gold rush

This is his mouth on my breast. Like a nursing child, he won’t let go. This is him smiling peacefully like a child, and before returning to his dedicated task at hand, this is him asking if I ever thought about piercing them.

That’s what Danny used to ask me every time I took my clothes off for him. He would pinch my nipples, chuckle, and say, “why haven’t you pierced them yet?”

When I took my clothes off for Danny it was always in a rush. Vulnerable is letting someone watch you undress, not the actual state of nakedness. Vulnerable is letting someone see the order in which you remove your clothes.

My breasts fall out to the sides, heavy and dropping. I hate the way the skin around my areola looks in the light. Every man who has known my body has loved and coveted my breasts like they were buried treasure. As though my lace bra unlatching could be equated to the opening of a chest full of coins. My nipples are hunks of fools gold.

This is his teeth grating against my sore and sensitive skin, I can feel my heart breaking.  And this is me four years earlier, in the same room, beneath the same open window. This is me sucking off his brother as the sun rose, he calls me by someone else’s name. I ignore the battle between come and coke drip that happens at the back of my throat. I masturbate when the moon disappears.

I will know what it’s like to fuck two brothers, what it’s like to watch them both struggle to last. They will never know of one another’s exploration of my body, and they will never know how they both made me scream.

This is my aching cunt and the breaking sky. They are the greatest of lovers. 

knees like california

We moved a lot when I was a kid and to this day my favorite home was in an olive green trailer. I was young, six years old. We parked the metal beast in a field in spring. The sunsets made the flowers look like flames.

We had a garden where we grew basil and zucchini. Every night we cooked quiche and drank lemonade. No one was ever sad because you could just step outside and be enveloped in orange and yellow sunflowers.

I remember the fireflies at dusk.

The air would buzz with heat, and the dust danced with me. My arms spread wide, I twirled. My skin felt like California. My knees shook with joy.

I have not felt this joy since, and this is only a dream.

I didn’t ever try to catch the fireflies. I knew how sad I would be if someone caught me in a jar and shook me ‘till my spark went out. 

un-mastered

I am not a master of anything; I only pretend to know what I’m doing. Mostly I learn by failing.

When I peel my eyelids away from each other the almost god-like beams of the winter sun remind me, yet again, that I am alive. It is as if they come from my dreams of constantly pressing the self-destruct button, and make sure I know it’s not time yet.

I spent the third month of my twenty-second year of life relearning how to walk. My unused bones shook, my tear ducts flooding, I picked myself up. This was the last time my father held me like fathers are supposed to hold their daughters. This was the last time I cried tears of joy.

I am a battle cry. My limbs and lips make the sky shake with fear. I am a war zone with my scars and fought-over territories. My legs belong to the sky, my shoulders-the grass. My hands are my own, forever, and ever, amen.

I remember the sun rising over the Columbia river, a photograph-worthy morning. I chewed my nails and watched as the early summer stars disappeared, being replaced by a shine I’d only ever imagined. It was like the darkness would never reappear, nighttime would become a fond memory, like childhood games, campfire songs, or youthful innocence.

Once I sang to the trees, high on hash on my back in the middle of a field of purple flowers. The clouds felt like owl feathers and I could feel the bugs antennae-sensing my skin. We were all hippie and tan. Melanie said she loved the trees. We sang for minutes until we had been singing for hours. The only words to our song were “we love you, trees. We love you.”

I am not a territory in the midst of battle. My skin encases not a battle cry, but a soft whisper of surrender. I belong only to myself, forever, and ever, amen.

I am ivy. I have been cut back time, and time again. Torn down from the bark of trees, snipped from my grasp on every last thing I have loved. We have thrived together. I am known as an invasive and poisonous species, but my many green arms have grown to lift everything around me. I am raising you all to the sun, yet somehow and always I am ripped away from you, suspected as a trespasser. I will return, however. Thank god no one has ripped me out from my roots, I don’t think I could survive that. 

Blackwolf Baby

this is a preview of the project i am currently slaving over. i don't know when it will be done or what it will look like when it is, but here's something. 

