A curse is kept close to your heart, and I can feel it running black through your veins. You try to hide it, but it begins to ooze out of your pores and leak from the corners of your mouth. You’re trying your best, I can tell. As we grow, the valleys carved into our hearts begin to harden with every blunder and every condemnation born of fear. I am bound to my habits as much as I am bound to the hardened clay canyon that leads to your mind palace. It is a narrow, tight fit. I walk across it barefoot. Every conviction arrives at the same place rainwater arrives in a riverbed. We are embarrassed by repetition; we call it fate.

I hold a small animal to the flesh, an outline of a hand, close to my chest and against my bare skin. I allow it to feel my heartbeat and listen to my breaths grow smaller as my consciousness begins to loosen its grip. I’m granted courage without the expression of fear, but this impulsive empowerment is mere taxidermy, the performance of something once alive. The body is easily convinced. By morning I am awakened, not by your absence—I can’t afford your presence—but by the terrible realization that desire survives fulfillment. Your presence better articulates my desires, but it cannot quench them. The animal lies motionless. I listen for its heartbeat and hear only my own.

A light fog veils the sky. The trees and rooftops are outlined with a thin border of saturation. Each breath is its own form of touch, whether it’s a bite, a kiss, or a brush against my lungs. I rub my index finger and thumb against one another to try and ground my feet back into my soles. I begin to run back and forth, looking for a sign, an omen I might have left behind for myself. I’m starting to believe we are our own gods. Not enthroned above our lives, but hidden within them, kept vital in the cavities of our gestures, desires, routines, intentions, and secrets.I’m asking a gray cast sky for a sign to give in to my impulses completely. To sink to the bottom of the ocean. I am asking to remember something I left behind for myself long ago.A trail of breadcrumbs laid by a self who understood what I could not yet bear to know. The future and the past touching are fingertips inside of me.I’m far removed from the trail that leads to the heart palace, catching my breath between hits of a cigarette and the damp weight of the morning. A second familiarity kicks in beneath the language we hide behind.I’ve gotten fat off nostalgia. I’ve feasted on old summers, expired affection, and leftovers in the back of the fridge.I am gluttonous on empty memories.They don’t nourish me, but they are mine. Don’t worry, I’m getting my summer body back.I’m letting my memory fail me.

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My knees are still sensitive from my big fall(s). Humiliation has way too long of a half life. I have made a life of tripping over myself and falling headfirst down the stairs, and in return my body has adapted in its own pathetic genius.

Over time, my arms have stretched further and further until they no longer obey the ordinary geometry of a body. They spool from my shoulders like wet ribbons of tendon, unfurling with a soft obscene patience. They hang beside my torso with a sickly elegance that could be mistaken as “heroin chic”. My autonomy has become familiar only to a feral dog, half starved and panting.

I awaken slick with sweat to the sensation of my skin pulling tight at the elbows, tightening and loosening, tightening and loosening, as if something inside me is breathing through the joints. Then the seams begin to split invisibly, my elastic skin stretched taut against every bone. Each phalange swells with its own horrible pulse. Another little vertebra blooms beneath the skin, lengthening me by grief’s arithmetic. One hand sits at the foot of my mattress. The other brushes the floor.

I can see the white root system beneath my skin now, branching nerves glowing faintly through translucent flesh. I trace them upward, wrist to elbow, elbow to shoulder, shoulder to throat, all the way back to the person you first became so infatuated with.

It’s me. It’s me. I’m right here. I know I look strange now, but please, take me as I am. Please recognize me beneath the new anatomy. Please do not look away from what distance has helped make visible. And after all my pathetic attempts at reconnection, after I have dragged this impossible body across the floor, all you can offer is a towel thrown over a corpse.

Now my arms creep ahead of me like an obedient animal, sniffing through the dark for warmth. They grope blindly through the air for anyone who might mistake my morality as selflessness. I have become a soft bellied and ravenous thing that keeps evolving. How do I spare myself the indignity of another metamorphosis?

My truth betrays me. I have learned this lesson countless times before, and still I let each confession cover me in hives. I have never known how to hide what I feel. I walk through the world half undressed by my own sincerity, my truth painted over me layer by layer. I press it against the roof of my mouth and try to swallow it, but it blooms inside me like a watermelon seed inside the belly of a child. My posture curves around a twisted vine, my tongue pulled downward by a strange weight.

