The Hip Bone Connected to the Leg Bone

Restless.

I feel like an itch in the back of a throat.

A constant,

stirring reminder

that forces the evening alive

like an alarm clock beating against its own

inflated lungs.

————————————

House of cards.

I roll the foundation of this facade

into a dollar bill and pass it in a charity basket.

I imagine it a donation for children.

I imagine

a game of ring around the rosy

and fifty-two pick up:

a pity party searching for the joker

that made this consuming plague.

————————————

Silent.

Take an x-ray of the human body.

But make the x-ray out of the parts that light up in the nighttime gleam of a

refrigerator.

Capture where the disappointment blends in with foresight

on a color spectrum with frequencies

that break willpower.

Capture where the tongue is crushed below the teeth.

A secret well kept.

————————————

Scattered.

I clean out the collage of skeletons I keep pinned to the walls of my closet.

Another portrait too big for the shredder.

————————————

Repetitive.

Circling roses,

-rinsed clean again from the inside-

like bleach

circling the drain.

————————————

Repetitive,

but clean again,

from the inside.

XX

There is no whipping wrap of cold

only an absence of heat.

No pitch black rooms

only the absence of light.

What an adventure it was

lining the ground with matches

searching for the path through my frailty that you escaped to.

Constant.

Sharp.

No longer is it a breaking in me,

but an absence of you.

Fugue

We grew tired of dressing up our mental disturbances for

show and tell with strangers we never wanted to meet,

so we stayed home and splayed them out:

bare and insane.

Their bodies made shadow silhouettes on the opposite wall

that looked nothing like you or me.

But when they danced in front of the mirror

and sang out our fears,

we joined along.

We shut the blinds,

then we cracked like glass.

XX(3)

I.

If you were the fireworks then I was the fanfare

reeling back at your need for attention.

Don’t mistake my screaming for applause,

but at least specify which it is you want.

II.

You dug your jagged, dirty nails into my chest and shook me until something rattled alive.

I think we mistook growing sunlight for a starting spark.

III.

I called my mother,

her words were “Straighten your shoulders, girl. The world doesn’t have sympathy

for wilted roses anymore.”

You told me people used metaphors when they were too weak to admit their own

thoughts,

how the ceiling was just a ceiling and we were just bodies.

Nothing more.

The silence that settled and strangled us was just silence.

I refused to let myself turn it into anything greater.

IV.

You bought two roses.

I used one as a place marker and set it inside my notebook.

The other dried in dark brown against my windowsill.

I asked you if you thought people were like that,

in the way they seem to end up alone.

I liked the way you kept your lips straight and didn’t say a word.

I never intended that, when you actually let me speak,

that you would do so, so loudly.

V.

You shook your head and said yes.

VI.

I keep flipping through pictures of fireworks to prove to myself that

reflecting on the moment

was as meaningful as being in it.

I keep flipping through and all they look like are scattered sparks or

bullets through the sky.

I realize you were just that.

Nothing more.

My reaction piece to my poetry teacher asking me to “edit out the controversial statements” in my pieces

Saudade

At times,

I catch you with this unmistakable vacancy

burning away in your eyes.

At these times, I find myself willing to abandon the bridge being burned

to swim to whichever coast will keep you near.

In these fantasies,

each splashing attempt for you washes away at my past.

In exchange, my shoulders and arms become limp from holding your burdens.

The sea, I suppose, likely feels the same about me.

In the daydream,

I always end closer to the mirage of a buoy

before fading away to the soft crackle of the bridge bound to collapse.

I’ve never been tied to fate

but I’ve scraped my knees against jagged rock for you

time and time again.

I and your secrets and a forgotten match

-we were bound to be at the bottom of this sea.

But then you blink,

shocked,

with a sigh that I continue to mistake for relief;

and I pretend these last minute rescues have been miracles and not

sudden twists in a plot line

that I continue to rewrite whenever you avert your gaze.

No matter how bloodied my legs

like tides ripping in the morning, you always manage to return.

To leave me grasping and gasping for air with my head above water never meant that the sinking ceased,

but at least it gave this drowning purpose.

Conversation Pieces

Lying on a uncovered patio, we spoke of religion and plane crashes.

You said,

you liked the way rosaries looked when they hung off bedposts.

That you

never quite understood why they kept the bibles in the underwear drawers of hotels

but on the bedside table of every motel you stayed at when your mom forgot to pay the rent.

You made the idea of hookers folding their clothes like folded palms sound cleaner

than Sunday best strewn on a freshly vacuumed floor for

two nights

but always rising on the third.

I kept my tongue twisted around a blade of grass because,

with your upturned head covering your only means of expression,

only then did I figure I wasn’t supposed to talk during confessional.

I could see your eyes though,

they moved up and around to the rhythm of your thoughts.

You crossed the T’s over and over,

painting crucifixes in the sky over my backyard.

