god damn it, you've got to be kind: a playlist from 2013

1. Boy With A Coin - Iron & Wine
2. Like a Ritual - Title Fight
3. My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark - Fall Out Boy
4. Get Got - Death Grips
5. Army of Me - Bjork
6. If I Had A Heart - Fever Ray
7. Lovesong - The Cure
8. Thin Line - Macklemore & Ryan Lewis
9. I Love It - Icona Pop
10. Tunnel Vision - Molly's Worst Enemy
11. Wake Me Up - Avicii
12. Figure You Out - Citizen
13. Mr. Movies - Pierre *
14. Little Talks - Of Monsters and Men
15. Brace Brace - Bonobo
16. Girl With The Red Balloon - The Civil Wars
17. Butterfly - Bassnectar
18. Glory and Gore - Lorde
19. Female Robbery - The Neighbourhood
20. Venus in Furs - The Velvet Underground

Download // Spotify*


*Pierre's track is unavailable on Spotify but can be found here.

Maybe my veins are made of wire.

When you find me in bed at three
in the morning and three
in the afternoon, you will ask me
what's wrong and I will tell you,

Hold everything this is:
a newborn elephant, a thunderstorm
in my temples. Take a look--
there is place for a wind-up key in my back.
My doctor says there are misplaced ribs,
but I know better.
It's pressed in the shape of every time
they threatened to die while I loved them.

Twist it once--
the newborn elephant comes to life,
squalling, trumpeting, calling a military march of wrinkled forefathers
named Worry and Fretting and Scared
to pound their feet into my stomach.

Twist it twice--
it turns the dust of mistrust into hardpack,
desert floors unwilling to move.
A bucket of kindness will not make flowers grow here,
but do not assume
that the thirsty ground is not thankful.

Twist it again--
again--
again--
until the muscles in my shoulder make my left hand shake
like my fingers did every time I wanted to touch
a lover lost,
a thousand miles from my bedroom.
Do not hand me your trust. I have been wound
too tightly. I will drop you like a wine glass
in the hand of a passed-out drunk.

Instead, ask me for my heart.
I will hand you a silver key on a chain and tell you,
Hold everything that this is.

Dear Law & Order: I am not a Bad Guy

Trigger warning for discussion of mental illness, fictional murders and fictional rape and sexual assault.

So when I was in the hospital I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. This wasn't entirely a surprise, because I was once also told that I showed signs of this disorder but wasn't full-on Borderline. Nor is it my only mental illness diagnosis. However, it is my newest, so I really don't know much about Borderline Disorder at this point other than what the psych/med-student told me in the hospital, and what I read over on the National Institute of Mental Health website.

I also watch a lot of Law & Order.

If you're thinking, Wait, how are these two things related? then you and I are starting out on the same page.


I watch L&O as background noise when I'm trying to sleep or when it's late and I'm talking to my boyfriend (usually via Facebook chat--distance is a bitch) and I can't decide on music. Having watched all of the Special Victims Unit episodes on Netflix and then trudging through at least a season of Criminal Intent, I'm well aware that L&O, like most crime/police drama, is filled with problematic things. SVU especially, seeing as it deals with fictional rape and sexual abuse cases, and those cases tend to fall neatly in line with stereotypes and the occasional shock tactic plotline.

Criminal Intent is only slightly better. It's usually a murder case, and most of the time the culprit falls into "jilted (ex)lover" or "mentally ill serial killer" categories.

Last night I was watching a Criminal Intent episode entitled "Love Sick", which falls firmly into the latter category. If for some reason you're completely set on avoiding four-year-old L&O spoilers, I suppose you can stop reading now, since the rest of this deals with one specific episode.

In this episode, there was a series of murders--women who had gone to the ER and then later been brutally raped, murdered, and scrubbed clean, only to be "dressed as prostitutes" and left on the street. Lots of back-and-forth WhoDunnit stuff happened, but in the end, a woman and her boyfriend were arrested for the murders.

It became obvious as the episode progressed this TV woman that she was the instigator of these crimes. But what got to me was how her character was presented.

Not only did the writers, whoever they were, make her unhealthily dependent on her domineering boyfriend, extremely Other Woman Hating (you know, all other women are whores and trash who aren't good enough), but they heaped on an unhealthy side of Daddy Issues (also the typical TV kind, where there really is no reason for them but somehow all her present actions are tied back to him) and inaccurately portrayed the typical use of bondage gear (as well as perpetuating the idea that all submissive women are mentally ill, and/or that their submission stems from this illness, but damn, that's a rant for another time). At one point, the two detectives have this exchange:

"Some women dedicate their lives to making a man feel superior." 

"Yeah. [The female suspect] has markers of a borderline personality. Borderlines are dominated by an overwhelming fear of abandonment. They're needy, desperate to belong."

Now, it's worth noting that as I was watching this episode, I was literally rolled over, lights off, not looking at the screen, and half asleep.

This exchange not only woke me up, but kept me awake for nearly two hours afterwards--well past 3 AM.

As someone who's always struggled with being identified as "the weirdo" in one sense or another, I've battled against mental illness diagnoses for years. I had--and, in many senses, still do--the idea that if you can't point to me with a label-maker and print out an accurate term, there must not be anything wrong with me, and I can go on living life as usual. In the past year or two, I've narrowed that rebellion against diagnoses down to a few key reasons, the most evident being this: as soon as someone has a label for you, they tend to be less interested in hearing what's actually going on.

Of course, that statement does not apply to everyone. Several of my close friends either struggle with their own mental health and so understand that a label is not a story, or are entirely willing to listen, diagnostics be damned. But what kept me awake last night was the idea that, had I not done a tiny bit of reading of my own about Borderline Disorder, this fictional quip about a fictional serial killer might be my introduction to my understanding (or lack thereof) the diagnosis. In fact, thousands of people have seen that particular L&O episode, and of those thousands, odds are that for many of them, that is their only information about BPD. That, or some other television dramatization used to villify a fictional serial killer or other Insane Bad Guy. (Or in this case, Bad Chick, since most sufferers of BPD are women, and I would wager my next paycheck that all those depicted in fictional crime shows are women.) So if I meet someone, and become close enough to them to even want to maybe explain the chemical imbalances and disorders that sometimes make me difficult to live with, their first association might be of a fictional serial killer who was willing to literally clean up after their boyfriend after he raped and murdered multiple women.

That scares me.

There has been a lot of campaigning recently about not keeping your mental illness silent, in order to de-stigmatize it. While I whole-heartedly agree that this is an extremely important part of dismantling preconception about mental health, I would hasten to add that there is another half of the issue that is being ignored, and that is how serious mental illnesses or mental health issues are thrown around as cheap plot devices, most often in order to demonize villains. After all, how do you know the Bad Guy is the Bad Guy on shows like Law & Order--as opposed to Breaking Bad, for example, which is a wonderfully shining example of real-life moral ambiguity, and how who's Good and who's Bad depends incredibly upon your point of view?

I would argue that shows like L&O do one of two things: they make your empathize with either the victims or the Good Guys (often by throwing in an Underdog Backstory or something similar); or, they make the Bad Guy distinctly Other. And what's the most common way to make someone Other in the TV Crime Show Universe? Slap a mental illness diagnosis on them. The more serious-sounding, the better. No matter what they've done, their actions will now be attributed to their Incurable Mental Disease or Disorder. They're no longer a character that can be changed for the better, or reasoned with, or given hope of redemption. They're also no longer someone the audience is supposed to feel connected with. Joe Blow and his wife, Jane Doe, are supposed to react to the idea of Mental Illness with an emotional and mental drawing-away. Take a metaphorical big step backwards. Cheer when the Bad Guy ends up giving their confession to that episode's crime--be it rape, murder, kidnapping, or some other horrible event--with dull eyes and a sick smile, as if now that their illness has been found out, they can stop pretending to even interact with others in a normal fashion. They're carted off in handcuffs, the TV Cops high-five and leave to go get a drink, and the screen cuts to black. Joe Blow and Jane Doe are supposed to be left with the sense that all is now well in the TV Crime Show Universe--until next week, when the next Bad Guy comes through. Odds are he's got a diagnosis too.