My truth places a dagger in my hand. What I call an act of self preservation feels more adjacent to being dragged by my hair into a bright fluorescent room. My last act of intimacy is often this stuttering disclosure, this trembling offer. My pale hands cup themselves into an oblong boat. In my veined palms, I offer you a rusted blade.

You stand above me with a blunt pocket knife over my sternum. I see the hesitation in your quivering lip, but the more I reveal of myself, the more your uncertainty eases. In one seamless motion, in one silent cry, you kneel for relief. Every blunder and every prayer has nestled into the nape of my neck and dissolved the connective tissue in my vertebrae. I am coiled in your lap like a roly poly, soft armored and bleeding out. You brush my hair.

There is nowhere to hide in the mind palace once the doors have been flung open, once the velvet curtains are pulled back and every ugly room is lit. My last act of humiliation is going dog brain on you. Wet eyed and helplessly loyal to the hand that once fed me. My exposed underbelly isn’t so attractive when it’s paired with instinctive sobbing. I am honest past the point of dignity. I come to you panting, obedient to the terrible little pulse of being known. I have fallen off the thin line between intimacy and humiliation. I lie somewhere beneath it, staring up at a gray cast night. Maybe tonight you will sneak through my window.

I lay my head in the crook of my elbow, though even that posture has begun to feel unnatural now. My arms fold and refold beneath me in excess, joint after joint gathering on the table like a pile of loose rope. My arms become a room by sheer sprawl. I build my own corners in this world. I tuck myself away and stare at you with my left eye, half hidden through the strange architecture of my body, half blurred through your wet lashes. You extend your hands to a shaking dog.

This is it. There’s nothing left to confess. Your skin is plastered by your conscience, wet as gauze. Mine clings to yours by salience. I must have struck something soft in you some hidden muscle of fear, enough times for you to rip our pair bond clean. We stand beneath a shared distortion of light that makes your eyes begin to swell. This must be all we get.

you’re legally not allowed to hate me:)

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In the mornings I hold my head with the same delicate pressure one might hold a cracked bowl, palms at the temples, an act of maintenance mistaken for devotion. My body faces forward, but my neck instinctively wrenches toward what is behind my shoulder. It is a guilt that pools inside of me. Still water gathers in the corners of my mind palace and slowly rots the walls until all of my memories turn sour. I lock the door and open the window.

I have been close to God before. Close enough for me to mistake that one more reach, one more stretch of the arm, would let me graze the edge of divinity, the edge of whatever people mean when they say grace. But almost is its own private language that doesn’t mean anything to anyone else. I am unimpressed by a trembling threshold.

Outside, the moon throws itself over the backyard and spills into the living room, dragging the shadows of branches across the concrete, across the furniture, across my bloody scalp. Everything looks briefly arranged by something larger than us. Even the ugly things gain a ceremony. Light does this sometimes. It makes a wreck look intentional.

And then there is your face under passing headlights, carved and recarved by moving cars. The light hollows you out. Your eyes deepen. You become a stranger and more familiar at once, it is stripping me of my truth. I think when we are young, there is a belief that there will be many people who laugh the same way, many mouths shaped to meet ours in recognition, many futures where intimacy comes easy and renewable. But it is far more rare than I have convinced myself.

There is a violence in being idealized that people rarely admit. So I begin to skip bare foot on hot concrete and drag my ugly truth through the air, it is a broken kite on a humid day. I run faster dragging it above my head, until I step on glass and then run 10 paces more. I smash my forehead into the soil after it rains. I cry on public transport. I give bad advice and live by it. Evict me from your altar !!!!! Take me off of your high horse

People like to pretend humiliation and intimacy are opposites. That if I really respected myself I wouldn’t have crashed the fuck out like that. Humiliation is intimacy with the lights left on too long. It’s what happens when the curtain drops and there is no flattering shadow left between you and the other person’s gaze. To be humiliated is to be badly lit and entirely sincere. It is terrible, yes, but it is also terribly honest. It is one of the only moments where performance burns off so completely you are forced to stand there as the thing you actually are. It is a ritual I keep returning to.

