pink-tiled-bathroom

[pink-tiled-bathroom]

up north, 14/11/2024, 23:32

michigan holds my dreams of an honest, earnest winter--the snow is powder-soft and as white as the gates of heaven. 

there’s a little road in a tucked away town that holds a box of what-ifs, a tray of could-have-been

and theres a god human enough to look mortal who holds midnight in her hair and thunder behind her twilight-filled eyes. 

the road to michigan is closed now, the bridge iced-over and hollow,

but god knows i’ll never stop hoping. 

there’s promise of sunstroke in the neon lights, heatstroke in the blinding xenon radiating from brick to pavement--

this city holds nothing but empty promises and cold november mornings. the bustling metropolitan has called my name since i was thirteen

full of life, lives, breathing in a collective, a single pool of existence--i walk past someone i thought i knew once, i wonder if

their agony sits, waiting, dressed in mink and rubies, smoking a cigarette at their kitchen island?,

if their agony is paired with grief, looming in the shadowed corner, wearing a full face of heavy makeup to mask that she is just love

who has spent one night too many out in the freezing rain? i feel as though i've spent my teenage years keeping the wrong people as my confessionals.

sometimes the past will revisit you time and time again, like the wind beating down on a worn down barnhouse.

i suppose we've always been more alike than not; you have always been afraid, but i just learned how to cover my fear with faux repentance.

for now, i'll wrap my lips around the rim of a drink too strong for me to stomach, so i don't have to focus on the grief-stained inadequacy lurking in my ribs.

i was eleven and already turning to bloodshed. i know no other coping than violence. i only learned to turn it towards myself to save those around me.

we danced over whiskey and i still can't get the taste of you out of my mouth. it's a shame your name still tastes like lies on my tongue.

to be loved is to be devoured, and it's no surprise that you never had much of an appetite. it's a damn pity i've always been hungry.

i wonder if you can feel the blood on your hands. i'll be cordial and make a point not to stare at the warm crimson dripping onto the carpet.

tonight, i spoke with the keeper of my distrust, doubt, qualm; she stood there, silent. she looked a lot like you.

i am tired of being a patron saint of salvation; religion weaves through my touch and i have burned the skin of many lovers in their repentance.

the sunlight creeps through my blinds like smoke, and i wonder when i will find salvation in the touch of a god i won't burn.

my chest aches with the same pulse as the already-sanguine ethanol soaked wounds splaying across my skin, with the same pulse as the midnight rain.

michigan felt real to me, no matter how evanescent it seemed in the soft october daylight. your name is lodged in my chest like brass knuckles, locked around my ribs.

[pink-tiled-bathroom]

where the light doesn't reach, 23/10/2024, 14:24

i can feel the white noise begin in my mouth, static pinpoints leaking down my throat

the same way it spreads across the insides of my cheeks before i vomit. 

i remember when the gas prices stilled between $2.30 and $2.50

and as the bus lulls on its late night passage between work and home

it pauses by a gas station where the sign is burnt out and just reads $3. 9

who is there for the martyrs?, who is there for god,

when they are the ones who give? 

do they spend their late nights alone, clutching a bottle of whiskey between calloused palms and bloody fingertips,

praying to someone above them to make them feel less alone in their pain? or to end it completely?

my mother looked me in the eyes once while asking me for a glass of wine and told me

that i was only born to serve. born to give. never to feel anything besides giving every fibre of my living to anyone who asks for it. 

how is a daughter to live with the weight of being born only to give every part of her away until she rots? that she is undeserving of anything but the chisel?

i feel that this is some sort of convoluted convocation of being a mother’s daughter. 

the nights have gotten cold again. i dont sleep much anymore--the shadows whisper broken cries of shortcomings

and i can smell the copper-ferrous carmine lingering on their chapped lips from my own cold-sweat soaked sheets where i lay (alone, terrified).

