⋆♱✮♱⋆

When you lie to me it’s in the small stuff

[turtledoveroad]

I’m in somebody’s bedroom in Georgia and getting mildly (untrue) high with the tv on

Recently I’ve been into listening to the music I listened to my senior year of high school and if I thought I got it then I get it now.

I’ll be twenty-two on a hot Friday in June

Twenty-one was a year of losing everything I was attached to and being forced to change as much as I kicked and fought

This time last year, I might have been in somebody else’s bed, and imagining that the friendships I thought that I possessed in that moment would last Forever with a capital F

I feel so different and the same.

I can feel myself moving on if not forward, or at least trying, nymph molting to aphid

This year and the year of these songs feel similar

I feel lighter maybe, no less unsure.

[turtledoveroad]

The world is ending and I am 21

I feel stuck in the space between my adolescence with the mountains wrapped around me like a cradle and a cage and what could be if I had the drive to work harder, but I don’t.

Since I can remember all I ever wanted was to leave you (rural america) behind and exist somewhere that didn’t make me feel like a flagpole during a lightning strike

I still want that, but it seems less shiny and bright than it did the first time I went to a city as a conscious human being and saw people who seemed closer to me than the ones at home in a grocery store, living their lives.

I don’t talk to anyone that I knew when I was younger anymore

I got stuck on differences from then and not the fact that I didn’t want to keep in touch, I wanted to forget it and move on

I wasn’t ever really good at making connections at home anyway. Everyone felt like a school friend, not like anyone who wanted to know me fully and completely.

The people I met later who I let know me completely and fully are gone. I must be to blame for that, too.

I’m not good at being alone. I never ever have been, I’m my mother’s only child and I was scared any other children would take her away from me, I have to make my bed and lie in it.

I think I’ve learned a lot about myself in the past four years, I think I’m an entirely different person. But I don’t think I’ll ever be good at being alone.

I could write about the ways that I’ve sabotaged my own happiness for morality or whatever other reason made sense at the time as to why I should never speak to you again, but I won’t.

The world is ending and I’m 21 and I miss everyone and everything I’ve ever loved.

This one is selfish.

[turtledoveroad]

I want to do your laundry for you while you go work every day

And keep your bed warm while I wait for you to get home.

Playing house with you feels like being on lsd at the beach on a very sunny afternoon

And you’re swimming for hours and hours and probably getting sunburnt

But you’re so happy you can’t even feel it burn

When you get home I curl into you and I don’t know if you know but I want to be inside your skin

I’ve thought that about everyone I’ve ever fallen in love with

I fall fast and hard every time and every time I say it feels so different

I think it does with you because this time I feel like I got to choose

I daydream about your laundry and your dishes and how you hold my dry hands in yours when I’m done

The fact that you don’t want me to do anything makes me like you more

But I want to do it for you anyway.

I think we fit our roles well, you take care of me and I keep your bed warm and I keep you satisfied

You keep me satisfied.

I hope you intermingle the lock of my hair that I gave you with your own.

[turtledoveroad]

[turtledoveroad]

I keep having this daydream about you

You’re driving through the farmland and the ivy on the trees speed behind your head while I watch you from the passenger side

I’m running away with you and it’s fulfilling every hormonal fantasy about older women I’ve ever had even though you’re younger than me

You’re stronger than me and it’s obvious when you put your arm around my waist, and I feel the muscles in your arm tense

I want to live in a world without money and you figure out how to make it happen for me, I write your name over and over again on the inside of my thigh with permanent marker

When you touch me it feels like I’m drowning and on fire at the same time, I’m very easily addicted and you’ve triggered the chemical reactions in my mind

You fuck me like you Need to and I silently beg you to stay inside of me forever in some way we haven’t yet figured out

I know I’m bad, but in my dreams you don’t care

You love me anyway

I have this desperate need to be yours even if it’s wrong and I’m wrong and you’re too sweet to me

It’s wrong, but I don’t know how it could be

By the way our bodies slot together like it’s so obvious

I want you how I’m not supposed to, I want you perversely, want you like an animal

You like making my dreams and visions realize themselves

I really want you to choose this one

[turtledoveroad]

Someone has cut the beautiful silvery green tree outside of my window that I used to hide my breasts

from passersby below

It held the generations of birds that sang to me at night and the morning

new babies every spring to chirp and converse with

I can see the little mountain more clearly, the way it’s fuzzy top kisses the clear sky

the dead leaves and branches that sit on the roof outside remind me that my time in my perch with the birds who remember me ancestrally is coming to a quiet close.

