the shadow in the snow

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The other day he raised his eyebrows with a joke the way my stepdad used to when his blood turned anger and he suddenly had plans to place his self hatred onto my brother’s skin. And I don't know if I’m just looking at familiarities for reasons to run away, or if it’s normal to flinch with every human touch. But when he woke me up at 5am with a whisper that he loves me, I remembered all the past's hurt and my lungs stopped knowing how to expand and shrink. And sometimes I scare myself with the molecular compositions of people, because we’re really all just hands, and feet, and mouths. But when those parts are being used to hurt children who are just learning to live with themselves, it gets hard to be okay when someone uses them for love.

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I read Stephen King like the bible, find a reason to live in the cigarette smoke that screens between my eyes and night skylines, pretend to hate holding hands, and keep conversations at a distance by looking down. I put my sadness in gum wrappers and leave them in the bottom of my pocket just in case I need to write a poem about a person who used to love me. I order my coffee sweet so when someone asks for a sip, they enjoy it. Keep my face bare on purpose so people will really see me, leave my hair a mess so they’ll really know me. 

And amid everything that I am I have never enjoyed spending days with myself. The dark in me is a rude guest that drinks all your wine and asks to crash on your couch. It asks for a cigarette when you’re on your way to work and only have one left. It lays next to you all night and keeps its eyes open until it sees the sun, snoozes ten alarms, and then screams at you for not waking it up. 

And what I worry is that you will see the insides of the person I am. You will reel at the times I smoke instead of sleep, choke on the black coffee I make when I’m alone, call my inability to hope a deal breaker, and cringe as if the broken spines of my multiple copies of The Shining are your own bones. 

Last night, you held my head in your hands so it couldn’t shake, smoothed my hair down, and called me perfect. And all I can hope is that you change your definition of the word before you realize I’m not. 

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Love is a construct, but when really you feel it, it holds like a fire in the palms of your hands and burns away any sensation that isn’t them.

And the fire spreads; it makes smoke of eyes, charcoal of voice, and ember of heart; a slow and methodic ignition of molecules that pumps your breathing as a kind of oxygen gasoline.

And when it’s lit the last piece of you, the door to your bedroom gets closed with an ignorance about your cindered sheets.

And its leaving makes the handle too hot, and you may be ashes with no hope but it also lit the curtains, and no one can get to you because everyone’s scared your skin will blend with their fingers like sand into water.

When you get melted by a flame like this, the extinguishing is not a relief. It is an agony of entrapment in your bedroom of a body, with an absence that coats you in ash and won’t let you feel.

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You ask in amber what makes me want to leave here, this world. A question that wraps your fingers around my wrist like you can handcuff me to an answer you can work with.

I whisper in washed out Wednesdays that sometimes my heart and everything that’s supposed to keep me in this body tries to oppose the earth’s axis in a way that feels like my insides need to get outside my skin.

You answer in a silent russet and I watch my emptiness metastasize from your hands to the part of your eyes where you realize pain, and I hear the reserve of your voice drain.

And I don’t know how to take away your fear because I haven’t yet grasped if my lungs want to feel the cold of snow beyond my breath or if my throat just wants to scream at God without my help. But either way it hurts.

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I try my best to be the girl that can love, open my chest and orchestrate existence into my heart so I can really be here when you are. But girls that feel things on a normal level don’t smoke cigarettes to balance out their bodies with the heaviness of other people, they don’t shower before every date to hide the smell of poison they bring to this world, they don’t turn their white sheets into caskets and make love with the idea that they will end with no effort. Those are girls that hate. And my lips know exactly where to go on your body to keep you from heeding the warning signs and my fingertips feel where you hide your forgiveness. So when I want you to stop looking at me like Eve who mothered this world, and more like Eve who left us all in sin, don’t be surprised at how easy it is.

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This pain is a needle pinprick, the tininess of stars in big numbers. When I light another drunk cigarette and tell him there's a screen of smoke between me and other people, he tells me to stop smoking, tells me not to say sorry, tells me it's ok that I'm like this. And "nothing" is our word, we write it with the sweat of our skin after sex and rhyme it with our misconnection. He holds my hands tight to avoid eye contact with the earth I put under my fingernails trying not to let this world swallow me whole, dragging myself out of the trenches of another 3am spent wondering if there's anything in my dorm that could kill me. And when he watches me like he loves me, I look down. For once, when I apologize for being numb I don't want him to tell me it's ok that I'm like this, don't want him to cement my face between his hands like he can immobilize me into being, here.

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Our fingertips are bloody, trailing over the bumps of the other’s skin like humanity isn’t ugly, like we’re not wrong. You wrap me in a blanket like you’re kind, cover the bite marks on my neck and call me forgetful. But you’re mistaken. Every word you’ve ever spoken, every moan you ever make is engrained in me forever. It doesn’t matter if I believe this will last enough to want these thoughts, my foreboding mind doesn’t let me forget things that can hurt me later.

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The stars take acid at noon in a classroom and tell the moon: “why do we have to shine all the time? When are we going to use this in our real life?”

