I swear to god or grandma or whoever the fuck is
in the sky, passing eternal judgment on
the cleanliness of my underwear and the last time I took
a fucking shower (two,
two goddamn minutes ago, so hot if my contacts were in,
they’d have fogged up like my glasses still are at the edges)
that I could dismember my parent’s kitchen and find
sarcasm in the dust in the miscellaneous cutlery drawer
and in the mostly-dried syrup in the bottom of the fridge
from probably six years ago.
and look, there’s some tucked in my sheets-
fresh sheets for this week, but there’s some
fucking ancient irony folded under the hot pink
and between the mattresses!
where did it come from, where will it go, I
can’t even pretend to want to know
but if I had a guess as wild as the time
my sister and mother got drunk in Canada
over the picnic table at our camping site,
I would guess it’s mine, passed down from generation
to generation of fuckery and fuck-ups almost as
guilty and bitter and exhausted as me.
I only pray I can eventually reach their level
of finally-becoming-functional-members-of-society.
(it makes me wonder at the masses of teachers
and nurses my family has produced. I shudder
to consider their college years, I swear to my sock drawer.)
there was a point to this when I began. it was insomnia
but the self-fucking-same thing that made me start
this crispy trainwreck of a poem
has also gotten it off the rails and into a painful metaphor
(what fourth wall, this is no-sleep poetry, no
damn such thing, my friend.)
the pretty, frosted-flake irony here, I think
is that I want more time, and more
questions answered, and more thoughts
but instead I get an inability to sleep
and Pokemon that I lacked in childhood.
thank you, grandma or god, for presenting it to me
with such glamor and crusty sugar.
I appreciate the aesthetic.
i love so much more
than i hate
though i do not know if i am the better
for such a thing
as if it were a choice.
there are days when my heart
is swollen and bursting
with guilt, i think, mostly
but also hurt for those
i cannot be there for
for those i hide from
for those i cannot seem to do anything
but give pain, for all my love
for all my love is not a band-aid.
i cannot hate
for longer than it takes a scab to heal
though
god not-alone knows i have tried
i cannot hat people for long
and though i am proud of that
it also hurts
for love is just as exhausting as hate.
i do not know you, and
as such, i cannot hate you
though heaven knows
i could love you.
I look at her in the morning light, the sun peeping through the slits of the blinds from across the kitchen table. Her face, her hair, and her eyelids are stained by the golden stripes, turning the amber of her skin into the very incarnation of any number of goddesses- goddesses of love and charity, but also of lava and vengeance. Not right in this moment, course- her first cup of coffee, pale with milk and sugar still clinging to the rim, is still mostly filled. The steam of it rises into the sunlight on her face, tattooing her with curls of a shadow's cousin. Her eyes are sleepily closed, and she looks far too weary for murder and fire, with only enough energy to sit up in her sweater.
It's slipping off her shoulder a little bit. There's a scar there, one I've tasted, where it met a nail after falling off a swing set. She had to get her tetanus updated after that; she said she was nine at the time. When she told it, her mouth curved into a small smile, one that made me want to just bask in the glow of her.
She pulls to mug up her her lips again, savoring the coffee like it will save her soul. I'm still looking at her- thinking about how I want to paint her- when she looks at me through tiredly-hooded eyes and says:
"I dated a poet once. A man- a boy, really, to tell the truth. He said something once, trying to be romantic, I think, though it wasn't really his strength-" Here she breaks to chortle for a moment, "he said to me, 'I want to drink all your kisses and love until there's nothing left.'"
I snort. I can't help myself, really. She smiles, too, that mischievous little curl at the edges of her lips that I love.
"Well, that's dumb," I tell her, taking in the sight of warm light on her cheek. It makes her freckles fade some.
"Yes, I thought so, too," she agrees. "I'm not a cup. I don't have a finite number of loves and kisses to give."
"And if you did, that would be very selfish of him," I add. "I would have lost out of some of your magnificent kisses."
She laughs at that, too, a bold sound, like waves breaking against rock. The kind of laugh that parts a crowd and wakes babies. I like to listen to her laugh, as often and as loudly as I can.
"I love you, Sara," she tells me fondly, and turns back to her coffee. I cradle the sight of her in my mind, and her words to my heart.
