So you exhume the skeletons of what we used to be because you damn well know that no one could ever speak like rain so fluently. You know, and boy do you fucking miss, how I found an articulate way of translating the banging in your chest, the best at understanding the clashing sign language of your sporadic temper, and you remember how I made lemonade for you on the coldest day of winter, and how I made you black coffee mid-July. And I hope it makes you cry. I really hope it does. Because I loved you plenty, and you couldn't even care for me halfway. How convenient that you see that now. So you can bind your eyes and bind your heart, but no mental fabric will ever be thick enough to keep you from seeing and to keep you from missing me. Good riddance. Good fucking riddance.

This is the weight loss of the heart.
When I wait for a loss
that was imminent at the start. Look,
I'm not going to grab your wrist
and hope to pull you back anymore.
I just want to know
how easy it was for you
to make trading cards out of my flesh.
to choose someone who looks at you
like you're normal over
someone who looks at you
the way the lethargic is to a screen.
I am not running after you.
I am running after the truth that I deserve.
I am chasing for some explaining, hoping
that you turn around one more time
before you turn the corner. Digest your pride,
before it digests you inside, instead.
My skin is no fiesta,
my scars are not comida,
so stop feasting on my stitches.
You rely on mute goodbyes, masking
your coward ways with empty phrases like
"I want you, but this is the wrong time to."
I don't know what's worse. That your disguise
could only reveal how weak you were,
or that I chose not to look past it.
I am not going to envelop your wrists
with begging fists anymore.
I am going to sit here and wait for you to be
at least half the person that you made yourself seem.
I am going to sit here, on the front porch
of the home that you hammered out of me, a coffee
on one hand, a shotgun on another,
just in case you walk your way back
pass the white picket fence that you've forced me to build.

The currents were too strong,
we were changing sails and caught in whirlpools
and building boats too far from harbor.
My father never taught me how to swim,
but he sure as hell did a wonderful job
at teaching me how to drown.
I want to look at him in the eye now
and show him
how much I fucking excel at both.
I am destined to be a pilot,
my elbows are double jointed airplane wings
and I can backpack hundreds of luggage all at once
but no one checks the turbines,
and no one checks the gas,
and I took off never knowing how long I'd last--
didn't even make it past the lithosphere.
It's not my fault I can bend past the normal degree,
it's not my fault my spine is all pretzels and clay,
that it willows in my skin and pines for solidity.
It's not my fault that statues can't play.
But I know, I know, I know that it's etched
in an undiscovered pebble somewhere
that I am meant to be a pilot.
I know I know I know that
I am meant to be a pilot.
My doctor tells me I have a sailor's mouth,
I tell her to shut the fuck up
I came in here to see how broken my bones are,
and the bastard ignores me and says I have eyes
that could mold bullets into oceans.
I tell her that I eat both for breakfast.
She just laughs and shakes her head and tells me
that none of my bones are broken,
just specifically twisted to be able to steer the wheel
of a battle ship. I tell her no, I tell her no,
I am meant to be a pilot.
She says you have a touch like sky,
but you have a soul that calms tsunamis.
Go for the sea anyway.
So I bought a jet plane because
what does she fucking know. Nothing.
That's what.

vestigial

My body is the instrument of the impaired, Mom. It's been strummed by the blind, strings carelessly thundered by the boy with empty sights. I looked at his eye tests, Mom. They say he's 20/20. And I don't understand because he never sees. He just adorns my body with stumbling butterfingers, bones clanking like a thread of thin cans in unnerving trajectories at my anatomy. He'll hold me like an expired coupon but ab(use) me like a business credit card. I am spent but willing to be worn. But he is blind and he cannot see that. He is blind and I let him be that, Mom. I let him be that. Everyday, I let him be that. But in spite of his insentience, he is my only absolute, Mom. The sole presence of consistency in a looping world of looping uncertainty. Being upside down makes me sick, you know that. But with him here, my stomach restrains itself. Keeps the disgusting peanut butter oatmeal you made this morning, keeps it in, keeps it down. And sometimes that's all I need, for something to take my body under siege and make it feel less like a disease. And that's what I was to you, Mom. I was a disease. But the way he lacked susceptibility, the way he didn't turn away, the way he stopped the bleed. I was convalescing under his weight, my scars were merely scars pressed against his lung cancer chest. And sometimes that's all I need. Sometimes that's all a scarecrow girl like me needs. Some ravens for company. He makes good company. Even if my soul is a twenty page study guide, and the encasing flesh is the big test. It's supposed to be the other way around, Mom. But he doesn't care, he doesn't care because he knows that I will not fail him. And my god does he take advantage of that. And I let him do that, Mom. I look at the mirror and the only thing I've let go of is myself. And you look at me like it's terminal. And I can't look back with the defeating relief and acidic hope that it is. That it really fucking is.

There you were stamping expiration dates on every timeless thing that crossed your path. But for someone who was so good at making sure that things don't last, you did a shitty job keeping track at what you were destroying. Remember me. Fucking remember me.

on hitting rock bottom, whatever that is

they say that when you hit rock bottom, you can only go up from there
which isn't entirely true
sometimes, you hit rock bottom
and the fucking devil will come out and drill you through that fucking peel of earth and
propose to you and veil you with ash, and condemn you to his molten mansion
sometimes, you hit rock bottom
and someone is on the edge of the cliff, dropping anvils at you
and sometimes you hit rock bottom,
and you live.
you can only go up from there, they say,
you can only go up.
but with bones turned into art and
with the welcoming warmth of
hell to kindle your heart
sometimes you hit rock bottom,
and you keep going.

I'm back.