I don’t see the train coming until it is already rammed into my torso. No heroic anticipation, only impact and the flowering open of the self. My limbs fly across the tracks, plummeting into the ground. The walls of my mind palace split wide, all its damp rooms exposed, all its warped architecture visible at once. I am free.

I hit the ground hard, there is nothing left to maintain. The fake wood floor presses against my skull, my lower back, with complete indifference. An unforgiving sensation that allows me to exist beside it. The end of descent carries its own kind of stillness, that drags across my skin like a blunt pocket knife. The gates open in a flashing wash and everything is drowned in brightness. It would be easy to call it transcendence, but I think it is something rougher than that. Not redemption exactly, but more like a brief suspension of shame. The body, usually so burdened by self-consciousness, is overtaken by warmth.

I am begging for heaven’s reward to press against my cold feet. For heaven’s reward to cover my corpse like a blanket in the middle of the night. I do not want to be naive again, yet I still hand my throat over to hope over and over. Prayer in this way becomes its own disfigurement.

You kneel for relief and stand up marked. Who knows what you deserve.

horses don’t stop

계피. 개피

The difference is a single breath, a small tilt in the mouth, and a furrow in the brow.

Cinnamon. Dog blood

Sweetness can live in something brutal. Language does not protect us from what it names.

My fingers wrapped around my grandmother’s hand. I cling tightly to her tender skin, thin, mapped with years I cannot read. She leads me through the bustling street market. Tangerines stacked like small suns and persimmons blushing against their own skin, stretched and patient. Elders sit low, crouched on the pieces of cardboard, on blankets worn soft by bodies. In front of them are baskets of chives and green onions tied by twine, green bound to green.

At the corner stall, rice pancakes hiss against the griddle. Sugar collapses in to the pockets of the chewy dough. The woman cooking them wears a second apron of exhaustion, damp and clinging to her forehead.

Still she smiles down at me, kindness practiced so often it slips through effort and has become an instinct.

My grandmother turns to me and says

“how about we get you a dog blood hotteok”

The words knot themselves in my throat. My stomach tightens at the sound of something feral. I shake my head profusely, wondering why she would offer me such a cuisine I had no taste for. She insists that I like them, the way that elders do.

I stood on the side of betrayal, caught in between the tight syllables of her words. Blind certainty wasn’t enough to cut through my thick skull.

As a child, I did not know how to separate sound from meaning or meaning from doubt. Sometimes what is passed down arrives mislabeled.

My grandmother presses the hot pancake into my palms. The parchment paper blotted with oil, the heat travels through my calluses. I eat because she is watching. I eat because love at that age is obedience.

Nothing bad happens.

I lean against the granite counter, content to watch the shadows of the window pane press itself against your cheek. The kitchen transforms into a shrine monumental with shadows, this time of day this time of year, their slow dance sanctified by the sun. I feel blessed just standing here. You shake cinnamon in to your coffee before taking a sip, the steam melting your brows in to your temples, softening your expression in to the rest of your body.

I receive what I ask for, but it’s never anything I wanted. My desires fall off my stuttering tongue, punctured by hiccups of adversity. Mistranslated in to a confusing wish I cannot say out loud.

The difference is a single breath, a small tilt in the mouth, and a furrow in the brow.

You look up from your demitasse and smile, dog blood caught between your teeth.

Thanks

Some mornings I wake up with tear stains on my pillow and its mineral signature crusted on to my cheeks. Other nights I surface gasping, my heart hammering as if it had been running from me, my chest collapsing in to a familiar pitiless sink. And then there is the first dream I confessed to you, the one where everything I had built in Texas is stripped away from me as if I’m pulling a coat from my shoulders. My earthly flesh is obedient to my sleeping mind and I am awoken to my body repeating my dream’s geography. My whimpers come out muffled pressing against my throat, trying to escape an unconscious mouth.

I check the time three times before waking up. The orange hue of my alarm clock flashes from 3:00 am to 11:00 am in intervals that slip through my fingers. My waking thoughts masked in a groggy trance, I think to myself how do I keep letting this happen.

