a terror and a tantrum, a fever and a phantom

sarah. romanticism in my coffee. ghosts in the attic eating rose petals. dining on poetry. I leave lipstick kisses on all my disasters. currently residing in the guts of a nightmare.

[terrortantrum]

Because boys will be boys and girls will be victims. Because you went out of the house wearing that? Because you went out of the house alone? Because you went out of the house? Because your shirt is too revealing. Because your skirt is too revealing. Because your skin is too revealing. Because don’t put down your drink. Because don’t drink. Because no doesn’t mean no. Because maybe means yes. Because passed out at a frat party means yes. Because it doesn’t matter if she’s a brilliant scientist or a poet or a regular 35 year old woman unless she is your mother/daughter/sister/aunt/friend/wife. Because it’s ‘how to not be raped’ instead of ‘how to not rape’. Because the word ‘feminist’ is a slur. Because not all men rape. Because ‘not all men’ are so busy arguing with women that they aren’t rapists that they ignore the actions of rapists and misogynists. Because it’s 1 in 3, 1 in 4, 1 in anything. Because she was asking for it. Because “you know she wants it”. Because you was nice to him. Because you were mean to him. Because you friendzoned him. Because you had sex with him before. Because a man’s least favorite shape is the one a woman’s mouth makes when she says ‘no’. Because rape jokes are funny. Because pepper spray was given to you as a birthday gift. Because we victimize the villains and villainize the victims. Because slut-shaming. Because victim blaming. Because you’ve looked between your legs and at your chest and asked why they masquerade as targets. Because you’re a lesbian and you just haven’t been with the right guy yet. Because you’re bisexual and you’ll fuck anything that moves. Because you’re asexual and you just don’t know what you’re missing. Because men who buy condoms are being safe but women who use birth control are sinners and sluts. Because “I have a boyfriend” is the only acceptable form of no. Because you trade scary stories with your friends on the men who could have/would have hurt you. Because your lipstick was red. Because it was pink or purple or black. Because you weren’t wearing lipstick. Because he put his hand on your thigh and you didn’t shake it off like an insect. Because you did the walk of shame once. Because for women it’s called the walk of shame. Because your “no” was your crime and your assault was your punishment. Because passing out is really just an open invitation to your body. Because she declined your invite to the prom, to your house, to coffee. Because consent is really just a form of courtesy. Because your eyelashes made him do it. Because the way you curl your hair made him do it. Because you have breasts. Because you have a vagina. Because “is that a gun in your pocket or are you just happy to see me” doesn’t really matter because either can be used to hurt you. Because he’s “mentally ill”. Because he’s a “nice guy”. Because he deserves you. Because he paid for dinner. Because his friends say it’s your fault. Because your friends say its your fault. Because the police say it’s your fault. Because it must be your fault. Because you’re a bitch/whore/tease/prude/female. Because if you don’t, he’ll kill you. Because you gave him blue balls. Because you got him hard. Because you need to finish what you started, slut. Because society says you owe him. Because society says it not your body, it’s theirs. Because if these reasons and more were water, the Earth would be pure ocean.

S.R.N.

[terrortantrum]

Minnie Macabre

I want a room with nooks and crannies and secrets that have left cracks in the wall. Give me a ghost girl’s attic. Leave me sleeping and hopeful in the basement of a boy who touches flower petals the way he touches women. Gift me with battles in bed but don’t let there be a view of wars from my window. There are sheep in wolves’ clothing in my closet and I’ve got skeletons ballroom dancing in the lamplight. When you come here, you must leave your heart on my pillow, I promise I won’t be angry about the bloodstain that love leaves. I hope dearly that your pretty spirit haunts my bedroom when you’re not there. Put a bit of your soul in my perfume bottles so I can smell like your dreams and we’ll fuck on the lace I’ll wear to my wedding where the groom is not you and you are not you anymore. I need a room where “Hades & Persephone 4ever” are scratched into the floorboards with a tetanus nail and I want this to be the room where the dolls remove their tulle gowns for teddy bears. Where we cut our lips on crescent moons and too many c,o,m,m,a,s,. The walls will be painted scarlet fever, the rug will be stained with witches brew and my diary will have bite marks on every other page. Here we'll put the bell jars with Sylvia's blood. Here we'll put the marble bust of your post-me heart. This is where the X-ray of my broken wrist will hang. This is where the painting of the mermaid who called herself my mother will stay and this is where I place my silver locket caskets on the bedside table within easy reach. We’re going to make art and make love and mostly make the windowpanes rattle like the snakes I nightmare. This is the room where you find yourself half haunted, half headache wholly cliche macabre. This is the room where monsters flirt, where God comes to party, where Lucifer lectures Lolita on love and this is the room we make make make.