The moon answers with red, swirling to the edges of the classroom and says: “you don’t always get to do what you want when you have people that look up to you.”

You see the stars took acid as teenagers, before the world could even see them. 

They still had time for suicide but they put chemicals on their tongues and played with the insane idea that they inhabited planet earth.

The come up dimmed their shine and they asked: “why can’t it be like this all the time?”

They don’t want futures to fulfill; they want to be invisible.

The stars get tired of giving good advice and deciding fates for people who are never as alone as they think they are.

When the stars come down from taking acid they consider falling, at least then someone would wish for them.

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God bless the morning body: A cathedral you live in hunched back broken skin turn the fat back into dirt you don’t want it. Give it to Adam 12:01 on a Sunday morning when wine is your blood and lust is your language. And blessed is the belly that chimes every hour to let you know you’re alive and needing even if you ignore it. This body is stone surrounding stain glass. This body is painted pretty in the sun. It looks like a shadow under your white sheets. It’s angelic. And then you fill it. God condemn the evening body. Later heaven will put a streetlight halo on your car as you puke into a trash bag and prepare for the resurrection of a new day. The shrink of morning.

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I let him love me until the sun comes up. Then I close the door and console my skin, covered in halos the shape of his lips.

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You tell me I'm too young to be so uptight, then wonder why I let him unravel me.

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I am an ambiguous omen the 3am shadow in your bedroom body demonic with glowing saint outline. Take me as a prophecy and worry call your psychic tell her to crack my chest open and discard the lungs fill the crevice with the smoke of candles after you breathe their light out. I am defaming this body an empty shell that anguish will walk deer trails to make a home in barren bones with no time for your caution cut up skin a red warning. You will not find softness here only a sultry insanity with nighttime visitation where you can light a candle and pretend to sense my soul.  Lust for me while I am alive but please do not love me. I am haunted selfish for more time I will ask you to learn the language of ghosts. Desiring more than my body warrants a constant heavy heart bleeding an insufficient release  for an evil that turns skin to stain glass  makes me metal scarred angel. I am the sign that possession will come  and it has roots deep in a dark that will make you stop breathing. Please do not love me.

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I want to write you meaningful.  I want your knuckles to have a purpose other than cracking out the words you hold back. I want your clothes to be something other than camouflage. I want your expertly tightened smirk to exist without diminishing the acknowledgment of your loneliness.  I want your nail beds to really let you sleep at night because they're tugging your sheets up to your neck instead of ripping the breath out of your chest like it's a hangnail, all red and enflamed. I want to write you gaining, like your body doesn't hate you. Like you don't look into the mirror and want to break it because seven years of bad luck means seven years of feeling something. I want to write you home. I want to metaphor you back into yourself and wrap your arms up in similes, like a straight jacket holding you steady when you cry.  I want to sew up the canvas you draw on with silver cresent moons when you can't figure out why the goddamn stars are burning holes inside of you.  I want to write you okay, not happy, not sad. A happy medium of understanding that your body is yours.

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She wears long sweaters and wraps her fire in her stagnant stare. She lights desire with her hands and the air holds it. Stagnant. It doesn't move away from here. She wears black and boots and carries her weight in her smirk her steady soul, certain of where it is. She re-writes the definition of the colour green by combining it with the poetry of her eyelashes and she makes you question  every lesson  you've ever been taught. When she looks at you. Solemnly. She looks at you and she wraps your water with her flowing objections and the earth beneath her holds you as you should be held. Without sympathy or pardon; it is the truth. And it tells you where you should be. Listen.

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Sometimes I make out with people just to have something to write about later. Line their lips with my teeth and make their hearts jump the ropes of my fingers. I look into their eyes and pretend it takes five minutes to fall in love, even without loneliness. But I don’t think I’ll ever fall in love again, not the real kind. It’s easy to forget how heavy a heart is when you only hold it for a night. It’s easy to pretend a person isn’t something that can hurt you when you leave their bed before they wake. I know I bring confusion to people. They ask me what’s wrong and I can only answer in a skipped dinner, five coffees daily, and the hungry sex that comes with nightfall. I can only answer on their skin in teeth and fingernails, saving the other sharp things for mine. This is the only kind of love I can find.

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I’ve got a crow inside my ribs, and sometimes she comes out. At night mostly, in the midst of a panic she will poke out her beak and remind me of the temporariness of life. I should not worry about something that I can end so easily. In the morning I try to hide my black sternum with a wall of incisors, almost crack them my bitten lips leak black ichor. Sometimes my suffocating secret spills out with the sound of my stomach. It is too hard to stay alive, when there are two of us to feed. One is satisfied with words and coffee but the other one needs something more. One of us needs a body to exist for. And I am thinking of letting the crow free. A bottle of pills should loosen the latches. Open the cage and watch it bleed red rusty hinges leaking desperation, or a lonely bird song of refusal to leave. Please, turn my lies into powerlines and electrify the crow inside. I do not want her anymore, and she sure as hell wants me.

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Between heaven and hell there is one common thing and that is humans who look too long at the people they once kissed.