I'm not saying that mental illness has no impact on people's negative actions, nor am I saying that it is not, in some cases, the cause of things like murders. What I am saying is that, if anything, my reaction to receiving a new diagnosis is not setting me on the path to self-help and mental wellness--not as a first reaction. No, because of the constant bombardment of negative portrayals to an increasingly desensitized audience, the idea of a new Mental Illness Label terrifies me. In fact, the description of people with BPD as "needy" and "desperate to belong," obviously used in a negative sense, actually heightened many of the fears that Borderline Personality Disorder hands me to begin with: constant, irrational fear of being abandoned; the sense that I am not as good or capable as my peers; paranoia that I am not myself, not real, or not operating the same was as Everyone Else. Rather than helping me understand myself, the new diagnosis is feeding back into itself, all because of something a TV character said to no one in particular in the middle of the night.

The path to mental health and mental wellness is unique to every individual and their situations and problems. There is no Magic Answer to help any/all mentally ill people at once. But there are things that we as a society and as creative individuals can do to make the road to recovery and wellness easier for ourselves and our loved ones who struggle.

I think that taking a serious look at how casually we use our own and others' illness as a cheap plot trick might be a good place to start.

Black collars and red doors.

You admit yourself into the psych ward two days before Thanksgiving. Your mother drives you, after an argument-turned-tearful-moment at one in the morning and seven hours of fitful sleep. They take your blood pressure no less than three times, ask questions you mostly don't know the answer to, and then there's lots of waiting between this nurse, that consultant, and the other doctor.

You fall asleep on the emergency room bed, fully dressed with your boots on. When they come in to take your blood pressure again, you have a fast moment of vertigo.

For a second, just a second, you thought you were asleep on the Ramapo Health Center floor, the Ramaplague 2.0 kicking your sorry, sleepless ass, your favorite camper whining your name in your ear. Stomach flu or no stomach flu, in that moment, you were happy. You knew who you needed, and who needed you.

- - -

One of the people you talk to that morning asks you what your stressors are. You stare at her blankly for a second. My whole if is a stressor, you think.

“She dropped out of college,” your mother replies helpfully after a few seconds of silence.

“So you're feeling... abandoned?” the woman asks. You must have mentioned your long-distance boyfriend, the camp friends no closer than 300 miles away, the friends in Chicago who graduated. The idea that everyone is gone, gone, gone, gone.

The quizzical look you give her is real. “Why would I feel abandoned?” you ask. “I'm the one who left.”

- - -

When you go up to Station 20, which is where you will spend the next 24 hours, they make you change into burnt orange scrubs that are the same color as your ex-boyfriend's old car. Most of the things you brought with you, you cannot keep. Your journal has a spiral wire binding. Your Fair to Midland sweatshirt has a drawstring. Your belt is a potential weapon. They don't make you take your rings off, which is nice, especially since you don't think you could take out all of the ones in your hair.

You're almost ready to leave, brushing a stray dreadlock or two back with your left hand, when the nurse notices the black double band around your left wrist.

“Is that a belt?” she asks you.

You unbuckle it and hold it out to her. “It's a—” You choke on the word collar, as if mentioning your sex life—your kinky, happy, comfortable and currently-on-hold sex life—in this place is somehow unholy. Or maybe you're just not ready to try and explain a black nylon dog collar to this nurse. You're hoping that holding it out to her, unbuckled, will let her see that it's already cinched as tightly as you can get it, and it can't be a danger to anyone—especially since you've worn it exactly like this on your left wrist for the better parts of the past year and a half. Wearing it around your neck without Lynx around would be uncomfortable, unnatural.

But you don't say any of that, and she takes it from your hand cool as you please. Well, you think with a slow and sinking sense of inevitability. I suppose it's better to take it off now. He'll be gone when I get back, anyway. I had a meltdown on him and his girlfriend, it's only a matter of time. You take your now-harmless clothes back and step out into the unit wearing your scrubs and the feeling that something crucial to you has sloughed away like dried glue from a five-year-old's fingers.

You couldn't have felt more naked if you stripped all over again.

- - -

You play too many games of chess with a boy with the same name as someone who once treated you like a commodity he'd earned. There are not enough black pieces. You play with some that are a gray a shade darker than his white pieces. This leads to confusion and makes your forehead furrow, but you still manage to stalemate him at least twice.

The games keep being interrupted by doctors, nurses, and consultants. They ask you the same things. The conversations gain a rhythm.

Why are you here?

I don't really know.

Do you feel like hurting yourself?

Not right now.

Do you feel like killing yourself?

Not anymore.

How can we help you?

I don't know.

Your father even comes to visit that evening. He asks you the same things. You give him the same answers. You try not to be angry when he hints that you haven't been looking hard enough for solutions, and he tries not to let you see him tearing up.

After he leaves, you sleep like the dead, waking up once during breakfast to shouts and yells that make you think, I do not have to take care of this. My job is not to control this behavior. Today, I am a camper.

The thought gives you comfort you haven't been able to find in months. There's nothing quite like understanding your role in a crisis, even if it's completely opposite than usual.

- - -

Your mother picks you up at noon. You turn your phone on when you walk in your front door, braced for the texts from your two best friends inquiring after your well-being. What you don't expect is the text from Lynx, from 6:17 pm, right around the time your father started playing with mismatched plastic chess pieces instead of looking you in the eye.

I miss you and I hope you're doing okay. ♥

You stare at it for a good ten minutes before you can even think about answering. You feel like you are an axis and your world just rotated around you like a secret door.

He did not leave you. Between the time you hung up on him in a hiccuping, hyperventilating panic, and the time he got on a plane that would take him away from the other woman he loves, he was thinking about you.

When you get up to your room, you buckle the collar back around your left wrist. The snap of its clasp feels like the click of machinery in fine working order. When you go out into the kitchen, you play Scrabble with your brother. A couple hours later, your best friend in the world comes over. You finish Lynx's Christmas present and she paints a red door in the fog.

“It's a sad picture,” she says by way of explanation. “But it can have a happy layer.”

“Do you like it?” you ask her.

“Yes.”

When she leaves, you sit for a while, thinking. You think perhaps you're the Short-Haired Tornado's red door. You think that all the things you've spent so long believing about why people stay with you might be wrong. For the first time since you found yourself in a hammock in the woods in upstate New York in the middle of July, you think you know something.

You think you know who you need, and who needs you.

And for the first time in a long time, you feel those things balance, like your weight in a hammock between two oak trees, or the pressure that pulls on the ring of your collar when it's clasped around your neck. Yes, it's nice to know your role, even when it's completely opposite than usual.

Sometimes you take care of others. Sometimes people take care of you.

The balance there is the part where you take care of yourself.

Of monsters and men.

TRIGGER WARNING: horror, gore, anxiety & anxiety attacks

You never get used to looking monsters in the eye.

You've been dodging them right, left, and center since you were twelve and you know how to do everything else--how to avoid the claws that change length and strike when your guard's down. How to go-go-go-go for hours with their rancid breath stinking like wet coffee grounds and mold on the back of your neck. You've memorized the escape routes, mapped refuges in your head like the way you spell a lover's name. This book, that movie, the album you know all the nuances to. You can hide in the patterns and basslines for a while.

