a pill,
Marked for days Monday
Through Sunday,
So you could call yourself what I am not.
If only you’d remember to breathe
When you swallow
So that the birds in your chest
will stop piercing your lungs with wishbones
and building nests in your shoulders.
It’s here where you learn
love of mine,
heart of mine,
fear of mine,
truth of mine,
that this is where your castles crumble, because
you built with lace and clouds,
when you should have been building
with crashing waves and lightning.

xvi.

The easiest way to face the firing squad
is to kiss a creature made of war
who has tattooed in their heart
the names of everyone they’ve loved
and have already destroyed.
because the definition of heartbreak
Is a long line of ‘etceteras’,
beginning with
‘this is how it was meant to be’
and ending with
the red mittens I knit for you last Christmas
because you’d said
‘your blood is the only color
that looks good on me.’

(even when i offered to cut myself open,
you said it only counted
if you were the one who sharpened the blade.)

xvii.

home is where the heart bleeds
and I’ve almost gotten the stains
out of the carpet and
out of my jeans,
but I left the handprint over my breast
because some day I won’t remember
why I bought all that bleach.

xviii.

we called ourselves poets
because it was
an excuse to hold knives
at each others throats.
'this is beauty', we said,
even if we never broke skin.
i said your blood
was too precious to spill,
and you said mine wasn't worth
the scar.

but what i didn't tell you
was that i wake up with the roar of gods
racing across my back like a wound.
my blood is an elixir the lonely drink
when the roar of their minds
rival the colosseums
and their rivers of courage run dry.
but even the roar of the gods
can't fight against the way
your name tastes in my mouth;
it's strawberry jam and
tears in the back of my throat.

(God, if you're listening,
i will give you back my steel coated lips,
because i can't feel anything anymore
and that was not what i wanted.)

xix.

I have policies against
boys who go to church;
they think they’re
holier than I am
because they know how to kneel
For longer than I do.
The only hymns I know anymore
is your name crawling out of my mouth,
In fits and starts and gasps
and the only cathedral I visit is the one
where my blankets have been kicked to the floor
and the only communion I take
is the salt licked from your shoulders
and the only gospel I want to hear
are the words you drown in your sleep.
But you were the one who taught me confessional
When you wrapped your rosary around my hands
pulled god from my lips
and baptized me
in a river of pearls and lead.

xx.

Medusa came to me.
But could not harm me
Because I was already made of marble and quartz.
She taught me the secret of silent war--
How to use words as battleaxes, and
How to fell a man at ten paces with only my mouth
and my eyes, and
how to vomit mercy into the world
Borne on a tide of whiskey and cigarette smoke
And too many late nights with my hand on the phone
Trying to remember a number that I never had
And a face that I’ve never seen.

xxi.

I promised myself i would stop
writing poetry about church
and cathedrals
and hymnals gone to spoil--
but i can't help it
that every time you say my name
i find god all over again.
(and i know the parentheticals
are old and tired and overused
but i can't help it
if their enclosed spaces are comforting
for when i lose my tongue
and my patience
and my place in the world.)

xxii.

Don’t ask me how things are going.
I don’t have anything left to say
That wouldn't end
In a hospital visit.

xxiii.

This is a poem—
nouns and verbs
Organized and strategized in ways
To make your heart remember something
You once caught on the edge of a dream.

This is a poem—
Words that individually
Have no meaning
But when strung together
Can build ships out of twigs and
Lovers out of longing.

This is a poem—
Words that have power
To dismantle you
As easily as you breathe
And put you back together again
As easily as my hand
finding its way into yours.

xxiv.

If I were an apocalypse, I would drown the world
In grass and starlight
And rebuild it in your image.
We have wildflowers in our veins
And nebulas in our eyes, and
You told me nothing would ever be the same
Which is why we had to breathe
Out of sync,
Because we were running out of time.

If I were an apocalypse, I would drown the world
In your image
And rebuild in grass and starlight.
I’d cull the wildflowers in my veins
And colonize my shining nebulas.
The secret of the universe
That you never told me
Is that there is always time—
But it doesn’t always belong
To whom we think it does.

xvx.

I made monsters out of minnows
And used them to coax darkness
Out of my hands,
So I wouldn’t stain the walls
When they are all that’s left around me.

xxvi.

My growing pains started
On my twenty-first birthday
when adulthood crept onto my shoulders
And taught me how to breathe on my own.
‘child, this is what it means to grow.’
My bones have lost the knowledge of themselves
And what it means to be a unit.
They are ivory islands
Mired in lakes of blood,
Reaching out with sinew and flesh.
‘child, this is what it means to grow.’
It is learning the words again
To a song you’ve sang since childhood
And holding yourself when you’re scared of the dark.

xxvii.

I was born under Venus
With a bull for a father.
When I was 16 I grew horns
Curling as am embrace
To signify that the devil
Is in the details
and the details
are last night’s vodka dreams
in which I am lost in a china shop
with glass under my nails
and iron polish on my toes
and a yolk made of roses
hanging around my neck.

xxviii.

It’s hard to find a definition
That doesn’t swallow us when we aren’t looking.
It’s why we make clay from our ashes
And build palaces out of wishbones
and call ourselves whatever you aren’t.
even if you’re a sunburst
which makes us oblivion, destined
for a crash landing off the coast
of misery, almost over the border
of every song I used to sing
when I was sure you’d stopped listening.