i am the deer on the side of the highway, softly lulling between seeing what the people with guns call “god”, and the blinding afterlight of my blood on the asphalt,

the night sky cradles my half-alive body and the starlight looks like broken glass. the stars reflect onto each other like gemstones,

murmuring all the dreams ive had since I was six years old. i pretend everything isn't a metaphor for grief,

i pretend i am still unborn, before i was told no god would return my purity. i repine in the realization that i won't ever be able to go back.

i've lost the ability to tell whether the lump in my throat is some hopeless feat at self sabotage or the smoke in my lungs coming up to choke me,

most times its the former though every time i pray its the latter. the trains blare night in and night out with the cries of crimson on the rails.

sometimes i wish it was me. the only thing that lets me rest at the unholy hours of dawn is romanticizing

a horrid and gory suicide, legs splayed across the gravel, torso mangled, skull crushed in glass shards,

the front of the train now having all it takes to be human (blood, skin, flesh, bone, heat, and nothing inside you but lost dreams).

no epilogue, no note; only the fog hanging heavy over my carcass, ululating all the broken promises once made through gritted teeth.

there is a god just mortal enough to look human. she breathes the color of all my sins, slurring morning dew with crimson brume--

and i repent in the early hours of morning, knowing i fell from the golden light for abandoning god's faith. gabriel will lower his trumpet when i visit him again.

i am a better wound than i am person; my hands have always been blackened with contrition.

if you were to read my name aloud, it would spell out sacrifice, in its most grotesque form. strident, mangled, like knuckles torn to shreds.

there exists within my chest a desire to be wanted-- fervently, earnestly, to be devoured whole until my wounds exsanguinate;

but alas, grief fills october’s empty lungs like kerosene, and i wait around the corner like a mutt.

at my core, i exist as nothing more than a beaten dog. i will wait for you, even if it is not what i want. i know nothing else but waiting for the whip to crack,

tearing into the already blue-black flesh barely hanging onto my bones, spattering vermillion onto the tile like sunlight. every welt feels like home.

at some sentient part of my canine head i want you to drown in the guilt of the blood on your hands. i will bark and bite, but i will never speak.

i wonder if god looks down upon the fallen angels and wishes them well, because he too feels guilty.

[pink-tiled-bathroom]

this summer wind bleeds red, 08/10/2024, 12:56

its june already but the wind still bites.

the sunset over the lake turns the color of my grief--

a strawberry-stained streak on warm olive fingertips on an august evening in a place i no longer know.

i spent last evening with a girl that i knew a summer and a half ago, watching the cargo ships meander past us on the river.

she asks me if i hate my own sorrow, if i look in the mirror and dread the gaping hole between my fourth and fifth ribs on each side.

i tell her that my sorrow is my guilt in a ruby overcoat, that sorrow is just another name that could-have-been once went by.

the sunset starts turning the color of every memory pooling out of the cracks in my palm, dripping onto the worn-down concrete.

she asks me why i keep pulling myself into the sea, why i choose to drown myself when i know how to swim.

i tell her that all my anger was in a box in a forgotten corner under my childhood bed, that someone opened the box and forgot to close it and the house is burnt to ashes.

her eyes were lighter last august. she holds her worries in the marrow of her skull and it clouds the forest pines around her irises with a thick fog.

i once knew a girl who carried her mothers pain on her shoulders for seventeen years despite never once being asked to--

three summers in a row i saw her starlight-stained skin and grief-stricken nightmares come alive in the daylight.

three summers in a row i tore my own halo to carry her, and prayed she would be the one to hold my grief so i could rest.

three summers in a row, i had my wings clipped.

the sunset turns the color of the ache in my chest, that had been there for so long i forgot how bloody my sternum was.

my daydreams flood with clasped hands trembling towards the sky. god left us long ago, but in my eyes, we were always holy.

come lay with me when we're both twenty-five and tell me we aren't our past. come lay with me when we've both sunk our teeth into the fruit of moving on and tell me you wished it was me.

give me a reason for this lamenting. give me a reason for this grief that sits behind my eyes.

the winter wind bites hard, but your fangs haunting my shadows bites harder. oh, how i wish that god speaks to you kindly in this life.

