Coffee Spoons And Teaspoons

coffee spoons and teaspoons

i leave a spoon in the fridge while my mother’s throwing up. eliot measured our lives in coffee spoons, teaspoons, the things we love small enough to be scooped up and held inside our mouths. a sweater unraveling to leave me cold but still thinking i am warm. still capable of holding a spoon to my mother’s mouth, feed her panic with a soft voice to keep it from rearing its head. i wrap my lips around the edges of comfort and taste the metal of our loves. a white bowl does not mask the acrid scent of something bloody falling out from her body, something too large to kept in the same hollow space as her tongue and teeth and words. lovely how we fill our life-spoons with cough-syrup, sweet or bitter kisses, things that linger in a taste and still we can manage to have our mouths open, to fit the loving in. that we can hold everything inside us: a strawberry as big as my hand that leaves a spreading stain on the skin, the vomit dripping over the tiles, eight dry heaves in as many minutes, a shivering form only now realising it is cold, my own sweater i draped over her, the unraveling hem and sleeves, the nested spoons across a counter top with one missing in the fridge, the unspooling thread of time getting tangled up in things. was this once or as many as you can remember. each day i try to form the words in my mouth and find them a little less strange than before.

the whole truth

i should start here.

[a FAQ list of things people have said] (no, it didn’t always hurt)

when i was born, the doctor said i was a girl. yes, i am a girl. sometimes.

i learned to love with broken bones. heal the cracks in your heart with pavement, beat a rhythm in the pattern of your soles. bloody knuckles & split lips taste like home, like a kiss, like someone else’s body on mine in a way that isn’t suffocating.

i was fingered before i was kissed, & no i didn’t want it. that wasn’t affection. it wasn’t even a semblance of love.

my first tattoo was at fourteen, illegal & the night after homecoming a little drunk on being wild, we thought we were so cool god, who hasn’t been there, when you’re young & stupid. everybody did it once. in the hours after midnight that little fragile peace gray asked if i wanted something to remember i said yes so we carved a star on my hip & a semi-colon on sky. we were always dreaming. even then we were like this. even then.

bleach tastes awful but i won’t ever really tell you that unless you ask. because no, not everyone needs to know when you’re breaking.

those scars are mine.

do i lie pathologically? probably. it’s a habit of protection i gained from being told i was a bitch, i was too smart, i was too athletic, i wasn’t funny, i wasn’t pretty- i was five foot nothing & not even 120 pounds but i was fat, i wasn’t pretty, i was too much & not enough & cut up all at once.

i’m trusting you with this now because i’m telling the truth. the whole truth.

it did hurt.

i am broken but not irrevocably. i am shaped by the experiences that made me but not defined by those same conditions. i am the knife & the body & the air rushing through this, i’m lying through my teeth to tell you that i’m fine.

there’s a hole in my head and that’s the whole of it. it never never stops for sobriety & suicide but after all this time:

i think i’ll be alright in the end, truthfully.

the eat-your-feelings cafe

i eat past hungry to make up for the lonely. i eat for the empty chairs around me. this hungry swallows me whole. mouth turned inside out becomes a hole, becomes a table. table sits in front of empty chairs besides me. i am hungry. i am starving for anything more than nothing, something to feed this loneliness. empty mouth has hollow teeth. bite sharp in your own wicked. crave me to create me: inhale me whole.

foreign(or) god

god comes down to say hi sometimes, stepping out with the people of all race and ages. god has an accent no one can discern. god is an immigrant stumbling over the foreign languages of grief, emotion, not recognising the subtleties between happiness and happy-in-this. and even god suffers from cognitive dissonance, can’t say anything the same way we do. trying to find the right words and only coming up with something we won’t understand or will tend to misinterpret. half the time god doesn’t even know what he means, those misharmonised thoughts making less and less of a self when put together. god is a collection of parts we have assumed fit him without asking. god wears the twice worn pants of someone else and has to hem them by hand. god is tired of this. god was tired when he heard this. god speaks softly so as not to wake the demons we tell children about when they come here: loneliness and depression and never really belonging. there is something so sorrow-filled in the way he begins to recognise we cannot do not want to be saved. god walks away and we justify his actions to ourselves as if he had done the atrocity. god has a limit to forgiveness and it starts with desecrating kindness. god has all the accents of the people we have turned away.

uranus has a bad reputation

that they don’t deserve. uranus knows all the whores & fuqbois & faggots. they don’t always deserve it either. there’s a club for people like them: the membership list is written on the insides of bathroom stalls, sent in group texts, gossiped about behind a hand over a mouth familiar with the lips of someone who was in it. uranus doesn’t know why people make jokes & laugh at their expense. everybody’s talking but nobody’s telling them. (doesn’t mean they don’t hear it.) uranus knows all the secrets about drinking till you forget & having sex like it doesn’t matter & the drugs to make you feel better than high. that’s the bad part. all anyone ever says is about how to save someone from themselves. no one ever talks about what happens when they don’t need to be saved. how you can be okay & not be what’s expected. how the “whores” & “fuqbois” & “faggots” grow up to be alright. how they grow past what people think & knowing what you can do is better than not having tried at all. but it is never once easy. nobody ever notices the scars on those whores’ wrists because they’re too busy with the body. nobody looks past the face to see the mind inside. and god forbid they see the love and not the sex that everything is objectified to mean. but if they want it: own it. give them the anarchy, give them the sex, take the reputation that precedes you and walk into the room, two fingers up to yesterday saying fuck the whole universe. tear it down to make your own.

the genocide of xenophilia

there is potentially a spider in the bathtub so i’m whispering for you to kill it before it can find out. at this point in our history we are getting ready to kill the bees, a flowering of destruction on accident. at this point in our history we are getting ready to kill everything.

i am sorry that i am afraid of what is not like me, the wide eyes of a long-legged small body in the corner of the shower.

i am sorry i would still be afraid if it was you.

but no one knows why chimpanzees cannibalise each other. why we can murder ourselves. and still no one can explain to me why we have decided to kill the bees.

so in twenty years, this holocaust will be halfway complete and the earth halfway wrecked. what will be left?

(please come kill this spider.)

i am sorry to take part but this is how it goes. i am afraid and so i kill.

the world dying in small doses, a little violence in our breathing, every blink and motion an angry shudder. condone violence and yet wallow in the glory of a crushed body, the crooked neck of a mouse in a trap like a sick revelry.

our bodies do not enjoy completing deaths or so we say, reject it but reject that foreign alienness more and our hands move slow-motion to slam down on the bathtub and kill a body no larger than a fingernail, legs twitching in a gruesome little death.

it could have moved out of the way but instead chose to accept it. it is as complicit in this as we are- we cause the action and everything else allows it to happen.

but how could they have ever stopped it.

a history of sitting still in the face of something that you knew was coming.

a refusal to let yourself be washed away. no matter how deep the ocean is.

even if the real ocean is deeper than a bathtub flowing over, a spider refusing to choke and give in to a death by cleansing and the drowning, broken motions of something killed for no reason besides the irrational-

the silence of one body slipping away from view.

washing away the guilt of what we have done. how much guilt the world must hold.