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[lippingflowers-blog1]

I am never going to be soft enough I love it too much when my bones peek out from under whitened skin Pressing into bruises across my ribcage When she asks me about the handprints on my wrist and i say i got in a fight And she says doesn’t that hurt And i say yeah like i’d say the sky is blue Or i love her Or i feel a little less like i want to shake apart when we’re together And she looks like i shot her dog And i realize that maybe her smiles don’t come with the feeling of gritty tendon between her teeth Maybe she has never felt exactly where the deep end of her ribs cut away in the swimming pool Has never felt the high dive rush of feeling cracking deep inside of you and holding it tight Never letting go Til it heals crooked When she puts her hands on my wrists and whispers “mine” to the night air and i don’t correct her, she will say of it later that i lead her on And maybe i did What i do know is that when her hands are pulling my elbows backward When her fingers are pressing ice into the pulse points where my arms bend akimbo into shoulders, trying to pull me back from something i can’t contain and want more than anything to fall into and she says stop I have never felt the fight drain so quickly from my bones Like going white as a sheet, like the flashpoint before you pass out and your vision tunnels to her eyes, lips, ice on your skin and blood rushing in your ears When she rubs the pad of her thumb across my chapped lips i don’t say how i want to bite it off How the tongue between lips and teeth and marrow is continuously swiping because i am checking for blood How i clench and unclench my fists like creole music i play non stop, too loud because i have nightmares where they detach from my wrists I don’t tell her i have them in the daytime That each time i touch her i feel like i could fade right into her, like water refracting, and they would go right through and i would never get them back

fight club, excerpt

[lippingflowers-blog1]

I carry the people i cannot save in the pit of my stomach Skinheaded boys and angel girls and broken jaws and ketamine I carry you, big eyes, deep down where it hurts Past the cracked rib into the swimming pool of my guts My veins, my breath And i take you down to the place where acid lives If you’re the kind of person who bleeds gasoline you’re never really surprised when you catch on fire It seems obvious, all at once, why didn’t you think of this before

excerpt from bottom of a well

[lippingflowers-blog1]

italia

When the Christians sacked Rome, they pushed the pagan statues out of the great walls of the colosseum to the ground

They fell from grace as angels, and shattered mortal with the sound of whispers

Experience the carnal

Concrete and alabaster skin and

i am glaringly mortal already

One stray wind away from The Fall; as Michael, as Lucifer

A person cannot be sustained on belief alone, the truth is not enough to set you free

There is no one who can fly with stone wings

Icarus laughs

I always thought he was a fool until the day i saw the sun

And that’s the most brutally human thing there is: the cripplingly familiar feeling of throwing yourself in the fire over and over again

There were 4 candles lit beside the birth of Christ

It is the cruelest irony in the world of religion

To have one’s death eclipsed by one’s life and yet his crucifixion remains in painted eternity, dimly lit to the left of the mosaic

in all that crushing, colourful need, the death is an afterthought

There is a lot to be said about religion

For now, i will say this

I have never, before this, felt holy

At St Augustine, there were 24 candles, and a woman with a rosary

And a priest with a zippered sweater on overtop his robes

A 400 year old church inside another, and a man singing the words of the blessed

There was a Monday night congregation

Three old men

And whatever spirit can be found there

There was the squelch of wet shoes

The light of a handful of mosaics

And imposing booths

Forgive me father, for i have sinned

When I was seventeen years old, I kissed a girl in the shadow of the night and watched as headlights swept over us, like a lion coming from the floor of the Colosseum

and we threw ourselves apart like off a ledge

A year later with lips that are forming ideas that are ancient and ugly and foreign

With cold water around wrists refracting away from my body in the light

With the sound of the blessing in my ears

I dip my hands in a bowl made of gold in a house built of marble and precious stone and prayer

The wealth of the world is in the hands of God

Or those that call themselves god

That should be comforting, shouldn’t it

March, 18/16

[lippingflowers-blog1]

i. riptide I am eight years old I am running on quite literally thin ice and I am someone i am not quite ready to be and i know One foot wrong means something i’m not ready to face The day the boy falls in the blackness below me shifts I know what i am staring at and sometimes i see his face in the water There was no pulling He was just too small for something with a scope so wide it could swallow us There just wasn’t enough ii. undertow The first time i see your eyes it is a body blow I ignore, then, the cathedral curve of your ribs I ignore the way your voice hitches and your ink hair falls And i convulse, backwards Away from the colour i know in my dreams, the colour of something taken too early Earth, recovering from a scorching campaign You grab me by the trachea and pull me under And not for the last time i think What a heavenly way to go iii. shore I am freezing You do not have to be good But i am in sand that is sticking to my jeans My hands clench fists around handfuls of something That unwinds as soon as i let go Nothing is permanent I dig deeper until water runs into my palms and i cannot feel my love line I cannot feel my heartbeat at all I feel the moon above me like a stubborn compass and all i can see Is something looming before me An invitation iv. erosion The day i want to kill myself The one of many, i presume I am enveloped by darkness like an old friend And i despise myself for thinking such a cliche My mind is on sylvia plath and the dead boy And i step out onto the rock face And i trip And i scrape two layers of skin off my knees And my blood marks the stone i was here i was here i was here And i am too busy laughing to jump v. ebb Each day i am confronted with you feels less like stepping in the ring Although i still wish i could I miss that brutal moment The primal feeling of defend or die I know, in that moment, what I am worth I am quantifiable And when expansion seems very far off It is enough In a way I never am

i can’t escape the feeling of water on my skin

[lippingflowers-blog1]