[turtledoveroad]

You may pretend to know their songs

but these mountains whisper to me and have lulled me to sleep since I existed inside of my grandmother

You may pretend to know the pines

but the pines sap brought me to life before my bloodline began, their needles falling with the rain harmonize with the endlessly beating talking drum

You may pretend to know the coal

but upon birth it’s fine black dust was caked onto my tiny body, absorbed into the lungs of my momma and her daddy and his daddy too.

You may pretend to know the magic

but I drank the water pooled in the bowl of a birch tree stump a thousand years ago, and I have been awake and nurtured by my mother since then.

[turtledoveroad]

I lay in my floor with a gun pointed to my head, fingers too afraid to shoot

Maybe it isn’t a real gun, maybe it’s the fact that the absence of you in my life for the last while has hurt me deeply despite the short time I knew what it felt like to be cared for by you.

Wishing that you knew won’t help anything it won’t help me and it won’t help you but it pulls at the bottom of my brain like a leopard seal dragging something down, down.

I think I have a sick compulsion and can manage nothing else other than to wonder if things could be better had I made one different move.

But I can’t move, I haven’t been able to move after the day you first opened your mouth to me.

[turtledoveroad]

I want you so badly it makes me sick don’t you look at me like that. Don’t look at me that way. You will never be mine and you will never understand and it drives me crazy that I can’t read your mind

[goodmorningleftside]

First lesbian wedding in the history of the Philippines, in a revolutionary base.

[turtledoveroad]

Stealing glances at a party brings a thrum into my body the way that it does when someone is touching me that way.

I don’t know if I want you that way, I think I would be scared

and sad about it all

but then I think about your throat and your stomach and your shoulders and I change my mind I change it all and I want you and I ache to swallow you entirely and keep you all for myself inside.

I can’t picture it all the way but I just think

I think a lot about it.

I’m drunk and it’s spinning and why do I think I might still love you the way I did at seventeen? All the time means nothing to me. It hasn’t gone away no matter what I do I can’t get rid of the ache I can’t cut it out.

Sometimes I’m scared I’m addicted to the adrenaline my brain gives my body when you look at me

[hard-work]

Tommy Coleman, “seeing you blush”, archival print, 26" X 40", 2011.

[turtledoveroad]

My body is completely conceptual to me

It comes into reality when warm hands glide across my ribs and shoots an ache into my naked chest and alien, slug-creature opening that burns especially for you.

I bring you in with my mouth, and I feel how you feel about me too, maybe you want to be one as much as I do, you want to see inside of me.

You can.

[turtledoveroad]

Maybe I dream of you more often than I would like to think I do.

Caught in a slow dance, long glances stolen far away from anyone else to see.

We get so close, almost touching, and it makes my body ache.

My dream body, I suppose. The reaction may be physical too.

Maybe what I thought of you and I was metaphysical, it exists only in my dream realm.

Even then, we never touch, and I never know if you really know. Do you think one day I’ll get the hint?

October 29, 2024

[turtledoveroad]

The sun fades my curse to you in the neck of your jacket rotting in my car

I can’t appreciate you giving me a little bit of experience before I untied the silver rope from the dock.

I felt sorry for leaving in a hurry, but not for long. I think settling down with you would have stifled something that I need.

July 26, 2024

[turtledoveroad]

The only thing that keeps me alright is being able to

put my mouth on things yours may have touched.

I kiss the empty pink can you left on my nightstand in the absence of you.

I fight with myself not to put your toothbrush on my tongue

Over and over I lick the ends of the joints in my ashtray,

I pray that you will suck the resin from my lips come morning.

June 1, 2024

[turtledoveroad]

I look down at the riverbed and feel like i could be happy down there.

I want to jump in and bathe in the mud at the bottom

find the things people throw down there and come back out at night

to throw them all away

to wish you away

and get pruny and sallow

under the sheath

of silver-clear water

just beyond the bluebells on shore.

while i think about what could be.

I do what the river does so well

and I run, though my legs do not

and melt into the rest of me

April 23, 2023