I admitted that

I was bad at praying.

I was behind the plated glass of my eyelashes admitting secrets to a cloud that looked

nothing like a fantasy and more,

simply,

like just a cloud.

But you just happened to be there.

I wasn’t a hooker with a waiting list or two Evangelists trying to get off

but

I could make a mean conversation with the sound of exasperated sighs and my favorite nights

always seemed to depend on what song was playing on the car radio.

I said that

airplanes flew over my bedroom every single night and yet

I stayed in the same place singing songs on the radio

about people moving on.

              Most of the early inventions in aviation ended up killing the  

              inventor,

I’m not sure which one of us said it

but

you then said,

you were tired of people getting hurt from the things they built up.

I said that

they probably kept the bibles in the drawer so people could forget, at least for a night,

because hookers don’t have to pretend that their clouds are anything but clouds.

And you told me that you

don’t understand

how I could

miss the point.

But for every bedside rosary seems to be a crudely made noose

mocking shapeless outlooks and stuffing them back into their bedside tables when the

underwear drawer gets too full with life’s shrapnel

kept like a souvenir.

I

can’t understand

how you managed to

miss the point

You looked so innocent when you believed in everything

Then one of us says,

             It just seems so frightening

            so stupid a risk

            to believe in myself.

-I’m still not sure which one.

XX

We were at a party in a friend of a friend’s basement.

I asked you if you could feel the walls

caving in around us.

Surrounded by all these people,

you said,

how could I feel anything but joy?

How could I feel anything

but all these people.

You barely felt the walls.

I suppose that’s the moment when

you became one of them.

Translation

Say that I’m sorry.

But

because the story’s that repeat themselves only play like records while we

scratch at the walls:

Take us out of the scene.

Take two people

and one is holding a gun between their teeth to test

which makes the deeper wound.

The other one is bleeding,

because it begins like that.

Something that masquerades as birth and love

beat between those thrumming fingers that,

here,

are neither yours nor mine.

In the scene I want you to imagine snow over broken glass.

When the snow sticks to the ground it turns drowsy eyes and

fresh rose red,

and it sticks to them like hand prints.

The one with the gun feels remorse dug deeply inside like stray bullets into the trees.

One of them in this story says

it’s dazzling to watch the universe through the destruction and have it all

come together once again.

The one that’s bleeding, likely, says so.

In my mind, it works this way as they lie on their back to see the clouds

stripped of color.

Those naked thoughts too short to be swan songs are going to haunt one day.

But,

right now,

they’re just dressed in the wind,

dripping stripes of red between teeth that load and unload

until one is choking on their tongue

and trying to hide themselves in the slush

-their body draped in fingerprints.

In this story,

I wanted to be the snow.

I was to cover the scenes I had no control over

and yes,

most of the scenes were you.

Everything you touched became filth,

so I continued to fall.

And the words I said to break the shell never seemed enough for you to look up.

It was supposed to end with you as the universe,

but here we are.

My hand prints all across the mess we’ve made.

Highlight the Details You Think are Important

I’d likely kill you myself if that was all it would take for every one of our exchanges to stop sounding so

pitiful.

Like we’re drinking ourselves under the table.

I take a shot of an eight grade dance where the lights spun fast and I thought 

faster,

moved slow,

waited until I was at home in my dress to cry between the parts of the CD that skipped.

The worst part is that I tell you these things with romance.

Grass growing high over the broken windows meant to me that there was at least one thing left alive,

and I always mention the part about staring directly at the sun while it set.

As if that’s meaningful.

I tell you about locking myself in at night and how it sounded like the smack of lips against a cheek.

I find myself blathering on mindlessly about broken lipstick shades in drunken slurs.

Red.

I tell you that the night was red lipstick and cocaine white eyes and that 

I am afraid for this.

But the CDs don’t skip much anymore when I threw them out the window.

Then you tell me something about yourself.

Some loose anecdote lined with subtext that says you hate your mother 

or that your father was never around.

But it comes off like a ballad,

Like the swan song that whistles against the wind when you stand on the bridge.

I want to be up there with you,

holding your hand or the trigger but holding on tightly

-I’m new at this.

I want for time to wrap itself around our shoulders up there and swear that it will never let us go.

Or I want for my biggest regrets to stop having time-stamps.

I tell you that too, as a slip of the tongue.

Sometimes you open your mouth

then shut it,

then go back to sipping nostalgia from the rim of my vulnerabilities.

It’s like one of those stories that you read over and over and once more again

that ends with the hero dying.

The hero dies in the end but you read it once more to see if there’s something you missed that could have warned you about how it would play out.

But the words are printed on the torn pages the exact same way 

and all you notice is that you skipped the line right before the last line

about the orange and yellow horizon that afternoon.

I no longer stick around for the mystery,

I just want whoever painted the sky.