When did you stop singing
in the shower?
When did you stop dancing in front of the mirror
in your underwear?
When did you stop being amazed
as colors melted into the evening sky? Or upon seeing
the stars peek out from behind the night?
When did you stop jumping in puddles and
catching snowflakes on your tongue
and eyelashes?
At what point did people stomp on your feet
so hard
that you no longer dreamt
of flying?
The only times you fucked me were when you fucked me over.
Fuck.
I’m falling again.
It’s funny how even after the millionth time,
my stomach still tries to escape
through my mouth.
I’m unattached and
the wind cradles me, rocking me
in her arms.
For once it is just my veins and my skin
and my stem:
just me.
When the ride is over and
her hands slide me onto the ground,
I am destined to become
dirt.
Prose rises
from your lips while
you sleep. I wish I understood
what you were saying, but
you mumble
in a language I will never know–
you whisper secrets
to me I will never hear.
I’m so sick of closing my eyes to feel alive.
Never date someone who makes you feel like shit– you can do that all on your own.
At dinner parties, my parents still laugh
and tell their friends about how
I used to bite my toenails as a child– as if
it is cute that my fingernails and cuticles constantly
resembled a war zone. As if
the fact that a four year old had enough anxiety
to resort to biting her toenails
once her fingernails ran out, was funny.
Five thousand eight hundred and forty three days later,
the skin around my thumbs has learned how to heal
when it is uprooted from it’s home.
Five thousand eight hundred and forty three days later
and I’m sitting in this chair, small flakes of my skin accumulating
on my thigh. I try and hide them,
brush them off onto the floor.
Five thousand eight hundred and forty three days later
and she asks, Why
do you pick your thumbs?
and I think: To feel something.
Because bloody thumbs
are a lot easier to brush off
than the scars on your inner arms.
Because you can pick your thumbs
without having to discretely pack
blades and gauze pads and tape and bandages
in your backpack.
Because you don’t have to hide
in a bathroom stall between classes
just to feel something.
Some days the anxiety
is so bad my fingerprint
reader on my phone cannot read
my thumbs.
Some days my fingers are so raw
I cannot hold
my pencil without cringing.
Some days my fingers look
like they’re wearing bugle hats.
Some days my nail beds are
a war zone.
I’m picking at myself to feel something
because being numb isn’t enough to prove I’m alive.
Our love was the way we hugged when
we said goodbye:
two anchors, with limbs tangled
we jumped into the sea
knowing, yet ignoring the fact that
we were drowning each other,
we were killing each other.
I loved you because your lungs were filled with water, too,
until I realized
I didn’t want to drown anymore.
I shed the skin you burned
with your fingertips,
and ever so slowly rose to the surface,
my lungs bursting with the anticipation
of air.
‘If you hate your scars, why do you do it?’ he asked.
‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘the only way to get rid of all the pain in my mind is to feel it on my wrists.’
The rhythm of
life is dictated by
ticking clocks.
ticktockticktockticktock
But my life was not breathed
to be conducted in the duple meter
of this mechanical march.
I was made from the
undulating ebb and flow of tides, the swaying
of outstretched tree branches,
the rise and fall of the universe’s chest,
the very same cells that bend
to dance with the wind.
My heart cannot beat
in synchronization with wound-up gears.
Silenticel 