The pads of my fingers press against my thick hair. Sifting through my follicles feeling for patches of dried blood to pick at. I’m having a cold flash, and I don’t know how to help myself. The most I can do is pull my hood over my head and rock myself back and forth until the ac turns itself off. I sit beneath the shower head and watch my skin turn red. I turn my back against god and press my forehead on to the slick porcelain floor. All of these attempts of seeking warmth has not served me in the ways I have hoped. It scratches the surface and can never penetrate through my hypodermis. I need the sun to force itself down my throat, deep enough to warm the blood circulating through my heart. Warmth is a visitor with clean hands, and I am left with a deeper temperature that doesn’t belong to the air or the season.

“Even with your condition … you know your tendencies”

I sit there with the handkerchief I embroidered with the words “HORSES DON’T STOP THEY KEEP GOING” crumpled in my hands. My eyes fixated on the damp blobs and streaks of snot against the pattern of horses running across a flat tan surface. I rub the fraying lace between my fingers.

“I hope that you can see…”

Her sentence trails off into the bucket of words people use to describe me. The break in her voice forces me to stop fidgeting with my hands, and look up at her watering eyes. I immediately straighten my back and my character. The sight of someone crying kicks my instinct to “fix things”. I don’t talk about anything else important for the rest of our session.

Last night I wound a scarf over my head and whispered a prayer for the wrong reasons. Texas in January has been kind and almost tender, but that night the wind cut through every layer and sank its teeth in my torso. I hold my breath as I walk towards the dim bar light. It is a mouth I keep returning to, an alter of sorts. I walk in and I’ve come enough times in one summer that I ask the bouncer how his backpacking trip to Mongolia was. The bass of the band playing on the patio leaks through the walls and loosens my scarf. I offer to buy my friend a drink. My acts of kindness serve me in selfish ways.

We walk out onto the patio and sit at a table closest to the heater. You must have been cold as well, because you and friends were sitting directly in front of us. I didn’t pay attention to the back of your head until you turned to the side, and the angle of your jaw sent an electric shock through my body. I hold my breath and for a second the band’s bass falls away as if someone had cupped the speakers with their hands.

I’m watching shadows of blinds run across your face, striping you with the same geometry. You glance over at me and without skipping a beat I stare right back. Your back is turned towards me for the rest of the night.

I walk up to the monument in my mind, and drag my fingers down its spine, I’m reading a hymn off the bone. I’m watching myself in my childhood bedroom lying on my stomach with the windows open. I’m watching myself run bleach through your hair and letting it stain my sweater.

I say my thank yous out loud before fleeing from the scene.

THANK YOU

On the bus from the Incheon airport to Gangnam, my head rest against the fogged up window. Streetlights smear into soft coins, and each time the bus brakes, my thoughts surge forward, then settle, then surge again. I choke up the same prayer I whispered since I was eighteen: It was my fault. It wasn’t my fault. Maybe prayer isn’t the right word, but a binary rhythm worn into me the way water wears a channel into stone. A canal that takes shape of a snake eating its own tail. My train of thought often falls in to the route of hunger feeding hunger. Hunger that only tightens around it self, satisfied by the illusion comfort. A creature of habit, we return to what is familiar.

The truth is smaller than a pearl, slick with salt and persistent. I roll it forward with my tongue and pin it behind my front teeth, at the threshold where vapor becomes liquid. I keep it there on the edge of confession. My lips dry from the salt. I imagine truth is not meant to be spoken.

Your truth is tethered to your pinky like a childish vow you never learned to untie.A small knot of faith tightened beneath the skin. Your fingers hover over it, looming then closed. Knuckles whitening the way winter does when it wants to look innocent, my knees red.

I watch you clench down harder as your words slip off your tongue in pieces you can’t catch. Words like coins dropped into a gutter. Your chin points at me as if direction could replace apology. Your eyes half gazed, practicing distance.

You speak with the confidence of someone who has never had to beg for what they broke. And yet beneath the assertive act you hold eye contact like a stray dog holds a sidewalk, waiting for warmth to choose it.

Maybe you don’t believe you deserve it. Maybe you were taught that love is a room you only enter by earning it, and you keep showing up with a tight fist and empty palms.

I believed you because I recognized the way a person speaks from a flooded place, trying to outrun water with nothing but their mouth.I recognized that panic dressed up as certainty. So I kept choosing your intention over your impact, as if meaning could dry what harm had already soaked through. As if I could hold your fist open with my faith, as if my patience was a kind of rescue. Maybe that was naive of me. Maybe I showed you love the only way the moment allowed for, trust, offered like a last match, hands cupped around it, hoping your breath wouldn’t take it away.