[pink-tiled-bathroom]

empty salvation, 22/09/2024, 18:24

you were standing in the rain, eyes dark and gaze lowered.

i could only see your silhouette through the headlights of your midnight blue car in the early darkness;

you held that goddamned bloody knife in your hand, sobbing contrition that seemed all too similar to a fucked-up backhanded complacency to me.

seventeen years old under your holster, already holding a weapon not made for your hands, and i was only eighteen kneeling before the blade.

unwilling as you claimed you were, you were the hunter with the shotgun; and i was the doe with fangs staring into god's light.

this life was never written in your script, you had only been so young before your father gave you the gun. you had only been so young before you got so angry.

i gave you my youth in exchange for shattered hope. all the wounds scattered across my body scream your name as loud as they can,

all i wanted was for you to look at me as if i was starlight, all i wanted was for you to see me as more than a body.

all this anger was once love, all this grief was once pliancy. i was young too, once.

wings unfurled, soaking wet in the cold june rain, i stood before you, searching for an answer to any of this in your eyes--

i imagine a butcher feels the same remorse, clawing apart bodies that once breathed divine life. your conscience must be stained the color of repentance.

vendetta gores no blood in my body, but there is only so much that gauze can heal. my throat still has bullet shards cutting me open every time i speak.

forgiveness bears no sweet taste on my tongue, but i will drive for hours on backroads so long as my hands are stained with mercy.

my name had always been the bearer of leniency, a fawn in god's forest, before this latent ferocity. the bite of your maw is not forgiving, nor is it kind.

despite the crimson catharsis dripping down my chin, i will search for a divine judgement to our suffering.

you stood before me. you held the rifle. i could hear your sobs. this is not what you wanted. this is not what i wanted either.

[pink-tiled-bathroom]

summer is a metaphor for laying awake at night, 19/07/2024, 00:56

i spent eighteen cradling hope between the flesh of my fingertips,

mirroring my ten years ago on my knees beside my bed praying for salvation.

my new atonement is feeling the way the old floorboards creak under my heels

and pretending the floor hasn’t caved under me, sending me nine floors down onto the cold pavement.

my new sin is shattering every mirror in my cage so i do not see the blood on my face,

letting the burn of forgetting sear the inside of my mouth and drip bottled love down the corners of my lips. 

i spent sixteen in a confessional made of smoked glass, stained with the fears and indulgence of fading teenage dreams. 

i’m spending nineteen sprawled on the bathroom floor with the neck of a bottle of regret 

tightly wrapped inside my bloodied hands, spilling onto the tile in golden streaks of light. 

i still can’t scrub the stains the kitchen knife carved out of my thighs off the shower curtains. 

i knew a girl once. she watches me from the corner and sees her own mother,

passed out on the floor of the master bedroom, blacked out and bloodshot. 

she prayed this wouldn’t happen again. she promised she would be different. 

she sees her brother in me, a living manifestation of lost potential, eyes blackened with lost hope;

he always told her to find her own footsteps. she’s realizing now that she never did. 

i lay awake at night trying to ignore the memories caught in my chest, trying to ignore what could have been had i just tried a little harder. 

these june nights have gotten hotter now. i wish i could spend them tasting the salt on your skin,

but instead i stare at the moon and wonder if you get to see the stars. 

i know every backroad in this small town. every tree breathes the smell of fourteen,

the smell of adolescence and first loves and hiding cigarettes from mom and dad. 

every road here knows your name. every star here knows my prayers. 

every traffic light knows how much i loved the sunkissed freckles on your nose. 

i remember your face, still. i feel you in the marrow of my bones. 

you hold a pervasive presence in every aspect of my life no matter how much time has passed. you are in every crevice of this worn-down house.