You learned how to take the hit with someone else, minimize their pain, share it like the more you bleed, the less they do. Sometimes it even works. Emergency emotional sutures are your specialty, followed closely behind by the Magic Words to Talk Someone Off an Emotional Ledge. Both work best on no sleep, 4 AM crisis calls, Diet Coke and Excedrin to keep your mind sprinting away from the demons faster than they can catch you, or anyone else. And then the danger has passed, somewhere between the desperate, panicked sobbing that took root in your chest and your partner's words shifting from desolate to somewhat acceptable in the real world. They cut you loose and slip into sleep or their own Anti-Monster Routine, full of chemicals and secrets they won't share, not even with you. You let them go--wasn't that the idea this whole time, digging your bitten-off nails into the rotting flesh of someone else's insecurities?--and the stares of the creatures from the insides of both your heads come back to haunt you.


Your hands shake too hard. Your chest is too small, heart too big, lungs suddenly incapable of normal functions. Gasp. Try and focus your eyes. Fail twice before you find enough presence of mind to realize your glasses are off and discarded on your floor somewhere because they were in the way of your tears. How long has it been since you breathed? Twenty-five seconds? Forty? Your chest is frozen shut. You tell yourself to gasp, inhale, god dammit breathe or you won't get the chance again, breathe already, BREATHE you mother FUCKER.

And you do, eventually, just in time to notice the way your head is spinning and everything is either too dark or too bright, nothing in between. You taste your last cigarette on the backs of your teeth and bite half-moons into your palms instead of standing out in the cold and repeating it won't work, it won't work, it won't work into the puffs of smoke rising from your cracked and bleeding lips. You close your eyes and try not to spin too much, but that only makes it worse. Imprints of danger on your closed eyelids. Panic hanging in imperceptible droplets from your lashes.

You don't have your own Anti-Monster Routine. You've spent too long patching up the holes in everyone else's. Your adrenaline leaves you in a rush as you remember that you never found a replacement for that kind of fuel. The collapse to your bed is too long for dead weight falling three feet. The press of your body, slowly betraying you into trembling that is bone-deep below zero, is too much to pull to the right place on the bed. Find a corner of a blanket and try to pull it over your like a shield. Try not to think about how much safer a pair of arms would be. Gasp--when is the last time you breathed, again?

Keep on the artificial lights like witches' lanterns. Pretend you did something to make them powerful. Pretend someone else found your Magic Words, the ones that etched themselves in wrist-bones and ankles to keep you safe. Pretend the war you just waged was for you, that the demon-spawn won't be back the day you think to yourself, Maybe we've both recovered from the last round.

Most of all, pretend you know how to forget. How to let all of this fade into fairy-tale and once-upon-a. Pretend you never looked a monster in the eye, that the eye never grew to twice its size and reflected your face and your fear and your life and made it look more terrifying than any set of crooked teeth and armored, swinging tails. Pretend you don't dream of that reflection swallowing you in the middle of the night, opening up like a sinkhole and eating you alive, that you are safe and sound in your bed and you don't have to fight this battle again next week, next month, next time you haven't slept and have spent eight hours listening to your little brother trip on acid. Pretend that it's over. Pretend it's all okay, now and forever, world without end, Amen.

Remind me--when is the last time you remembered to breathe?

When you draw your gun, think first. Shoot anyway.

When you become the people you hurt to keep from hurting anyone else, you've failed.
But that's not new to you, is it, sweetheart?
You're sitting alone and you're hungry, and you listen to the way your stomach clenches around itself
like it's trying to salvage something that isn't there.
          It isn't there. The things in your life that you love
are few and far between and while you're in the land of much
    and close together,
nothing matters anymore.

Let your head hurt. Let your stomach growl.
Once upon a time you were going to be something.
You ran away to the woods and thought, This 
is a good place to become. You unraveled instead.
They'll find you in the scum under the bridge. You freeze in the winter.
When their feet slip over you,
don't pretend you're holding back your laughter.

Crack under pressure.
When your stomach growls,
     pretend it's a roar.
Pretend it's a battle cry. Pretend
you have something worth fighting for
and something inside you left to fight.

When your enemy kills you, laugh
to the beat of the pulse in your temples.
Look into your own eyes like a lover's,
like they belong to the people who ripped you apart.
And they do, honey. They do.
You are your own worst enemy.

Surrender without fuss.
When your own back is turned,
take the poison.

The only honor you've got
is in the way you're giving
up.

Heartline Cartography

For four days and three nights, I found you in the pockets of the real world, and we stole hours that burn brighter than any days outside of the ones we found in a forest in upstate New York, naked and laughing on a wooden floor because we couldn't quite do it any other way. The map etched into my collarbone says home, and it occured to me over and over again while you smiled at me that you are the only person in my life who has a grasp on what that means. You stood in the tiny, black ink star with me and we lived, together, through stories no one else quite believes.

You are my battlefield lover, and somehow that has always made your kisses taste sweeter. I curled up against your chest while I spun on wine and tiredness and you let me sleep with a smile on my face. The bed was too small, but it was yours, and in the morning I thought to myself that there was none more comfortable in that moment. When I met your other girlfriend, a student of the sword with eyes the size of the moon, the way you lit up made me want to cry. It wasn't until later that I realized you look at me exactly that way, as if I hold something bright and alive, as precious as sunlight or late August nights. It wasn't until now that I realized maybe I do.

You tied me up and set me free the night before I left. We slow-danced naked to songs that make me cry. When I bit the back of m hand to keep from shouting for you, I wondered if my skin could absorb your name like sunlight on oak leaves, to help me grow. I wonder if it already has.

When I told you there was a utopia inside my head, you asked me to share it. When I said it was you and me and lovers neither of us had met yet in a cheap apartment, its barely-not-empty walls echoing with laughter, you didn't ask me to stop. You told me you smiled, and asked me, "In this picture, are you wearing your old collar, or a new one?" and the tears I'd been holding since the back of a Greyhound leaving Milwaukee spilled onto my face like too much rain in a crystal glass.

I've tried to catch the light in you so many times. I've tried to keep it on the backs of my eyelids so it burns up the long nights when I'm not sure why I am. I've pointed my camera at your smile and click-click-clicked until I gave up with a frown and the thought that whatever you have in your heart is too big for a glass lens. I put pencil to paper and tried to draw the sun in your eyes and the lunar shine of the student of the sword, and all I got was graphite on my cheekbones. You glisten outside my lines, refusing to be tied down by anything quite as simple as art pouring from my shaking hands.

Listen--you are the fable in the back of my head, intricate and steadfast, reminding me of all the reasons I am. You catch my stutter in your lips and when you smile, it flees, like mist at dawn. My imperfections look like freckles that turn to constellations you are teaching me to read. When I see you looking at me, I wonder if perhaps I am the lines of a book and no one else bothered to read me long enough to say if the story is good.

This story is good. It's slow and it's strange, and sometimes I wonder if we're in the middle of a chapter or the end of one. But here it is, spinning out on pages made of question marks and maps no one has labeled yet. There are oceans we want to swim in and turns we want to take, only to double back and go the other way. What else is there to do? There are uncharted territories to draw lines in and sights we don't even know we wanted to see. Here we are, sometimes together, sometimes alone, making a map to answer all the questions no one ever wants to ask. When we see go no further, here be dragons, we look at each other and laugh.

After all, who doesn't want to see a dragon?

In the face of anxiety.

Written in Gaming House, Lawrence University. October 25, 2013.

I've never seen glasses with rose-colored lenses.

For Ashleigh

Throw out the metaphors.
Send them through your shredder and toss them in the trash.
Repeat them like the word "apple" or "door-frame" or "love"
until you forget what they mean.
Your heart
is not an animal or the pound of the tide or a half
of a whole, it's
a muscle
beating hard and sending blood through your body and when it feels
like it's breaking--well,
I promise you it's not
because you are still around to feel it.

His hands
were never fire and smoke, never
sledgehammers on stained glass. They
were hands.
Human hands
that sometimes touched you so kindly, you cried.
Hands that had bitten nails and callouses and sometimes
shook when the world was too, too much.
Hands that held too tightly
and sometimes
hit
too hard.