Your mouth tastes like brine. Mine does too. Your words press against the thin salt wind, and I realize we’ve been living in the same climate with different names.

In hydrology, salinity is evidence of what has already left. Salt remains when water has gone. Salt remains when something once moving has evaporated, when the body of liquid has traveled on and left behind its mineral signature. Maybe this is what I’m tasting, A shoreline after the tide has pulled away, still slick with what passed through.

I stand still holding my breath. I am watching the horizon dissolve into the sea and the sea blur into the sand. Each line of separation surrendering in to the next, two truths sharing a border. A spectacle only visible if you stand far enough from the sun and grind your knees far enough into the earth. Distance blends in the seams. And from far enough everything buffers in to forgiveness, I can’t be angry forever. The tide rolls in, I imagine it to be a hand petting the fur of a cat.The seawater grazing the shore, buffering the sand on its way in and smoothing it back during its retraction.

On the shoreline I lie shivering against the moon’s pull. I lie still against my own gravity. My memory fails me but flesh is a man’s most loyal witness. It remembers where it was dragged and where it was dropped, the way a dog remembers the hand. The tide pets the shoreline with a gentleness you wouldn’t have imagined by the sound. The tide washes over footprints and leaves only a faint outline of a heel, a soft crater of stance.

For a long time, I thought forgiveness meant letting you off the hook. I thought it was a kindness I would have to donate like my own blood. Leaving me pale, holding an expression of virtue.

I have been clenching the pearl behind my teeth until my jaw aches. I have been holding the old channel in my mind until it turns into a trench deep enough to bury a name. I have been damming myself with guilt and a mouth full of salt.

I forgive you the way the ocean forgives the shore, by touching it again without the intention to punish. By letting what happened become part of the sediment instead of a stone lodged in the throat.

My forgiveness is not pure, but a hunger for ease. As much as I would like to pride myself of a saintly act, I imagine this to relieve you as much as it relieves me. I have to feed the snake something other than itself. I cannot be faithful to the wound forever.

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The strip itself throbbed like a living artery, pumping music and bodies from bar to bar. Sorority girls shimmered under the streetlights, their skin dusted in glitter. Frat boys shouted over jukebox anthems, their voices hoarse with cheap whiskey, beating their chests like they were keeping time with the heartbeat of the night.

I’ve grown comfortable enough to exist in spaces I don’t fit in, but spaces like these make my edges feel too sharp, too obvious. I’m not a girl, I’m not a boy, but something in between orbiting the spectacle without being fully invited to land. I move through the crowd like a ghost with a pulse, visible only when someone needs a body to take up space or a voice to echo their laughter. Nothing to feel bad about, just an observation.

The couple times men approached me that night, I could feel the space tighten around us, their eyes scanning me for cues on what to say next. A choreography older than all of us, I was expected to fall into step. I think about myself a few years ago and how I would have followed this ancient dance in hopes of feeling less foreign. I’ve grown since then, and the line between foreignness and familiarity has tightened. I remain still. Their sentences come out in uneven bursts and breaths held in gaps where they waited for me to play the part. Desire doesn’t know where to land when the target steps out of frame. I am not the girl you wish I was, and not the boy you fear I might be. I watch their expectations collapse in real time. A sadistic part of me finds it amusing.

There is grief in realizing that even in moments of intimacy, beyond the frat boys at the bar, I am still being auditioned for a role I never wanted. That love, when given through the lens of expectations, slowly rots into erasure. I am not a girl, I am not your girl.

Grief is the bruise on my hip and the rock in my shoe left behind when expectation releases its grip. Grief, I learned, is only one side of recognition, the other side being clarity. If intimacy demands that I contort myself to fit into your palms, then I will bask in the sanctity of my own form. There’s a relief in being rightly misunderstood than wrongly adored.

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I grieve every room I’ve made my bed in even if the sheets weren’t mine.I have always been quite naive and often too trusting. I build a cocoon in fleeting promises. I build a home on sand. They stand for a season and return dust. The imprints of the roots remain.