Tell me everything you know, she wrote The sky is blue with sadness, hanging heavy over the crashing ocean. The cry is plaintiff, it needs listening. I know that red is anger, and yellow is cowardice, and violets wither when morals do. I know never to give lilies on a birthday. I know the world is wide and my eyes wider, and I know that I am an artist’s palette, caught. Is not blue a colour of passion too? Should it be relegated to its corner, a relic of a time in white washed skies, when the air was clear? Is not blue the colour of blood as it rushes below the surface so close, is it not the heartbeat felt in the airy cage of a lover’s ribs, is it not the glint of her hair spread out in the moonlight? Is blue not you, too, a murky puddle with no escape transformed to a pond silver as your tongue and twice as sinful? And what is red? The shouting that colours the air is more black than anything, lover, if you look hard enough. A muddied brown, thick and dripping, suffocating, but red in anger? Red is poppy sway breezes and plump pink lips dripping with the juice of strawberries staining fingers. Red is flush of spring and breathy laughs and the colour the curve of her ribs turn when fingers press into her sides. Is red not you, too, a wild and reckless abandon of a night that will haunt you as it rebuilds you? Yellow, dear, that is the most light of all – cannot something so close to purity still be made of a thousand blacker colours? It is true blindness, child, to think that cowardice and courage cannot live in the same cage, fill the same veins. Yellow is buttery sun bright battlefield, yellow is too-bright oceans and the absence of blue, in the same way blue is anguish. Is yellow not you, too, cripplingly familiar and not at all air tight? And if not violets, what then? What flimsy wildflower would one bestow upon a lover? Is there not a time and a place for immodesty, for throwing violets into a fire built out of years of broken matches? Let them be your kindling, and set them alight with burning blue. Lilies, dearest, are for everyday, and let no one tell you otherwise. Your eyes are wider than the world, and see so little you might not have them at all. How to explain love to someone so regimented in her abstraction Who can love, that is a part of such an elaborate fantasy buying into the metaphors given until she’s buried in them Here you are, a cautionary tale If that is everything you know, lover, tell me this What is the truth?

ode to bare legs and a blue dress

[lippingflowers-blog1]

I remember her nails digging into the back of my neck and can’t help but think I would have let her take so many pieces of me if I had just been able to keep her from drowning Her arms are always buried under my ribcage, gnarled over like scar tissue, birch branches in a stiff wind her knuckles are under my diaphragm, which is the reason the water spitting up from my lungs comes up in shallow gasps I remember watching the sky turn yellow-sick and everything get deathly silent, Like the air being sucked out of a room like tombstone teeth smiling with copper pennies dripping from my mouth The world holding its breath, waiting for the smell of sea salt and oxidation to come up from her lungs Waiting for pieces of the wreckage I remember legs, knee deep and numb in water that looks more like the center of a flame The place where it burns brightest And wanting to look away from where I know they begin to refract away from my hips The way the light comes up from underneath like a too-bright battlefield, like yellow, like forget me nots, like the sun shining through very thin marble I remember not noticing I was bleeding until i dripped cherries onto her shirt and called it kissing My skin pulled tight away from bone like it just couldn’t wait to be with her badly enough Like gnashing teeth and looming bones Like an elephant graveyard glinting in the sun, something pretty and shiny and special if you squint Like they just couldn’t get away fast enough The mass of all that ocean, all that wave and rush and riptide I remember feeling like I would love the immensity and i remember being sucked under, pulled into something twirling, twisting Like a fairground that isn’t fun anymore, like childhood coughed up from your lungs, like lipping flowers and the absence of red, like a flame started on years of broken matches falling from anxious hands I remember the feeling the next time she pulls away and I see that her eyes are the colour of the ocean and I also feel somehow like I’m going to die A weight is pressing heavy, like Blair Witch, like Hamlet, like Bellamy Blake and water has a metric weight but the ocean isn’t quantifiable in the way she is so I pretend heartbreak hips aren’t cutting slick as shells And like the cathedral curve of her ribs is a worship, not an absolution As if I put myself on my knees instead of being told to live there As if the phantom hand that never lets go behind my eyes is truly just a spirit Holy Ghost And I remember touching each, individual knob of her spine and feeling like a guest I have never seen anyone so at home in their skin I have never invited anyone in and yet mine always seems to be inhabited by something intangible Like a technicolour movie stuck on repeat Where the dialogue just doesn’t seem to synch up I remember the day i switched my anxiety from my feet to my hands because balling fists is easier to explain away than tapping a two-step into the floorboards and wearing them thin I don’t say that it’s because it felt like my feet were treading water Like the ground beneath me could go any second The barbell across my collarbones could drop and nails in my palms, bitter as seawater, are a better reminder of my permanence than the balls of my feet sinking two feet into wooden floors every time i feel like coming up for air I remember the deck of a boat during a storm, rain across my face like wet warriors, like a full body blow And feeling right at home I remember wearing chokers two places too tight because that’s what i thought i needed, because it felt like fishing wire When her arms wrap around me from behind i recognize that the life jackets are twenty feet away and the storming, frothing beast below me is much easier to be thrown to I have never shied away from baring teeth I remember 14, knowing that little boy drowned in the lake that never quite shook itself from my hair That the droplets on my skin held power greater than i had ever imagined skirting across the thin ice and rocks and When she held my wrist across my pulse in one small hand and said “you feel like the rhythm of the ocean” I heard sirens calling, and Helen of Troy and I went under I did not come up again for two years.

you can’t control the ocean, but damn, did i try