Your lips are not poison and your words
are not holy water.
You do not build and break with sound alone.
You have in your throat
the incredible power
to say what you mean
and nothing more.
Your voice echoes in an empty room
just the same as it always has.

Love is not a red string that cannot fray, not
puzzle pieces
made to fit together.
Life is not a merry-go-round, a dance, a
masquerade.
It is chaos and heartache.
It is hard work and boredom so strong
you lose sight of what it means to feel anything else.
But it is not fiction, not
words spun into something beautiful and hollow.
Your world is not a snow globe,
and it cannot break.

Your lover is not a miracle.
She is you,
and she is not. She is fragile
and strong,
and the muscle of her heart pushes blood through her veins
and sometimes feels like it's breaking.
But it is not.
It's only hurting and beating
and keeping her alive
to be with you--
or not to.
Her heart is not a compass,
and you are not true north.

Take your metaphors and burn them.
Erase them until all you can see is real,
and harsh,
and much too bright.
See the world the way it is,
and love it
even so.

A letter to myself.

Throw away the stuffed puppy that your first boyfriend gave you and
get rid of the letters from the boy you dated for ten days
before he went back to his girlfriend.

On your bookshelf you have conversations from thirteen-year-old you's 4AMs.
Gather them up and burn them.
The forgiveness they hold is ancient and just because you no longer have proof
doesn't mean it wasn't real.
Besides,
you never should have needed contrition for caring too much.

Delete the playlist you made for the boy you fucked last winter.
You never gave it to him
and listening to something that makes you cry doesn't make you stronger.
It just makes you sad.

Crop the man who took your virginity from the portrait you drew.
Keep yourself
and the way your hair turns to the ocean.

Put your ex's cologne in a drawer somewhere until you forget what it smells like.
Don't open it until the next time you have a date--
put it on to remind yourself how gentle hands can be
and that his were not the only ones.

Repeat after me:
You are not
defined by the trinkets you keep.
You are not defined
by the things they deemed worthy to give you,
nor the things you created because of them.
You
are defined by the way you loved them,
and not by the way you hoarded it.
as if it would turn to smoke and slip through your fingers.
You are defined by the way you smiled at them and
the nights you spent with them but you are not
a souvenir.
You are not
a museum for them, you
are not
defined by the way you loved them.

You are defined
by the way you let them
go.

I am the Tinman and you are Dorthy with an Oil Can

We have a list of things to do when we're within touching distance. It goes something like this:

1. Cuddle
2. Watch stupid movies
3. Tackle and be tackled
4. Enjoy beds
5. Fuck each other senseless

Late at night, it tends to be the bed I look forward to the most. Half-nights spent in humidity and bug-bites don't exactly end up rating high on the list for best afterglows. I have only slept one full night curled up next to you in the year we've known each other, but I remember it well: swimming out of sleep and muddled, half-remembered dreams only to realize that I was safe, not because the children I was dreaming of had all gone home or because the next morning I was flyign home, but because I was there and so were you. I could feel your skin, and you had never let anything hurt me.

It's a ten hour bus ride and a fair chunk of money to take a Greyhound to you, but it's not even a second thought to either of us at this point. (A car would make things easier, but a car means money, and money is something I don't have, at least for a while.) I'll gladly do it for a night or two with you and some daylight in between. I'll probably even end up doing it more than once before it gets any easier. To me, it's worth it. So far, it seems like you think so, too.

Still, there is an animal clawing at the walls inside my chest. It's one I've known for a long time, and one that has been fed more often than I wish. It lives on lies and mistrust, and perceptions that are both real and heavily denied. It exhales anxiety and doubt into my lungs when I'm not looking. Its claws are what-ifs and not-good-enoughs. It laughs at my hopes in the dark.

I want you to kill it. I want you to open up my chest like a birdcage. I want you to see its crooked teeth and glinting eyes, its hunger for fear and disappointment, and I want you to laugh at it. I want you to laugh until tears stream down your face, laugh so loudly it tries to cover its ears, and for so long that it can no longer stay and bolts, hissing, from its home behind my lungs. I want you to swing my ribs shut like a garden gate and padlock it with promises you'll actually keep. To watch the light shine through the cracks it made in my skin and tell me it reminds you of summer sun.

I hope you're the person the others were not, and that when my back is turned, you're not feeding the monster my scraps. And I hope your name never turns into a snarl the creature whispers to me in the dark when it tells me it's the only trustworthy lover I will ever have.

The part I'm trying to remember is that I think you are. I think you're all these things. I think you're August moonlight and morning fog, all-surrounding and impossible to lose. I think of you like old rock walls and oak trees, imperfect and strong, steadfast and beautiful. Sometimes you are a waterfall, washing my mind clean--others, you are a carpenter, mending things that you were not the one that broke. Always, you are safety--the untouched page, the unopened door, the unbroken string. Your hands are what I've been chasing. Your mind is the scent on the air I needed to breathe before I knew that I had made it.

And wherever this goes, I hope you know that. More than anything, I hope you know.

A goodbye, three months late.

There is a glass bottle full of thunderstorms
sitting on my dresser. It kept me
smiling through the bite marks and hid
the smoke from the cigarettes
from the people I was trying to protect.
But now I will leave the half an inch of rain
sitting at the bottom.
I'm not sure I want to smell like storms anymore.

I wear a braided ring around my finger.
Once, you tried to hide it in my hair,
but my hair is mane of a lion, quick to consume the beautiful.
It stays on my finger instead, but
I think I might try to find another band
of silver,
with less memories attached.

A riding crop of black
and red sits, conspicuous, on a suitcase.
It traveled with me when you could not.
It touched my skin more recently than your hands, and I
must admit,
I resent it for that.

I gave your empty journal to my brother
and started a new one instead.
It has no black feathers in the pages.
The cover does not bear the pawprints of your dog.
There is no smudge of mint ice cream on the pages,
no memory of bacon brunches caught
somewhere inside the binding.

I'm not sure I can say the same
for myself.

Turkey Song

Wrote this while I didn't have internet and didn't have a chance to post it.

TRIGGER WARNING for animal death and some related psychological horror. 

A week after spring finally came to northern Wisconsin, her lover—if she could call him that still, sitting at was probably an unchanging month-long dry spell, with only scattered appeasements offered to get her off his back—went turkey hunting.

Her phone, in a show of horrendous but not entirely unexpected bad luck, jumped down into the porcelain gullet of a toilet an hour before he left. She cursed it thoroughly, only thankful later that she had been entering the stall as opposed to standing up to leave it. She disassembled the old silver flip-phone and left it on a windowsill to dry. No one she asked had bags of rice—the semester was winding down, and food was being eaten so as not to leave any leftovers. When she tried plugging it in, the cord sparked in the socket and the screen bled to a blank and glowing white that reminded her, somehow, of insomnia at four in the morning. She emailed her lover, along with her mother and best friends, with exasperated sarcasm. My phone went swimming, she said. I'll have a new one in a week or so. Until then, I have scattered internet and you guys just have to await my return.

Not long after that, her lover vanished off the map.

He returned some nine hours later, exhausted and impatient, but not in bad spirits. She just happened to catch him on her way down the stairs for a cigarette, meant to calm her nerves before she tried calling him and, if necessary, finding a way back to the cabin in the woods to take care of the chocolate-colored, curly-haired spaniel they had left at home.

“We should go, the pup's been alone for fourteen hours,” he said as she gathered her things.

“I know,” she replied. “I was about to go get him.”

He nodded at her, as if he hadn't expected anything less, and she wondered what that meant.

