Bitter Kisses

bitter kisses

i eat lemons alone, no company because afterwards everything tastes sweeter. every breath is now sugar, an aftertaste of acid burning tissue.

does everything on your skin feel soft after it’s been burned?

another lemon, mint, and the air tastes cold. metal between my hands is warming; i am freezing to death.

suck on the pulp and kiss everyone good bye. i leave a bitter taste in everyone’s mouth. i leave a bitter sweetness on their tongue.

#prayforcharlottesville

i’m so sorry i couldn’t write sooner, but the world keeps crashing down and i don’t know how to write poetry about hatred without reason. i don’t have the metaphors. i can’t write this beautiful. listen, i gotta call you back.

after the silence for prayer: I FOUND ANOTHER BODY TO KEEP SCORE WITH, I FOUND ANOTHER REASON TO BE ANGRY WITH THE WORLD. AT THIS POINT WE SHOULD JUST ACCEPT OUR OWN FAILURE CUT THE LOSSES AND RUN BUT I CAN’T IMAGINE SOMEWHERE WHERE THIS DOESN’T HAPPEN AND I AM SCREAMING AND I AM SCREAMING AND I AM LEFT FEELING SICK AND TIRED AND I’M TRYING WITH ALL OF ME TO HOLD ON, KEEP THAT HOPE, BUT WHAT AM I HOLDING ONTO? THERE IS NOTHING HERE TO LOVE. WHAT KIND OF HATRED HAVE WE ALLOWED TO BREED INSIDE THESE WRETCHED BONES? WHAT KIND OF MAN DOES NOT CONDEMN THE EXECUTION OF ACCEPTANCE?

HOW MANY WORDS DOES IT TAKE TO EXPLAIN THE WAY I CANNOT BREATHE FOR FEAR OF DROWNING IN BLOOD AGAIN?

and everything we do is after the fact. everything we say has no meaning to the dead. #prayforcharlottesville, for everyone these atrocities have taken because we couldn’t find a way to stop them in the first place.

an all-nighter with planet mercury

four planets in retrograde
and we sit under the full moon to lament
our crazy revolutions. 
mercury, the rare bastard, hides in the shadow of the light,
nothing like the rest of them. a day that lasts hours and a smallness inside your bones, never knowing how to sleep because the night never seems as long. they don’t know what it means to be made of availability, the closest and the remainders of what is left. we both have hands full with drops of this monthly blood, a body’s rejected life shimmering down the side, fingers curved tenderly but still silver slips its way through the cracks.
leaking out to leave empty palms and the moon shines silver too, the stars, who are we to raise our hands and say that we belong in this night with a longing buried deep to leave? too tired to think about what it means. mid-night mercury turned to say unguarded in a hollow voice: i just feel so small, in comparison. so close, and quiet, and less. i feel like i am nothing. (not nothing. never nothing.) underneath such long nights guiding us to oblivion we cannot be nothing on the horizon. i know, mercury sighs, face half-hidden in the blinding light. and still i am so much more and so much less than what i want to be. i can’t find a way to stop myself from spilling out of my hands.

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.

DEAR MEN:

this is not a poem to say i hate men. but-

i am cat called by cars on three separate occasions on the same stretch of road while i am running just in one week and there are only so many times you can say fuck you before someone takes you up on it.

i am not flattered. i am always afraid.

because the men on motorcycles at a rest stop say hey dear in that voice, and suddenly i don’t want to stop.

because they make fun of women for going to the bathroom together when they know what happens when we go alone.

because a man buys a drink for me and it’s fruity and i don’t want it and i’d rather have a whiskey.

because i eat and i am called fat and i don’t eat and he goes babe, do you have an eating disorder or some shit? i don’t want to deal with that.

because i want to pay for my own dinner so you don’t have to deal with that.

because a man buys me a whiskey and i don’t want it and i’d rather have a sangria.

because i would like to buy my own damn drink.

because i go to work out at the gym and i can feel them looking at me, i can feel it itching over me.

because one of them slaps me on the ass and says look at that to his friends when it jiggles.

because it was like a gunshot and i am still flinching.

because it was a touch and i am still flinching.

because it was a long time ago and i am still flinching.

because every day there are these men and they don’t understand that i am a person and not a body and a human and not a body and i am a woman and not a body and this body is not your own.

dear men: you are one letter away from mean.

dear men: i don’t hate you*

*all.

dear men: sometimes i love you. too much. sometimes i need to let you go.

dear dad: i love you too. this is not a poem about you, for once. it’s about them.

dear men: THIS IS NOT YOURS. dear boys: learn from this. dear men: LISTEN TO THIS. dear women: do not take this.

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.