She is not a cup, I think to myself as I open the microwave for my oatmeal. She loves too much for that.
i.
carbon
links the world over
all the living things have it
and stardust is the
building blocks, the metaphorical legos
that structures the earth
and our bones
we all are made of the ashes of stars
you are made of stardust
i am made of stardust.
ii.
some people burn
whether with purpose or feeling
or memory or whatever else
and some are burnt out
leaving only charcoal and dead embers
in the wake of their potential.
iii.
it was around a dying campfire
that my father told me the story
of our family name and its ancestor
the man who cut off his foot and threw it
to the new lands
for honor and his family's name
and it was by the glow of fading fire
that i first learned
my surname means dragon, a
might beast of flame and fury and treasure
and i was proud.
iv.
coal does not become diamond
coal is born of one environment
from carbon and death and pressure
diamond is birthed from heat and carbon
in the heart of the earth
we burn one, and carry the other
on our bodies
one clouds the sky, and the other-
the other is saturated in the blood of war.
v.
i am made of carbon and the ashes of stars
i do not glow or sparkle
i bleed,
and i burn
do not stand too close.
i will consume you.
i.
i am only human
and a fragile one
at that, standing 5'5
not quite 100 and twenty pounds
of damp skin, cartilage, and
miscellaneous.
ii.
i have been trained
in the school of smile
and sass, sarcasm and
insults traded like candy
on the school's yard
your opinion does not frighten me.
iii.
i will argue with my dying breath
and enjoy the debate
with my grim reaper
i may not be able to kick
anyone's ass, but know
that i can tie your mind in
whirlwinds, and laugh at the
design i have made.
i do not dream as much
as i did as a child
made as i was of static hair
and doll-brown eyes
but when i dream
i dream for more than myself
when i was younger than now
(but
older than i used to be) i
dreamed of true love and romance
i let the idea, the thought
occupy and define me
i feared to die unmarried
as if that could only mean to die
alone and lonely
as though
there is no other kind of love
i am older now
though still very young
and aware, now, of my youth
i fear not loneliness
because, as your friend,
my darling, i will die
an old woman, beloved
whether or not i have
a cold metal ring
do you remember
the first disney princess or romantic flick
you watched? probably
probably not
you were, i would guess, quite young
do you remember
the first time your mother or father told you
"someday you'll find the perfect boy
and you'll love him and he'll love you"
i know i don't
but they did say it many times
what about your first kiss-
do you recall that? i do
in technicolor
i was thirteen, and it was recess
he had almost-black brown hair and blue eyesi haven't seen him since i was fourteen
and the first time you realized
perhaps there's more to living than
desperately searching for that romantic relationship
(the one that may not actually exist)
when you considered living without trying
to see true love in every corner
sad to say- i was eighteen before it struck me
i guess my point
my point is that the conditioning can be undone
and i (and you) have a chance to be content
with a romance-free life
filled with coffee and crisp apples and wifi
One.
when i was a little girl
my sister and i had china dolls
in pretty dresses with pretty smiles and glassy plastic eyes
we would play with them
take them down from the shelf and undress, redress them
like the barbies they were not
our mom worried we would break them,
and get hurt.
Two.
i had a babysitting job the summer before
eighth grade, three days a week, in the afternoon
i tried but i was not much good at it
(not like my sister, who is somehow
a wonderful caretaker, and is a nanny now)
and one day the toddler boy knocked over a picture frame made of glass
it shattered on the carpet
i shooed the kids away and worked to pick it up
but i knelt on some glass
it did not scar, but sometimes i remember how much it bled
and how that fascinated me
even as i tried to keep Christina and Cody calm.
Three.
i was very much a romantic little girl
interested in love and crushes and kisses
like in movies and like
my parents kissed in front of the tv when they thought
i was in bed, but instead peering at them
mostly hidden on the stairs
small pink hands grasping the bars and doe eyes
taking in the gentle small touch
in the normal blueish glow of the living room.
Four.
i was eighteen before i truly understood
that i did not need a boyfriend or a crush to validate
me as a person or a girl
one relationship over and done (it was wonderful
until it was not, and then we
were not) and i felt (and feel) freed
absolutely contented in singleness
and free to enjoy romance in the abstract
without feeling the need to be cynical about realism
romance and myself.
Five.
i am and am not a china doll, if that
makes any sort of sense in the least
my skin is not smooth and cold but
marked scarred and sticky-warm; you cannot hold me in
two hands and strip me and reclothe me at your
leisure, but still
i have two glassy soft doe eyes and
if your try to walk over me
i may break, but i will certainly make you bleed.
and i have to reel myself back in"vanity is unbecoming" was
my motto of my adolescent years
(and depression, fed, i know, by
"poor self-esteem" a counselor's phrase i forced
myself to define as me, in a littany of useless words)
i still say and believe it sometimes
in between announcing that i have a great ass
and looking through old selfies admiringly
i think the vanity of the mind is more dangerous
but right now
(a scant hour before midnight) i find
that i like the idea of dangerous
i am dangerous
hear the clack of my keys and smack of my heels
the snap of my camera and
the space-negative sound of my dangerous, dangerous
womanly thoughts
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