[terrortantrum]

T W E N T Y  T H I R T E E N

January taught me that panic still swelled like a storm inside me and that I could always take just one more pill.

February gave me a small, mewling thing. It nestled in my hair and burrowed deep in the cavern of my heart and I watched it be taken away from the cradle of my body.

March murdered me. Left my rotting corpse salt-soaked on my bedroom floor. There was a crime scene in my head that even Jeffrey Dahmer couldn’t bear to look at.

April was looking at the sky after the rain. Watching it hatch like a duck egg and seeing the veins of the sun tendril out. In the horizon, I saw dark clouds and thought "coming or going?"

May was giving up, was fearing anything that dared knock on my bedroom door. I turned my hair red in an attempt to warm the blue saturated beneath my skin.

June was my house with more liquor than hearts, and I couldn’t seem to write anything as beautiful as the pills in my mouth. 

July had me watching explosions in the sky. I loved them so much that I set off a few more behind the bared teeth of my blood line. I was skilled in the art of making shrapnel out of mouths.

August was receiving a postcard in the mail from life. It read "wish you were here" and I sent back a tear-stained envelope stuffed full of failed dreams I’d once clutched too goddamn  t  i  g  h  t.

September had my words framed on someone’s bedroom wall; a decorative "Your voice matters". I discovered my heart beat a little bit faster in a coffee shop down the road.

October found me folding paper, trying to write out my future in a tiny scrawl. It told me to answer the phone and I suffered the consequences of letting it go to voicemail.

November had a gun to my back, ink slipping into my shoulder blade like wings and whenever I wore my coat, I also wore the history of a woman who had stopped recognizing her own hands when they were empty.

December I was given a lesson that youth was a fever I could sweat out. That I would not, would  n e v e r age like fine wine. That my heart tasted bittersweet and would break under even the most cautious fingers

[note to self: salt and burn this year’s bones; don’t let it come back to haunt you.]

[terrortantrum]

I’m seventeen, and I love a girl who is both heaven sent and hell born, who wears a halo atop her horns. Her red hair sets flame to my pillowcase when it’s fanned out like a forest fire. She’s narcotic, all honey and heroin and haikus. Marionette strings grow from her hands like fingernails. Her hand moves and my heart turns puppet in my chest. She makes me a vixen a villain a victim out of the “V” of her hips. I steal kisses from her like a thief, I worship the deity of her wrists, press prayers to her pulse with my lips. In her gray dress that rolls and unfurls like storm clouds, her legs, pale and bright, are lightning strikes and I wanted them wrapped around my head, electrocuting me to oblivion and skin heat. My switchblade smiles her machine gun mouth our tongues are daggers we spar with and I was taught that a woman is a weapon and I learn that she is never more lethal than when in love. For her, I want to be the shore she builds her sandcastles on. For her, I want to be the tree she carves her name into, a declaration that she was there, she’d climbed my branches, she’d touched my leaves. I’ve heard people say that the person you love is like your favorite novel and here is my greatest fear, my cobwebbed covered secret: she is a book I’ve borrowed from the library, she comes with an expiration date, with the inevitability of return. She’ll be consumed by others who will bookmark her pages, and will memorize her passages. Will they find solace in her soft similes the way I had? Will they read between her lines? If our passion is borrowed, I’ll return her dog-eared, her spine cracked from my love. I’ll leave my favorite parts of her in fingerprints and tear stains. Whoever takes her off the shelf, will find the flowers I pressed between her pages and know that she had been loved fiercely. I will remember her by the scorch marks on my pillow and the smell of ink on my fingers.

S.N.

