Eighteen

eighteen

is the taste of asphalt and blood, school skirts tucked a little too high above the knees, and we keep running, keep our heads tilted towards skylight; film reel of blurry faces and dreamscapes that pass by too quickly, but i still remember what your hands feel like, soft, we are soft — but not broken yet; tell me, will playgrounds ever feel magical again? hour-long bus rides in the rain, golden-hour glow spilling across our faces, our tiredness; paper memories that will soon gather dust, you a roseate memory i shelter in between the creases; paths never crossing again, empty late-night trains heading home, ghosts feeding on nostalgia, someday we will return —

inspired by @dhritspoetry ♡

on having a boyfriend with OCD

He was always turning the lights on and off,

opening and closing the door,

counting as he went: thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty.

Eventually I had to tell him that if he kept opening the door,

we’d have a whole bunch of house intruders

before the night was through. He responded by trying to kiss me once,

then ended up kissing me twenty-three times, then once more

for an even twenty-four. Then he had to redo two of them

because “our mouths hadn’t been quite aligned.”

Some nights I’d wake up with the moon soaking the bedsheets,

listening to the sound of him repeating the word “fuck”

over and over: he’d stubbed his toe on the bathroom doorway

but couldn’t stop swearing once he’d started.

I fell back asleep after staring at my pillow

until the floral pattern burned into my eyelids,

dreamt the two of us went to an opera but instead of beautiful,

tremulous voices rising high into the air,

two sopranos were singing “fuck” to the tune of La Traviata.

He apologizes the next day, says the new medication

made him feel like shit all the time so he took himself off it;

I respond that it probably made him feel that way

because it was working.

Two days later the ambulance comes and takes him away;

he’d accidentally cut one of his wrists with the steak knife

chopping carrots for stew

but couldn’t have just one cut wrist;

he had to have two.

And I can’t help but to run my fingers down your spine like you are my favorite book. But I still cannot read you, you are your own language. Your pages are tired and torn, but I want you, I want it all.

Michelle K., “Like A Book” (via thelovejournals)

i don’t know what ephemeral / means, but i know i bought sandwiches / for lunch with my mother’s tips, i know / when the economy crashed, beauty was / the first thing my mother’s clients crossed / off their weekly budget

Melissa Lozada-Oliva - “Maybe She’s Born With It, Maybe She Got Up Early” (via buttonpoetry)

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somewhere, in a better gotham, the joker was born a woman, with eyes like candy apples, smooth skin. babysoft. 

in the gotham we know, the joker fell into a pit of toxic waste and turned green with envy. in this gotham, the better one, the joker is a tall, thin lady walking down the street. “smile, pretty” follows in her footsteps. when she stands at open mic laughter nights, she’s heckled from the crowd. they won’t smile for her but they resent her frown. 

her mother says that her best feature is her body. the joker spends hours staring in mirrors. picturing a trophy-wife kind of life. smile, pretty. smile pretty. smile. pretty. she’s sixteen the first time she tapes her lips up, just to see if she can teach her skin to learn the shape better. your teeth are your best feature. in the wild, smiling is a sign of fear.

she’s twenty and lives alone with her dog and tries to be okay with that. another night where she’s losing money on transportation, but she goes to the open mic anyway. the guy before her talks about airline food. she gets on the stage and immediately booed. and it’s years like this, in a pattern, in the weave of her passion, so that every night is thrown beer bottles and shouting and comments that make her sick to her stomach and being told she’s nothing special and being told women aren’t funny and being told her voice is shrill and ugly and being told when she’s too animated that she’s crazy and being told when she’s too stiff that she’s boring and being asked out by every single sleeze in the zip code and being shouted at when she says no and the neverending tumble of it because maybe tomorrow will be better, maybe tomorrow will be better, maybe tomorrow

he comes up on stage with her and soaks her shirt in beer. now that’s a show! the man calls. he gets cheers. she doesn’t cry, just walks out the back door before doing something stupid. the manager pats her on the head while she leaves. it’s okay, darling. he looks her over. i don’t get it. a body like yours? you should be an exotic dancer. comedy isn’t for everybody. you’re not funny, sweetie.

she’s not funny. not funny. not funny. the words turn alarm bells. the one thing she’s supposed to be talented at. the one thing she loves is just to make people laugh. and she’s not even funny.

hey you know what’s kind of funny? the way it feels at the bottom. how flat everything turns. how unreal. she skims like a rock. your body is your best feature. she tries again on monday. “you know what’s funny? i thought about murder the other day”. don’t we all, sweetie. on the bus, come home with me. on the street, why aren’t you smiling.

maybe some people are born close to the camel’s back, maybe some people have just always been looking for the straw. it’s too much in either direction. she goes home and smears makeup on her skin. tears her hair off. dyes it green, a shock, to match her eyes and spite and envy at men who can tell the same jokes and get laughter for it where she gets nothing and nothing and nothing, where she is pushed off of stages, where she is mocked.

well, isn’t it her turn to do the mocking.

in this story, in this better gotham where vigilante is sometimes good, sometimes a few letters from villain: who will stop her? in this life, when harley walks in, the two are different, best friends, sugar-on-pie because isn’t it true the world has it out for women. in this life, when harley shows up with hyenas, the joker thinks about the wild and the laws of it and says, “oh, of course, let them in”. in this life the violence has a name. 

and nobody says it without laughing.