#irlpoetic

[courtneydove]

one day we will sip duck blood soup to wash down soul food. I can see faith, trust, and pixiedust wandering across my eyelashes, and I’m finally free. we read stories in meadows and run in the gutter forever. margo and lucky and lulu and all of the fish we had in the basement of the house on ridgedale are swimming through wildflower with me. we’re watching nick jr. on VHS and cartoon network is after discover channel. onyx and indigo and amethyst and emerald are holding hands. sunlight drips down my throat and my insides are finally warm.

“I love you all”: a suicide note about heaven.

[courtneydove]

when i’m w/ you, every night is halloween.

no hallway hookups for me. I’m scared that the callouses on my feet will get soft again. no pun intended. every scar on my body tells me to put my phone down and stop trying to meet someone new when I still think about you. you in electric blue, lying between my legs, your head on my belly: right where my heart dropped when I realized that I’ll never know if you kiss like the other boys who disappointed me. do you unhinge your jaw and swallow her whole? do your lips creak like the tin man when love’s oils run out? does your tongue slip past her lips? the key that unlocks a kiss? 

I shouldn’t have opened my mouth. but you should. words are exhaled through a toilet paper roll so the RA won’t catch my friends smoking weed. they don’t go anywhere. so if you’re still my friend, why did you go? I don’t mean the flight or the trip upstairs with a girl prettier than me. I know you’re still out there, so let your words come back. just say something!

 it’s cold and wet on the sidewalk. casper the friendly ghost is on cable. do they have that where you live now? if you ever come back, you can tell me about your ghosts from over there. I promise I won’t cry, cross my heart and hope to lie. you used to laugh at my jokes, but I think I’m the joke now. rodents sift through smashed pumpkins looking for me. the rain washed me away down the gutter.

[courtneydove]

she is growing too fast, her flower pot is overflowing. dogs are sniffing through the soil for maggots. she’s still just a girl and i hope she doesn’t know what it means when men holler and call at her like they did to me. my bus fare is next to the butterfly knife in my pocket. or maybe it’s a switchblade, i don’t know. dad gave it to me. he knows that i could do better than this place, but i don’t think i deserve to leave. if that girl’s roots are cut and she wilts in the parking lot of the dollar store, she doesn’t get to go back to mommy and daddy like me. she must look at me and think, “don’t you dare look down your mulatto nose at me. our color is the only thing we have in common.” i want to tell her that i stuck out like a sore thumb in the suburbs, a pewter sledge hammer slamming down on my ceramic knuckles and leaving me with amethyst bruises and ruby blood. but i won’t say anything, because white people volunteer at this school with metal detectors and their copper egos should be left behind the yellow brick road. the girls tell me that they like my hair, but if i say my full name, they’ll know i’ve got white in me. so i’ll miss the bus. i’ll blend in. i’ll hide. it’s only fair (skin).

suburban black

[courtneydove]

the rum used to sting me on its way through the canals of my bloodstream, but now i just get fuzzy memories of sleeping through my days. i was only happy when i was unconscious on the bathroom floor, because i couldn’t feel the throbbing all over my body as it tried to repair itself, protect me from my own bad ideas. i used to wince when i drank rum, but i can handle it now. i’m in control now. i’m in control now. i’m in control now. now. now he moans into my mouth with his hand down my jeans. now i’m floating somewhere in the starless sky behind his overgrown hair - see, the rum numbs my skin to keep me from feeling the rocks and the blood that they drew as we roll through the alley. other frat boys are pissing by the fence behind us. i won’t feel anything until it’s over. he wanted me, and i wanted him. but i don’t think i want myself around anymore.

[courtneydove]

but i think i love you, you know? i know that’s weird, and maybe it’s not true, but i just thought i should say. i thought i should say that i saw a streetlamp and thought it was the moon. somebody yelled, “hey, boo,” from their car when i was walking home, and the guys on the grass watched me light my cigarette: “must be oral fixation.” you probably read about freud and the phallic stage, but i don’t care that you’re older and smarter and i’m probably never gonna get to love you like i want to. i’m proud of myself because i didn’t call you today, and that would have made me seem more desperate, so i’ll text you in the morning. my grandma used to say that girls who walked while they smoked were tarts, and i said, “lemon meringue girls? were they sweet ‘n’ sour?” but nah, she was really calling them sluts.  i’m not a slut, i’m really not, as much as i want to be. maybe if i spent less time stealing pills and bottles from the cabinet, i coulda got somebody to touch me. maybe if i didn’t smoke so much and if my teeth were as white as faraway winters. i have sticky fingers, pickpocketing what i want because god knows he would never give me anything on a silver platter. i stole black panties from the mall because i wanted to have a story to tell before i put somebody in my mouth. i talk too much, i don’t know why i told you all of those things. but you listen, you LISTEN, and you let me let go when no one else would. my secrets were all, “getcha hands off’a me, fool!” and i was like, “okay, but mama won’t care. nobody listens, nobody listens.” nobody but you.

keep me in your camera lens, look at me only through layers of expensive glass.

[courtneydove]

I want to ask Mama if love really exists, but she’s too honest and will probably tell me something that makes my skin crawl and my intestines walk. my heart runs to Dad: he’ll lie about it. they taught me how to do both in a sickly kind of balance where I bare my soul in love letters, only to bandage myself tight so I don’t spill my guts. I’m always embarrassed, humiliated when I catch myself in the mirror. loverboy treats me like a little girl only because I act like one. he told me that when he first saw me down by the water, he thought, “she knows what she’s doing.” but he talked about making love and I couldn’t even tell him the first thing about letting someone come inside. the dirty fingernails and overstimulated tongues of last christmas were barely sex, not even fucking, so far from making love. “I’m naive, so what?” so what is loverboy supposed to do when an honest liar, a virgin-whore falls for him? what he does is ignore my lips on his cheeks when he waves goodbye. he does not return my flattery. he doesn’t call and we don’t kiss.

[courtneydove]

“like, he left me, but he didn’t leave me. it’s not like you can leave someone who you were never really, like, with in the first place, right?”

i know i’m not making any sense, believe me, i know that. but he’s been with me this whole summer, so how could he just be gone?

“he was headed overseas before he met you, you know that, right?” she says with her eyes. “you didn’t change his life, he was moving on his own path long before your chipped nails went in his mouth.”

i wanna tell her it was an accident anyway, we were just playing like kids in the shallow water. we never even hooked up or anything like that. i’m a little girl. i’m a single cell. i’m black baggage forgotten on the conveyor belt at the airport, ‘cause nobody can tell the difference between those things. he’ll see a lot of little things like me when he’s away, but i’m scared that i’ll never see anything like him ever again.

[courtneydove]

his wet swim trunks dripped on the floor by my bed. the puddle bled into a stream that burnt my fingertips. the cicada shell that I am can’t scream anymore. august is here and summer is coming to a close, melted hershey’s bars are begging to be remembered when you finally grow up. I’m not jealous of my older brother anymore - I have friends, too, and we are old souls and young at heart, having chicken fights in chest-deep water to prove that we don’t care if we crack our heads open, we just want to have fun while we can. I wondered if my skin was scratching his shoulders, but he didn’t seem to mind. or maybe I just imagined that he didn’t. maybe none of it was real.