**

I lost a child. My uterus contracted in the middle of taking food orders from a group of middle-aged women. They all smiled sweetly while popping one-dollar bills into my Halloween themed Count Dracula tip jar. My body was attacking itself, the crotch of my pants slowly being saturated with dark blood. A stabbing pain and then a pull like a hook attached to the string of my unwanted pregnancy.

I grimaced, smiled softly, “Thanks, ladies. Have a wonderful day.” I wondered, then, if any of them had ever lost a child and if they could read it on my face. I could feel my skin losing its color. My body began to feel light. If they knew, would they have tipped me more?

I walked home after cleaning up my mess of blood and apathy. With the gift of a muscle relaxer hidden in my sleeve pocket I felt lost. I walked these streets every day and suddenly had no idea where I was.

Home, I took my pill. I filled the bath with Epsom salts and my own hot tears.

My uterus contracted again as I submerged my naked body into the steam.

“Intention is everything, baby girl. Everything will be okay. I love you.”

I lowered my body until the water covered my hears. Bonnie’s voice was there, as I knew it would be. “Just let go.” I smiled, and as my body released the last of its broken insides, I relaxed. The muscle relaxer had finally set in.

New Day

I dig my hands into the ground, fill my fists with earth. Mud, grass, rotten fruit, broken egg shells. Real earth stuffed itself under my fingernails while my ear pressed upon your chest. “I love you. I really truly love you.” The words escape despite my lasting efforts to diminish them. Wipe them from my vocabulary. Those words hold so much power, like the fertile soil I grasp, they can change lives, grow things, also kill. Too much fertilizer suffocates the seedlings. Words as strong as these can easily suffocate and kill. “I really truly love you. I mean it . and it scares the shit out of me.” You pull away from me, take my hands out of their earthly resting place, and kiss them. The dirt dusts your lips, earth speaking through you. “I can’t. I’m sorry. Its too much.” The fertile earth has suffocated me. Taken my ability to breathe and move. I am stuck in sludge and I don’t care to leave it. I would fill my nose and ears and eyes with it if it meant I’d never have to hear your apologies ever again. If it meant I never had to smell your sense of guilty regret. See your eyes and know how many times they were so dishonest. “I love you. I love you. Good bye.” I dig my hands back into the earth and I am enveloped completely, finally, one with the grass. I am a seedling. I will grow into truth shaped like a weeping willow. I will sprout love

Dusk

[For my brother]

We began to dance when the light fell, the sunlight fading, the sky filled with pressure. It was so hot that day when the bats came, that day when we burned down the gazebo, that day when we knew things wouldn’t ever be the same.

When the bats came, dusk had lain down over our heads, the sweet stick of wine and remorse formed fools clouds around our eyes. We giggled and flicked lit cigarettes into each other’s hair.

We were invincible and you laughed in the face of death.

Maybe we were the ones that were afraid and you knew you were sick, maybe I had forgotten any sense of reality. Maybe death had come to get you and the bats came as a warning.

They were on our side; they wanted us to stay together, to not be parted by illness.

We would fight, like hell if needed, against death and we would remember dusk as our reclamation hour. When we drank so much wine we forgot each other’s names and lit a fire and danced like wild people. We exorcized your demons; we beat mine out of my chest. 

We awoke at dawn in the grass, clutching bottles and each other, bruised and sweating. You were coughing so much your hands shook; I took you home and wrapped you up in a blanket, kissed your forehead, and smiled.

“We probably should have died last night.”

After that morning we strayed away from each other, we had climbed to the edge of death together, we had danced our last dance together, but we had lived. It was too much to stay friends after something like that.

Dusk reminds me of living. 

Blanket Breath

Sometimes I think of the morning time, in the blue hour, when I am awoken by the shine coming through the corners of the window curtains don’t cover.

In the blue hour everything is enchanted, life feels soft.

I turn away from the wall and look at the naked beauty lying next to me, sleeping. Sleeping soft like the sky, breathing calm like a gust of wind.

I smile sweetly at this moment of waking being so perfect. He is Pan, a God, this man in my bed.

The blue hour is the best hour for kissing a God awake, behind his ears so he rouses with a pleased groan, his eyelids because they are still closed.

I want to kiss his mouth but I wait until he pulls the sheet over our faces, blue light shining through the white sheet.

Turning everything: my skin, his face, and the curves of both our bodies, angelic.