*

There were two turkeys in the back of his burnt-orange Caliber. They weren't his, but belonged to his hunting partner and her father. “I'm going again in the morning. At three. They only wanted to hunt if someone would take the meat and I told them I would. They want the feathers, and the tails and beards. I'll pluck them and get the meat tonight—I'm a functioning insomniac. It's only ten thirty. No need to sleep. I gutted them in the yard earlier anyway. It shouldn't take too long.”

“I'll help,” she offered.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, it'll go faster that way anyway.”

She got almost entirely through the first bird before she backed off, revulsion clamoring under her tongue and somewhere at the base of her neck.

She had watched him pluck, unzip, and cut the meat away from the turkey with no problem. The gamey smell seemed frighteningly appetizing, and she felt her stomach growl more than once, even while she watched the blood ooze from the places where the bird had been shot. She marveled with him over the feathers, hoping that he would get a bird of his own the next day and give her all the feathers his partner and her father had asked to keep from these two. She even helped him pluck the feathers, though her touch was decidedly too prudish, and his own grip was much firmer, his work more efficient. It wasn't until he was vacuum-sealing the meat and she was trying to pluck the remainder of the neck feathers that her will gave out.

At first, it was the smell. She tried for the wing feathers, the big, long ones that looked like old-time quill pens begging to be shaped, but when she drew the wing back, the smell that rose from the hollowed-out bird was no longer appetizing—it was stomach-turning in its subtle rot. She folded the wing back over the bird, feeling, suddenly, the smooth motion of it in her hands, the way it must have flexed and spread and flapped when it was alive. She made a disgusted sound and moved to the small feathers on the neck instead. She got a good strip of them gone, too—five or six inches long and maybe half an inch wide. She kept getting distracted, however, by the head.

Its eyes were half-open, and she could see the wet, black beads it had seen through until sometime that morning. The skin, wrinkled, was mottled with reds and blues. She had a sudden, vivid memory of watching wild turkeys just like this one strutting behind her uncle's house on Easter, Mothers' Day, Fourth of July—every and any holiday where turkeys would be out, she guessed. She heard her mother's voice in her head, and for a moment, she was standing in her uncle's bay window, looking down at them. Look at those colors, her mother's phantom voice said. Aren't they beautiful?

She snapped herself back the the present and sighed a long breath through pursed lips. There are more of them, she told herself. And you eat turkey all the time. I bet all of them are beautiful. So what? She moved back to the neck feathers and began to pull.

The skin tore unpleasantly beneath her hands, and the feathers refused to come free. She made an urking sound and tried again, feeling moisture on the feathers. Water from his hands, she told herself. Not blood. There's barely any blood. Still, she readjusted her grip and decided to finish the strip she'd begin earlier—all the way up to the head this time. There were no more feathers behind her fingers to press down on, and when she pressed to the pale, dead, pocked flesh of the bird, it felt uncomfortably warm. She tried pulling the feathers with her eyes closed, but her fingers kept slipping. She sighed again and opened her eyes.

The head of the bird was pressed oddly to the small refrigerator at the end of the table, its neck bent. She could see the soft folds of its skin again, the black shine of its eye, and for a moment, she was sure it was alive. It must be uncomfortable, she thought nonsensically. I know I'm always uncomfortable when—

And then her mind crossed wires, and she made another nauseated sound, pushing back from the table. “I can't,” she told her lover. “I can't, I'm sorry.”

“You made it farther than I thought you would,” he told her kindly. “It's okay. Go out to the bath house, wash your hands. It's fine.”

She left quickly, shuddering in the dark. When she reached the running water, she turned the tap for the hot water and didn't touch the cold. She washed her hands three times, until they were red and stinging, and then practically raced back to the cabin. Her mind yammered the entire way there.

Uncomfortable, it must have been uncomfortable, I wonder if there's a kink in its neck, I know there always is one when my head is pressed against something like that, when someone is on me, fucking me, when they don't notice and my neck feels like snapping and they're fucking me, fucking me, I wonder if I'll feel its claws on me the next time he's fucking me—

It was all she could do to keep from crying as she locked the cabin door behind her and lit a cigarette. Her lover was finishing the bird, and she tried to pull herself back up onto the edge of logic. Besides, she had an uncanny knack for knowing when she would never sleep with a man again. It was a sense of deep resignation, a morose acceptance that settled into her chest and made a pit in her stomach. I already know he won't have sex with me again, she told herself. I even turned my claddagh ring around. He isn't going to touch me, and I'm going home in a matter of days. I heard our swan song weeks ago.

But her mind wouldn't rest. Turkey song, it sang madly, between images of its wrinkled blue and red head and the way the skin tore under her fingers. Turkey song, turkey song—

She pictured its ribcage, broken open; and felt, the way a mind has ways to feel, her lover's hands on her skin, over her breasts, along her back—

Turkey song, turkey song, you heard the turkey song—

She tried not to think of the flesh between her legs like the wet, pink meat being torn from the bird bones, slapped wetly into an enamel pan, slightly bloody—

*

She was still awake when he left for his hunt again at three that morning. She smoked another cigarette and didn't sleep until the sun came up.

She heard the whisper of feathers in her dreams.

On money and motivations.

     We sat in the cabin at nine o’clock on a Friday night, coming to terms with what it meant to be broke.

I had been broke for weeks, out of the last fifty-dollar installment I occasionally got from my father as his only means of assisting me with school and life in general. My boyfriend was dry until payday, and the half-check was slated to go to rent first. And then cigarettes. Always cigarettes. He was already smoking mine, but since his pack-a-day habit was much more of an addition than my own, I didn’t mind. His artist neighbor existed solely on what he got from his father, and his bank account was also empty.

“Would your ex have money for weed?” the ravens’ wings asked the starving artist.

“Maybe. But I don’t want to talk to her. You’d have to go alone. Plus, no promises on whether she’d actually buy.”

“That’s the problem  with campus being closed,” TRW griped. “Even if I had more to sell, there’s no one around to buy it.”

A few moments passed in silence. I had nothing to say—I knew the ravens’ wings’ lack of funds was partially because I was all but squatting at his place for another three weeks, and I had nothing to contribute to the scrounging of theoretical money except a meager jar of change hiding in one of my boxes sitting on top of each other in the back of his truck.

“I might have laundry quarters I never used,” the starving artist offered. “There’s probably like… five bucks in there somewhere.”

“Yeah, but then we’d have to make a decision between nicotine and brownies.”

“True. Or we could go hold up a convenience store.”

“For a single pack of cigarettes?” I asked.

“Sure,” the ravens’ wings joked, his voice thick with frustrated sarcasm. “We could see how much jail time they’d give us.”

“This is why being a creative person sucks,” the starving artist lamented, slouching back in his chair.

“And why’s that?” I asked.

“Because we fuel ourselves with shit.”

“Like your drug cocktails, and nicotine and junk food?”

“Well, that too. But like, hey, TRW, when life is good, is it easier for you to write?”

“Not at all.”

“See? We just fill ourselves with crap. There’s no other way for us to create.”

“And we’re still broke,” I observed.

There were mutters of commiseration. Shortly after that, the ravens’ wings began to search his cluttered corners for change or some sort of money he had misplaced. I figured it was probably more to distract himself from mood shifts and nicotine cravings than anything else, and the fact that he emerged with fifty-two cents and an old MP3 player he insisted on showing the starving artist proved me mostly right.

I found myself wondering what it would be like not to worry about money. Not to have those days between paychecks where even the rice that sits in the pantry for three months, mostly forgotten, gets eaten in a last-ditch effort not to exist on nothing but tea and peanut butter for a week. And I wondered if what the starving artist said was true, that we could only create when being filled with shit and chemicals and broke-to-the-bone weeks and depression and the short end of the stick.

And I wondered, if that was true, which life I would choose, if I could

When you realize Odysseus never really loved you.