My memory fails me, but my body never forgets. The iron bullet sinks deeper and doubles in weight. I keep it nested between my ribs.

In nature a symbiotic relationship benefits both organisms in some way, not always equally. I used to think the iron bullet was a foreign object I was meant to spit up. Each time I have, it lodges its way back down my throat.I’ve stopped resisting. I’ve learned to keep it warm, wrapped around soft tissue and loose ends. It carries every post card I will never send. It holds the weight of every home that was never mine. I often mistaken the fullness I feel in my chest as something intrusive, refusing to let me go. There’s a thin line between foreignness and familiarity. I take the long way home, until its roots fills in the crevices of my memories. I take the long way home, until I look down at the iron glint beneath my sternum and realize what I have been carrying has been carrying me.

My body has grown accustomed to foreignness.I was born into it. Into the ache of arranging and rearranging the pieces of myself to match my surroundings. I learned early which parts of me my parents could love and which parts my friends could see. Belonging became not a place, but an ongoing negotiation. In the process pain has become fluent in the language of my nervous system. It knows every room and the number of steps in staircase. I used to believe it was a parasite drinking my blood, but parasites take without giving. Pain, in its own twisted generosity, leaves offerings, sensitivity and intuition. My memory fails me but my body holds every palm sized wound.

Sometimes I believe pain seeks out the body the way the body seeks out pain, neither wanting to be alone, both needing a witness to their existence.Heart ache witnesses everything. It leaves bruises on my feet and splinters in places I shouldn’t touch. Without me, it has nowhere to live, no lungs to echo in, no pulse to measure itself against. The iron bullet holds my center of gravity. How will I remember that i’m alive if there is no risk in every promise. How will I feel the burning friction against every kiss. How will I feel the respite the rain has to offer. It gives me something to push against, a shape to name. Pain gives the body direction; the body gives pain purpose.

Perhaps this is the real symbiosis: a mutual agreement. Not harmonious, not gentle, but masochistly enduring. I will carry you if you remind me I am still alive. I will be your cocoon.

I showered the morning after the world watched us kiss. I pretended I had been too drunk and had forgotten. I turn a blind eye to things I want to forget. I treat my negligence as if it were a dove I am tossing free into the sky. I turn on the lights and let the mirror fog up before slipping off my clothes. Nothing to look into—it’s just easier that way.

I open my chest and welcome in the water. I let it turn the folds of my arms into streams and mountains. I let it consume my hair and soften my skull until it is malleable enough to push my eyes further and further. Maybe this is my attempt to reach into my brain and sever the neurons that keep replaying my mistakes.

I scrub my wrists, ankles, and the backs of my shoulders until my skin turns raw, peeling away like something rotten. I watch as it circles the drain, joining the rest of the hair and scum. I scrub the lingering scent of cheap rum and sin from my neck and chest. I exfoliate until a thin line of blood, muscle, and bone lurks beneath all the skin and shame.

The wrinkles on my knees press against the bathtub floor, my back turned against God. I turn the water hotter and hotter until I feel it eroding the back of my neck and spine. I let it carve a canyon, let it carve the syllables of your name.

Water moves through shoulders built for a head to rest on. Cheeks that fit in the palm of a hand. Ribs molded to interlock with another. A body crafted to hold an embrace. A body scrubbed raw of sin but still ridden with desire.

Lips shaped to whisper prayers and promises, bitten by sacred words. Fingers traced with purpose, made to grasp, to tether, to beg. A spine curved not just for reverence, but for the press of another against it. Skin cleansed in holy water, yet burning with the desire that bites back. A vessel of devotion, sculpted for worship—both sacred and profane.

You once told me you would love me to your grave and I wonder how much of that is still true

I have dreams of running in to you on the street. I imagine it to be summer in Colorado, so I can see the light shine through your hair and eyes. Maybe I spot you sitting outside a coffee shop or against the humming of the liquor aisle. In all my fantasies I have the confidence of three beers whilst being sober and I walk as if there was string tied to my head from the ceiling. I ask you without stuttering “would you love me to your grave”.

I can already see your eyes of those of a drowning man.Your words stumbling from your tongue spilling all over my shirt. Knowing me I would let the stain set in and bury it beneath my bed.

Maybe I’m naive to believe you still do. I was naive when you cried those words in to my shoulder.

