āFebruary: The fall starts easy. I took baby aspirin, and a rusty spoon to my head, and smoked the stale weed my brother left in a broken vase before he left for college. Night comes fast, and tells the creation story. I ignore her this time. I donāt give a fuck about how I was made anymore tell me how I fall apart. March: Nobody can ever find the raw spot on their leg until they start itching. I remember 6th grade when the mosquito bit my calf. Larvae and laps on the soccer field in early spring. He is oozing into my shoes with the mud. April: My mother buried my rusty spoon, and took my brown hands. the clothesline was dripping carbonated orange soda sun, the wind was soft, the mice were sleeping warm beneath the floorboards; she spread my tarot on the floor with the forever broken and gnarled thumb she stuck in a blender when she was 5. That spring I walked home alone some nights, the heatwaves followed me like the labored breath of drunk men who donāt take no for an answer, I turned over The Devil and someone dropped a wine glass next door, she gasped, white eyes, the mice began to scrape and scream, the heatwave killed their children like it split my shoulders open and ate the youth inside. May: The month of falling out of trees, junior high was gonna shipwreck any day now. There is a fast food place where the milkshakes taste like cough syrup and the skater kids cheat death on 3 feet of concrete stairs. There is a crack in the sidewalk in front of it, and he kick flips on it to break the back of the mother who left him at 13, he breeds violence between his fraying vans and then something in his ankle snaps, my oxygen goes tar black. He bleeds, he. Makes this sound. Like a dog when you step on its foot. I want to hold him, put a butterfly on his cheek, give him a band aid, something, God, something. He looks like heās in pain. I want to. I donāt know. Help. I walk away trembling and put my head between my knees behind a dumpster full of shitty milkshakes. June: The neighbors fuck like rabbits while Iām trying to cry to joy division. I pray for a lightning strike. This type of poetry is for pretty girls, anyway. July: my birthday flies into the glass of my bedroom window and breaks its neck. mom said the only things you can grow in summer that wonāt die are grapefruit and hair, and I made a garden, I cut my chest open for Demeter each full moon. These locks were watered with gulf stream sea spray. I fed them bludgeoned daydreams. I threw my head against church doors trying to send Jesus some red flowers for his funeral, or maybe his birthday, doesnāt really matter, we celebrate both. August: I got kicked out of high school knocking myself out on my desk. People carved hearts into the enamel, I carved my heart out of my chest and turned it in for my midterm. I slam dunked my skull into the bleachers on game day, and when the bleachers fell, into my history textbook, and when the book was mushy with blood, into the track field. Iām grinning ugly, dancing to the 80ās synth in an empty gym after homecoming, with a nosebleed dripping love songs down my yellow teeth, like words on old gravestones: here lies a moontoothed lover who will never rest in peace, every night she claws her grave and hears the call of western waves. September: Iām high on concussion flavored car races in a stolen low rider, bluebirds fly in circles around my head after we crash, I wrote a song on a 5 dollar bill called blunt force trauma and it is about skater boys with broken noses, snarls of shaggy Jew fro his friends make fun of, and hands. that graze los angeles highways while he rides asphalt waves, slam his locker, and give the finger to the education system he keeps tripping over like untied shoelaces. he pricks those hands sewing together the lackluster parties private school kids throw. he puts his dewy rose bud lips to the jack daniels bottle, and kicks the drum kit over, gives it mouth to mouth, pump his fists into someoneās chest, gives it a pulse again. hands big enough to steal grapefruit with, the size of my swollen heart. I didnāt know it could get that big but he bumped into me, buzzing like a light saber, sky walking out of the grocery store with a grapefruit. with my heart. October: do you have a girl do you? have a lover? Jupiter is orbiting around whatever this emotion is called, the rollercoaster one. when you look at me. We spend Halloween turning into werewolves at the library, you were moshing in the kids section, bleaching your hair in punk rock, I was banging my bruised and knuckleheaded love poems into a paperback copy of Romeo and Juliet, brushing my hair with broken glass. That was the first day the blood on our hands was not our own, she shushed us and we laughed. High on Shakespeare and Jupiter gas, we dug our fangs into the dewy decimal system. You ask me my name, I tell you, you smile. We had matching bruises and I floated home. November: You make me. Feel. You make me feel like I can speak to snakes. You make me feel like my hips have a purpose besides balancing bins of laundry, and bowls of fruit. You make 17 stop feeling like a suicide note no one will read. you make me banshee scream and lick like fire against young pines, when you. dance. when you. kiss her, let her ride your double dutch hips, and your skateboard. She is a new coin, tangy on his numb tongue, and he tucks her in his pocket, his lucky penny. Iām the bubblegum he scrapes off his sneakers and throws into a storm drain. December: I still cower into my pillow and smile a crooked smile, and go red at the cheeks, you. You put the red in my cheeks. Iām here, Iām exploding, why canāt you see me? Just put the bottle down, take your hand from your eyes, I wonāt ask you what happened to your face, or how you got that scar, I will just like you and like you. we can buy angels wings in Hollywood, make an apartment out of crumpled homework pages at the bottoms of our dirty backpacks, we can drop out of high school, I will like you and dissect your sadness like frogs in freshman biology I am used to the rotting smell in your ribcage, I reek of it too. I will like you. until I know how to love you. January: I switch schools, I cut my hair, bleach what little is left. It makes my mother unhappy, she thinks my spirit world is severing ties, she thinks my planets are discordant. I ask somebody back home about him, she says he dropped out and started working on cars. I come down. Softly. February (again, again, again): He was born to a rabbi and a beauty queen. I was born to a chemist, and a witch. Ammonia, bleach. Donāt mix them unless you want someone to die. Blood, adolescence, summer saltwater. Donāt mix them unless you want to make somebody wish they were dead.ā
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