(Or, Calypso's Closure)

Swallow the sea
when your eyes go dark
and your ribs fill with sand
made from all the broken glass from every shattered dream.
When your heart is heavy as whale bones left to rot,
find the abandoned ports,
the empty shores without a lighthouse.
Shed your clothes, shed
your memories.
Shed the world you made inside your head.

Listen to the gulls screaming,
Maybe he was right and
all of this was
a myth inside your head.
Maybe he was right, maybe
he was right.
Then tell them
they are wrong.

You hold the ghost of a little boy in your stomach.
Vomit him up
with the salt water.
Scrape his would-be father from the inside of your skull.
They will lie black as blood in the moonlit sand.
Leave them.
Let the tide come in and take them away,
the way your first lover once took away your fear.

Swallow the sea.
Realize that the inside of your mouth
has tasted like vodka and regret
for far too long,
that three-AM secrets were never what you deserved,
hidden in blackouts and Bermuda triangles,
in the landlocked cities he hid within his head.

The salt will burn your wounds,
make them easier to find,
to stitch up with driftwood needles and seaweed thread
and watch them tattoo you with the coast as they heal.
Leave your demons on the beach.
Take only
the image of your footprints
as the ocean
washes them away.

Swallow
                the sea.

Time limits are the world's way of saying, "Please, pay attention."

You wake me up at five-thirty to chicken and garlic pasta. I've been asleep most of the day, and in any other place at any other time, I'd be filled with dark cobwebs, wrestling with the emptiness of a mostly-wasted day and the desire to succumb to the ease of slipping back into sleep. Instead, as your dog hops up on the bed to give me a belated good morning sniff, I slide out from the covers. You pour me wine, and as we sit with full stomachs and cigarettes afterward, I have a thought that is becoming increasingly frequent and exponentially more pressing. This is too good to be true.

It's not, not really—the food in my stomach and the warmth of the fireplace tell me that—but when you leave, I hear the ticking of the clock. You keep it in your mother's old secretary desk, the one you held for your brother in a storage unit after she died, and when you're out in the snow for wood with your canine companion, it seems incredibly loud. I try not to look at my watch or the clock on your wall, try to forget that the days are slipping towards spring and towards the day I will pack up all my belongings, load them into the back of your truck, and take the last drive down the highways, away from my northern haven and back to the place I lived the last time I felt like this.

There is always a deathclock for lovers, I tell myself. You just happen to always be able to hear it.

Still, as I try not to memorize the patterns on your ceiling and the way the wind sounds outside, the ticking of that clock seems very, very loud.

- - -

The night I tell you about the scientist, and the way he took advantage of me, you get angry. Not at me, I know, but either at the idea in general or the scientist himself. I keep you awake until six, half-yelling in the dark and trying not to shake. You search for my hand and hold it, and I think that you might be the first person I've been with since him to actually understand how often he enters my mind.

A few days later, the kokopelli boy sends me an article on the Steubenville rape case that you already read to me. There is no comment, no note, nothing, and it is the first thing he's said to me in two months. I stare at it, dumbfounded, wondering what he's trying to say, and if he thinks current events are really the way to get me to answer him after a year and a half being in love with him and almost three months of stone-cold silence.

Does he want a gold star for being a decent person? I wonder. For understanding rape culture? For knowing how much I hate it? Well it'll take more then social commentary from someone else to get me to decide to talk to him after he told me he wasn't sure our friendship was even worth the effort.

For the next few days, though, I find myself marveling at the circle I've gone in. Here I am again, finally happy and counting the days until I leave it all. Soon, my days with you will be even with the days I had with him. Don't think about it, I tell myself. This isn't the same. There is so much difference here.

And there is, but as I sit in my dorm room with too much time on my hands and no warm touches to break the monotony, I swear I can hear the clock ticking away on the shelf of your desk, miles away.

- - -

“I thought I was done with sex before I met you,” you tell me.

I try not to laugh and probably fail. “I'm sorry?”

“No, don't be. It's a good thing.”

And it is, again and again. You told me once that I have an easy on switch, and I laugh about it, but I wonder if you can tell how easily that on-switch is turned off, and how much it takes for me to trust you the way I do, to always leave my defenses down. I have never been afraid of you, never had to pull myself back to Earth just in case. When you press your thumbs into my hips, I don't feel strange about letting you know how perfect that is, or adjusting your grip the way I would if I was digging bruises into my own skin. When you steal my breath, pressing your hand over my throat, I'm not thinking of proving myself to you, or of what the woman you usually sleep with would think of me.

At one point, we fuck twice, and fall asleep naked. This is the first time I've slept naked next to anyone since the scientist—the first time I've felt safe enough to. Right before I drift off, I hear the clock ticking steadily away, counting the seconds until I'll have to start thinking about how hard it will be to leave you behind and start all over. Maybe you don't have to, I find myself thinking. Maybe there's a way to—

But I cut that thought off before it finishes. The last time I decided to fight fate, I spent a year and a half sleepless and ripping my heart in half every few days. This is different, part of me insists, and I think it's that very heart, scarred and still bleeding sometimes over a confused and battered guitarist halfway across the country. This is new.

But the clock is still ticking, and when we wake up later, I still can't bring myself to admit what it means that I am so intent on denying its sound.

When we sleep for real that night, and your breathing turns deep and heavy next to me, I find myself spelling all the things I can't say with the hand not tangled with yours, over and over in letters you can't see or understand.

I wonder if I will ever say them aloud, or if I've finally learned that no amount of emotion, no matter how strong, fixes expiration dates.

The deathclock is still ticking, and I am still leaving. Still, despite all of that, I am happy—then and now, here or next to you, and I am hoping that will be enough in the night to remind me that the second-hand means nothing compared to yours.

On unwanted healing.

Once there was a part of me that fell in love with concepts, with potentials, with the insides of minds I only barely got to see. I made mix tapes in the dark and wrote letters I never sent. Once, I knitted my dreams into a scarf. It’s half-finished, gathering dust, and I don't know where. If I ever finish it, I might wear it myself, just to prove a point. But that part has gone away, to parts unknown, and it didn’t leave a note.

I lost the part of me that wrote poetry in my sleep, the one that devoted every spare moment to dreaming. It wore away somewhere in between the dashboard of his car and the cold air of his garage. If I looked, I think I would find pieces of it tangled in their Christmas lights, in the way I looked in their mirror. Traces would be found on wooden floors in the middle of the woods. It’s tangled in his hair somewhere, caught in the chain of her necklace, on the fabric of his grandmother’s quilt. It drifts up in the smoke of his pipe in the small apartment bathroom, in the clouds of mint smoke from a long-shattered hookah.

I am trying to find it. I’m digging for it in the footprints I leave outside of his cabin. I search for it in the whorls of his ceiling, and find only faces that look like the ones that flow in ink and color from my brother’s hands. This is you. I thought maybe I’d find it in the Boykin spaniel’s golden eyes, in the griffins on the backs of his calves. There are times I think I’ve come close: his head pressed on my chest to hear my heartbeat as he touches me, our voices vibrating through the springs of his mattress in the dark, the way his pulse is the strongest I have ever heard, and I don’t even have to be touching him to feel it.

But I’m starting to think the piece will always be missing now. There are times I reach inside myself to find it and feel something that’s like new skin over old wounds. I feel like I lost a key to a lock I hadn’t yet found, and when I reach it, I will be barred, stuck forever on the wrong side of a gate I never knew I needed to open. I wonder if I gave myself away too early, if I was supposed to ration the love songs and heatbreak so I had some left to give when I finally learned how.

I look for songs to break myself open later, ones that will remind me of fire-heated rooms and long nights full of cigarettes and too much Diet Coke. I look for the lyrics that will remind me of the smell of bourbon and thunderstorm cologne and the cold air of mid-winter. I can’t find it. Not a single song clicks home.