Two years ago I would have swallowed your words and let them turn into an iron bullet in my chest. Now I am six months away from turning the age I once knew you as.

I stare at you through a wine glass

your eyes bigger than your ears

distortions makes it easier to swallow

My morning routine lately has consisted of falling in and out of asleep for hours until I’m horny enough to masturbate myself out of bed and I lie there a little longer and try to recall the words I once choked on. I feel all the edges with my tongue and spit out what I chewed.

I lie there long enough for all the things I once desired to bite me back

A whimper beneath the door step

A lighthouse covered in snow

What do you call the hours between night and dawn, the certainty of separation and the relief in allowing people to lose you.

The liminal hours I have spent on peeling your shadow off of my walls and your skin off of my floor

I stare at you through a wine glass

this time your hands stretched out and swollen

distortions makes it easier to pretend

I split the apple down the center and hand you the bigger half

During The Hour of Severance I watch smoke uncoil its body and thin into the rest of the night as if it were holding the weight of a wish I can’t say out loud.

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I took an edible on a Monday night and dreamed I touched god

“those with closed fist do not receive”

my knuckles white

knees red

There’s softness that lies beneath this mud

at night I hope you will open your palms towards me

sneak through the window

fall asleep on my floor

In hiding all I want is to be seen,

a confusing wish that I can’t say out loud

I took an edible on a Monday night and dreamed of spending slow mornings with you, I dreamed I touched god.

kicking sand and salt in to the air

etching the pattern of youth across the shore

leaving the syllables of my name for the sea to hu

m towards the moon

I watch as the waves wash over my grave

On the floor of my bedroom

you watch me through the gaping hole in my stomach

your words pass right through and so does my attempts to coddle my heart

I wonder if I keep pouring into your endless stomach maybe you will pour into my cupped hands, but I watched as honey spilled from your mouth and on to my new rug

two birthdays later I still find sugar in between the fibers

I like to think the snake eating it’s own tail is well fed

Or maybe hunger lies in sighs of grief, in a rotting fruit bowl

Crane your neck towards mine

I might put my ear against your voice box to get one step closer to god

The viscous cycle of consumption followed by emptiness will foster beneath my skin for as long as an apple blossoms from a crooked branch

Sometimes my dreams feel so strong I wonder if they are disturbing you too.

-loving you always, row

I think this might be my 5th time sitting down to write my first post. I’m sitting in the same spot as I always sit to write. The chair facing the kitchen window in our backyard, beer on my right side next to my foot. Tonight I’m sitting out with my roommates and her boyfriend. We’re laughing and talking about whether we look like more like our mom or dad. I love learning more about my friend’s families. Talking about their parents is always weird especially when you’ve never seen them before. Trying to imagine the faces of the people that raised your friends feels like trying remember the strangers in your dream. I’ve decided to turn this into some sort of digital diary. I need something simple and imperfect this season. Maybe one day I will write long blog-like well thought out paragraphs with perfect punctuation. Perfection is my toxic lover that will stay with me. Perfection is the knife that turns. Perfection is ugly and I love it so dearly. These days I wonder if you are ashamed at the thought of me. Does your heart turn heavy when you hear my name. Do you still keep my mementos or do lie in a box on tucked away in the back of your closet.

September 7th

I’m back out tonight with my roommates and her boyfriend. The same chair in the backyard, facing the kitchen window. Room temperature Blue Moon next to my right foot. No weed tonight, or yesterday night. Trying to be intentional with my smoking, learning to fall asleep all over again. I love writing with confidence of a couple beers. The words flow smoothly from my brain to my finger tips and on to the screen. Honestly terrified of posting my writing online. Something I’ve always wanted to do, but I find myself always waiting for the “right time” or the “perfect paragraph”. I’ve soon realize that nothing can satisfy me. I’m on my second beer now. I failed my 4th grade writing STAAR test and didn’t really understood how commas worked util the 8th grade. I had always been behind in reading and was in ESL until the second grade. Literature has never been my strength, but I remember sitting on the school computer after hours writing poems to send my sixth grade english teacher. I have always had a lot to say, but never the confidence to say it. Lately I have been telling myself “it doesn’t need to be perfect it just needs to get done” and this is that. Getting it done.

-drunk off of beers, love ro