[terrortantrum]

As girls we are taught that the color of our lips is more important than the words that come out of them.

S.N.

[terrortantrum]

I feel like I’m not real. I feel like there’s too much inside me, my skin straining at the seams. Like I need to slice myself open because that’s the only way to let everything bleed out, red river of chaos. Words, fears, ideas, dirt. I’m running on three hours of sleep, three pills, and three cups of coffee. No, I’m not scared, I’m just stretched thin and full. I bought lipstick today because I didn’t know what to do. And I saw my coffee crush but I didn’t know what to do. Everyone keeps putting a happy face at the end of my name and I want to tell them that that’s very wrong. There are too many songs that sound like home but so many more of them just sound like the stranger who told me I had pretty hair and besides I don’t even know what home is to begin with. Today is my sister’s birthday and I want to tell her that growing up is a game that you don’t want to play but it’s too late because she’s been playing for years and I’ve been stuck in jail since the beginning with no get out free card.  I’m sorry I’m always looking at the road it’s just I don’t know where I’m going but I do have to go now because Sylvia is whispering in my ear telling me to take a hot bath, it cures everything. I’ll look for panacea in the soap bubbles and hope I don’t find it going down the drain.

[terrortantrum]

She kissed me like wildfire the blaze moving past my lips and to the very heartland of my soul. I hope the firefighters don’t make it in time …I would happily become ash for her.

S.N.

[terrortantrum]

I’m on 75 and I’ve never felt emptier like the way the sky must feel after a rainstorm I’m on 75 and I’ve never felt sadder crying in my car in a college parking lot thinking, nothing, breathing, falling, medicating, medicating, controlled, controlled, and hurtling out of it; a phone call and I’m sorry I sent my tears to you from miles away and did they freeze the moment you felt them on your cheek? "I don’t want to be me anymore" and those words are the toxic smoke coming out of my cigarette throat I want to suck them back in but they’re already spinning down the line of the receiver like soggy cereal down the drain and I hang up because I am much too small and this phone is too big and so is this world and 75 left me numb and dumb with salt-crusted eyes on my bedroom floor trying to feel something while she held me and rocked me and cried for me, her first baby who was now dreaming of yellow colored car wrecks. 75 took air from my lungs and hope from every heartbeat and I looked up thinking the angels would finally show me their pretty faces like my mom said they would but I just saw my ceiling black with the dust of my former selves. 75 75 75 and I was sinking.

"Seventy-Five" - S.N.

[terrortantrum]

I’ll sit on your couch the paisley cushion closest to the lamp and you’ll say: “How’ve you been?” Maybe I’ll drop the word “Small”. Maybe I won’t say anything at all; it depends on if my lips are threaded together because the devils knows how to wield a needle like a sword and he says I’ve got a pretty mouth to cross-stitch. Maybe I’ll tell you about bullets, blades, pills, and nooses the lullaby I sing myself to sleep with, the things I could put myself to sleep with. I don’t like that my car smells like desperation and salt water; I haven’t been to the ocean in months. I don’t like that I wake up on seven years bad luck because the cracked mirror slipped underneath my sheets again last night. Black coffee cats lick at my heart with sandpaper tongues and the devil is my roommate and likes to write his every thought on my skin in permanent marker and he is the only on who smiles at me these days. Maybe I’ll tell you about the time I tried to find God in a high school cafeteria once but I couldn’t find his face in the green jello so I just ate adolescent insecurities with a pitchfork instead. The sewer kids must hate me now. I bet they don’t pity the tears I feed down my shower drain when I imagine all the red yarn dangling heavy from my wrists and pooling at my feet. I do hate the shell I am, fling me viciously back into the sea for I will never be tucked with love into the pocket of a beachcomber. I swallow these handful of pills like bars of soap, leaving me with bubble bath blood and the reminder of: lather, rinse, repeat you’ll get dirty again so soon. And in the end, I get off that couch money in your hand and my dark beasts running wild around the room.

"Drinking a Molotov Cocktail" - S.N.

[terrortantrum]

[terrortantrum]

[fragilebee]

"you taste like what I imagine swallowing radio wires feels like: all sparks and pop music in my throat.”

[black-leather]

[hellanne]