I cast my net out for the memory that will belong to him, months from now. The one I will remember when I think of him, the way I remember music on a ratty couch and a hand on my shoulder as a fire blazes. Every time, I come up empty, and I am afraid. I’m afraid to forget, but more than that, I’m afraid I’ve numbed myself to the urge to remember, to cling to details like lifelines, proof like carvings in my heart to remind myself, This was real.

I wonder what it means to know that I would rather have that broken place, full of all its shattered memories, than to lose it and all the things it held

As the ice thins, so does your certainty.

The prodigal son returns to you as you sit in a cabin in the woods. Two months ago, you gave away his medallion to the brother who stayed. When you cry on the line to your best friend, you find yourself wondering if you will ever actually pick up the phone to call him. You have lost him so many times—surely there comes a point where lost things should remain that way, forever floating in if-onlys and the mistakes you wish neither of you had made.

- - -

The man you're seeing—the ravens' wings—is more like the tide than anyone you've ever met, and you wonder what it means that you have always been so attracted to the ocean. Sometimes you think you've never met anyone better. Others, you're certain you are destined to fall for the people who don't fit you in just the right way.

You find yourself crying at the foot of his bed at 4 AM, and, like so many other times, your mind is pulled back to the boy with the kokopelli tattooed on the worst of the scars on his left wrist. He once held you as you cried at the end of his bed and told you not to be afraid. Until a few weeks ago, you thought you would somehow end up spending the rest of your life with him. Now, you are only nineteen and confused. You have no destiny, and the red thread you have been following through the dark has reached its frayed and broken end. The kokopelli boy is not there to meet you. He never was.

The ravens' wings asks what' wrong, and you words catch in your throat.

I miss believing in a god, you try to say. I miss when I thought I wasn't going to end up alone like my mother, filled with delusions like my father. I miss thinking there were forces in the world that cared. But even you have to admit that isn't all of it, not really. As you lay on your stomach on his bed, head in your hands, you try to tell him that you miss the feeling of wanting to be alive. You have never felt this happy and this empty at the same time. It's a hint, as if you ever needed it, that you are destined for this for as long as you're alive—discontent and unrest, and happiness that never quite reaches the places it's trying to heal.

An hour and a couple cigarettes later, you turn off the light and go back to bed, because it's easier than trying to explain this to your barely-lover, and you're not sure you can stand the desperate attempts to make you laugh much longer. Besides, sleep is better than sitting there and wanting to be dead.

- - -

Your chosen brother weighs heavily on your mind for days. You still have yet to pick up the phone. Part of you wants to, the way it always has. It's the part of you that felt that you would always be okay, if only you could find him and talk to him. It's the part of you that was born in a room full of holes, of paper wristband, of Enya played too fast on an out-of-tune piano.

The rest of you is not so sure. You're afraid of hearing the drugs in his voice again. Or, maybe worse, you're afraid he will be entirely sober, and entirely unfamiliar. You're not sure you could handle that, not while you're spending most of your time sleeping to keep the thoughts of pills and sharp things at bay.

If you're being honest with yourself, he has always been the one person in your life with total power to break you, and you have spent six years letting him, in one way or another. Your walls are stronger now than they were the last time this happened, and you know you will never be in love with him again, but you think that if anyone could tear you down to nothingness, it would be him.

You stare at his number in your phone for a long time, but you don't press the button. You flip it closed and swap inane videos with the ravens' wings instead.

Sometimes it's easier to just let things continue as they are. You think, If there's a brick wall at the end of this straightaway, at least I'll have an excuse to be a little broken.

Yes, sometimes it's easier to let things continue as they are, even if that's full of a muted pain in your chest and tears that come without warning. Even if that means lying through your teeth to every other person you have to speak to. Even if it means you've started not being able to leave your bedroom without makeup for the first time in years. After all, continuation, however mediocre, is better than the alternative.

And that's what you tell yourself every time you realize, all over again, that you want to die.

So far, it's working.

A mantra for the haunted men's lovers.

One day you will sleep with a man
who is better than you.
He will touch you like the surface of a lake,
like he knows he will cause ripples
and he cannot bring his fingertips to do it.
Do not correct his assumption
that you are not only still on the surface
but all the way down.
Remember that the reflections you offer are still beautiful,
even through the layers of algae you've grown.
Remember that a little distortion can be a good thing.
Remember the way the sunlight sparkles
on flowing rivers. Remember
that still reflections are of something already seen,
but when wind moves the water,
it offers something new.

Breathe in.

When he buys you cigarettes the next morning, remind yourself:
this does not make me a whore.
Remember that mornings after don't have to be full of pretense.
Once upon a time, a boy made you eggs in his father's kitchen
while his cat twined around your ankles.
Remember how that felt.
Remind yourself that sometimes people mean exactly what they say,
and that when he mentioned a second date,
he was not saying it
to placate you.

Breathe out.

When he tells you he is dreaming of wet, black earth,
of worms between his teeth, of
holes too deep to climb out of,
do not tell him you already know.
Instead, tell him you will wait until the storm leaves,
until the skin of his wrists smells like ozone again.
Remember the way his lips fell on your chest,
quiet late night summer raindrops.

Breathe in.

When you think about things the next day, remind yourself:
there will be more to think about.
Do not assume you will be left. Give him
the benefit of the doubt.
Remind yourself:
He is better than them.
Remind yourself:
He is better than you.
When he emerges, and you kiss him,
and his lips taste like dark dirt,
do not turn away.
Remember that you smell like lake water in June.
Remember that the dirt is where things grow.
Remind yourself:
he is stronger than you.
He is stronger
than this.

Breathe
           out.

Choking on pomegranate seeds and kokopelli shadows.

At two in the morning, you send me a text asking if you could call me. I say of course you can, and when the phone rings I am already in my closet, pulling on clothes one-handed so I can go smoke a cigarette and maybe catch a glimpse of the stars.

You're on the verge of tears as my lighter flares in the dark. "It hurts," you say.

"What does, baby?"

"Me. Life. I'm trapped."

"You're never trapped," I say, trying not to sound as desperate and uncertain as I feel. "You can always change something."

"There's nothing to change," you say, strained.

"What's eating you most right now, babe?"

"Everything. Just everything."

"I'm not arguing, lover. I just don't know what 'everything' means for you. You need to talk to me so I can understand." You are the first person I have ever called "lover" out loud, and every time I say it, it feels more like a lie. I can never be sure if that's the truth ringing in my mouth or my own fears making me taste the warm metal of untruth.

"Work. People at work. The red-haired girl. Me and you. Me and Persephone," you list off, your voice scant inches from shattering. "It hurts. Everything hurts. Mostly my chest, and my head. They just hurt."

I have to remind myself that crying will do you no good. I bite my lip between cigarette drags and manage, tearlessly, "I'm sorry, baby. I'm so sorry. Is it better for you right now if you talk, or listen?"

"You should talk," you say. "About anything. It hurts for me to do it."

I bite my I-knows between my teeth, remembering how much R used to hate them, as if I knew things he didn't, or at least was pretending to. That was never true, but it doesn't matter now. Instead, I ramble about life, the most trivial things I can find at the top of my head. I cut much of my life out--anything glowing in the pomegranate-red of your Persephone. I talk about class, and how I wish I had a telescope. I talk about my little brother trying to date girls who are no good. I talk about how damn cold it is, and how I've been dreaming about New York again. In the middle of all this, I finish my cigarette, and in the echoing confines of my stairwell, I say, "I hope I'm helping at least a little bit."

You mumble on the other end of the phone, and before I have a chance to ask what you said, you continue, "I'm just tired. I think I want to sleep."

"I can let you go?"

I can almost feel you shaking your head, minutely, two hundred miles away, and when you say, "You should keep talking. I like the sound of your voice," it feels like I expected it. And why wouldn't I? I'd watched your Persephone fall asleep on the phone with you at least a dozen times, and heard tales of at least a dozen more conversations that ended in your unconscious breathing and her quiet laughter. This thought hurts me, in a way it has no right to, but I don't tell you that. Not yet.

I talk about nothing for the next ten minutes: there's a mix CD on my desk meant for you. I've been skipping class, and will stop doing so. Soon. I hope. I come home next weekend, and I hope that I will see you. I probably won't. I forget you're nocturnal sometimes. I hope I don't cry during work this week. The list of unimportant sentences, filled with long pauses and lots of ums and ers goes on, until I realize you are definitely asleep. I pause for a moment, wondering if you are awake enough to notice the absence of sound, but you say nothing. I say your name, twice, quietly. Still nothing. Part of me wants to hang up, but I can't quite bear to let go of the sound of your breathing on the other end. I have not felt this reluctant to sever a connection since R, and that was a long time ago. So instead, while you sleep, I tell you all the things I cannot say while you're awake.

"I'm glad you're sleeping," I start, softly. "You don't do that enough. And it's odd--I don't usually get to tell these things to people straight out while they're asleep. But you can't hear me anyway. I'm probably talking to your shoulder.

"I miss you, and I'm sorry that I'm part of what's making you hurt. It isn't supposed to be like that. And I hope it stops hurting soon, and the things that can be fixed will be fixed. I hope time heals the rest, quicker than it usually does.

"I always say these things too fast, and I regret them... but I regret them more if I don't." My voice catches for a moment, and even though I know you are dead to the world, and won't remember a single thing I say in the morning, it takes a second to get my throat to unstick enough to keep going. "I love you. I really do. And I know that doesn't help, and it's not making anything less complicated, but I love you very much. I'm sorry that you're hurting. I hope that you'll let me help. And I know you can't hear me, which probably makes me a coward, but I want you to know how much I care about you, and how I would give anything to take that hole out of your chest. I'd even put it inside my own if there wasn't one already there."

I am thinking of R, of all the scars--intentional and not--he left inside my head. Of all the times I thought I would grow old with him. Of the dark-haired, green-eyed baby boy who only existed in my nightmares, crying for me. I am thinking of Persephone, and of pomegranate seeds shriveling on a cold tile floor, with an aquamarine ring that is gathering dust in a box somewhere. I am thinking of all the reasons I am not good for you, and all the time I will spend missing you anyway. I'm thinking of your lips and your hands and the way you kissed me for the very first time on Christmas morning. My voice is the one on the verge of breaking now.

"I love you," I say again, to ears too deep in sleep to hear. "And maybe, eventually, I'll be able to say that to you when I'm awake, even though it doesn't mean anything. Until then, sleep well. And have sweet dreams, lover. The very sweetest of dreams."

I hang up, and it isn't until an hour later, when I have tried to fit all the pieces together, to line them up like books on a shelf, like words on a page, that I actually begin to cry.

The shrapnel of his hands.

For Madison

His hands are on your thighs, tracing
the curve of your hips and
you are pulling away,
making a face,
spinning in circles.
     (“They are
     children, they are
     young, they do not
     understand.” And they believe it,
     ignore it. It's
     fine.)
He takes your favorite shirt,
tells you it looks better on him, you
let him,
thankful at least that he didn't take it
off your back
this time.
     (Boy will be boys,
     he was drunk, you know, it's
     no big deal. Why don't you
     give him a break?)
You tell him you don't want to see him anymore,
close the door in his face when he shows up at noon
and again
when he pulls his second-hand moped
around the back of your house at midnight.
     (“I told you you looked fuckable, take it
     as a compliment, you should be
     flattered. I don't want to date you I
     just think you're fucking hot.”)
Your friends become his friends again and you
are the one who broke his heart.
They ever talk about how
he broke his promises,
tore your fishnets when you pulled away, broke
the heel of your combat boot
when he made you step away from him
off the side of the curb.
     (You get the shirt back, want
     to burn it—
     it smells like your father. You
     should have never trusted anyone
     who wore that cologne.)
You become the harpy in his memories, and he
attributes half his scars to you while he ignores
the way his claws
scrape across his own face. He
will never see it.

You run and you
never
look back.

Oneself, in particular.

Written in response to an anonymous Tumblr message. Before you ask: I refuse to apologize and I refuse to take it down. Don't even ask.

Trigger warning: mentions of self-harm, suicide, slut shaming, drug abuse

Let's talk about me
for a second.

Let's talk about the fact
that I take five pills
every day
at four o'clock
just to try and be normal for five minutes,
to push back the constant visions
of scissor blades and open arms and
the way people would love me at my funeral.

Let's talk
about the fact that I have spent six and a half years
talking all my best friends out of spilling their veins
out onto paper and bathroom floors.
Let's talk about the two hours of sleep
for three fucking weeks--
again and again and again--
because my best friends are lost in the dark
and almost slitting their wrists on Halloween night;
they are dying alone in Austin,
and drinking themselves to death in Boston,
and overdosing on cough suppressants
somewhere in suburbs I no longer know.
My little brother had a nervous breakdown
and I wasn't even home and every day
I worry that I have seen him
for the last time.

Let's talk about the times that I am happy
for a second and a half
before someone decides I'm not doing it right.
I fell in love at thirteen and ever since
I have had a gallery of angry people
screaming,
"They are not yours and you
are wrong,
and you are not in love.
You have no right,
leave them
alone."
Let's talk about all the times I did,
walking away from the souls who had carved their names in my chest
because someone else told me I had no claim on the words
someone else wrote into my bones;
and let's talk of all the times I didn't--
all the moments I tuck under my tongue like acid
to haunt my in flashbacks
for the rest of my life.
I can trace the scars of every man and woman I've ever taken to bed,
and they
have never even bothered to look for mine
hidden under anchors and stretch marks and closed mouths.

Let's talk about every man who has ever
denied sleeping with me,
as if my love-lust for them was an STD
they never planned on getting.
Let's talk
about the way they call my body a black hole,
a monster made of black ink and tentacles,
a beached whale.
Let's talk about the venom in the voices of my friends,
as if somehow my sex is a poison that they can catch by hearing the stories,
like I am a disease,
contagious,
and somehow the way I love is suffocating everyone who knows.

Let's talk about how I stay up until sunrise
in tears
over how I have ruined every life I've ever touched,
set it aflame and burned it to ash,
scattered it to the four winds
and how no matter how often I apologize,
I will never be enough.
Let's talk about all the times
I have kept my mouth shut
and let my wallowing turn to blood
in the middle of the night.

Let's talk about me for a second,
and how I am my life--I
am the only person who will never leave me, and
I have no life without me.
In half a century, it will not matter if you loved me
or hated me
or wanted me to change.
There will only be me,
alone in a room,
a scale weighing my heart and my soul and asking itself
if I am worth it.
Asking itself
if I am happy,
if I have loved,
if I regret the mistakes that made me who I am,
silver-haired and wrinkled,
scarred and covered in ink
still able
to trace ex-lovers' scars from memory.

The answer is yes.
The answer is that my life is all about me,
and the way I love.
It's about the people I have kissed and
all the people I choose not to.
It's about the lives I've saved and the people who have saved mine.

My life is all about me,
because I am a soul and a body,
a heartbeat and a spine,
a ribcage filled with lungs that have too often stopped breathing.
I have cut out pieces of my happiness for far too long.
I refuse to hang my words on a string
for other people to wear proudly on their necks.

My life is gritty and full of dirt,
full of sand on the backs on my knees and blood on my scraped shin,
of tears I cried when he kicked me out at three AM,
when my mother called me a slut at fourteen,
when I kissed them goodbye
on my front step,
in the hallway,
on the corner of Central Park.

My life is pain and happiness,
sadness and joy,
laughter and body-wracking sobs.
It is never ever easy and worth it,
most of the time.

My story is mine,
and I will never, ever let anyone take it from me
again.