there is a convoluted dream that i keep having when the world lays still

where i see you again, where you're grown and different and barely recognizable--

i'll notice you off the familiar color of old stories and faded autumn memories in your eyes,

but i'll know it's you because the constellations between your cheekbones won't ever change.

you'll remember me because i wouldn't have changed. this story ends one of two ways--

you'll remember the way my name tastes between your tongue and teeth and i'll ask you where you've been

and we'll catch up on breakfast and i'll tell you i haven't slept in years;

or you'll search for the pity in my face while i search for the regret in yours. i'll desperately wait for you to say something, anything,

searching for an ounce of remembrance in your expressionless face before you turn away to reach for the strawberries.

i'll go home and pretend i once knew you, look to the medicine cabinet for prepackaged love,

and someone will eventually find me sprawled on the floor having not been breathing for days.

the bathroom sink will run for a while but no one will be there to turn it off.

[pink-tiled-bathroom]

june is grief's overcoat, 20/06/2024, 19:00

you held my worn body that afternoon like it was breathing to you.

my chest was glowing the color of my hurt, washing the inside of your car with crimson light,

the air was thick with knowing, and silence. our mouths were full of eachothers' blood, both the holders of some fucked-up storyline littered with memories.

i remember begging you, praying to you like you were my confessional, asking you to tell me which parts of myself you feel repulsion to,

so i can get rid of them and make something new out of myself, to promise a future where you can open me up and split my ribcage open and be appealed with what you see.

you knew the shape of my hipbones and the way the divots of my palms are permanently stained the color of my guilt

from cupping the overflowing liquid between my two hands. you knew how my throat burned from chasing down whiskey with the stories of my past.

i am afraid that once the roses you gave me wilt, nothing will be left of us but dust and old memories. i am afraid that you gave me the roses for that reason.

you tilted your head at me between tears and conversation that afternoon, wondering why i was staring at you,

when i was trying to memorize the constellations that your freckles make and how your eyes glow like gospel, like the binding of an ancient storybook.

in another life, maybe we could have went through with all the plans we made when we were sixteen. in another life, maybe i could have been enough for you to care.

i remember kissing you that afternoon, the sun drying up your tear-stained neck and leaving ivory streaks down your chest,

trying to convince myself that this wouldn't be the last time, but knowing i would never feel your chapped lips against mine again.

that night i sat in my shower for an hour letting the hot steam make me dizzy, hoping i would come out to a phone call from you like we used to do.

i fell asleep that night dreaming of all the plans we made together coming alive, eating together at our kitchen counter,

neither of our palms stained with worry or regret, the sun kissing your strawberry-stained cheeks through the windows.

i would pray to you, still, as if our church never burnt down; i'd kneel in the ashes and beg for you to tell me who to be, for us to have an ending without grief.

[pink-tiled-bathroom]

confessional of a weeping willow, 01/05/2024, 18:24

i've heard this story once before, over twenty-four new moons ago, in a burning house.

but this time it feels gentler; it's a softer retelling in a quaint house where the sycamores are budding in the april petrichor.

overripe-strawberry stained fingertips and spending skyline sunsets interlinking one another's warm sighs;

open wounds being stitched together--broken pieces forgivingly cradled, meticulously mended and hand-sewn whole.

star-kissed peach skies on sun-speckled skin, callow laughs two cities away, petrichor and aged books wrapped around warm sunlight;

sweet honey intermingling, tasting the vanilla on your lips and savoring the way it flirts with the lavender on mine.

you can’t touch or kiss art in a museum, but i beg to differ--seeing the way the sunlight wraps your features in golden silk,

and the way your beautiful laugh sounds like summer mornings, you are art in its holiest form,

and i was blessed with being able to lace my fingers between yours and kiss the stars on your face.

ivory chiseled in the gods' perfect image. feeling the warmth of your skin against mine is my religion--

i wear your name on my heart like a cross. your touch is my church, your breath my confessional.

your golden halo showers the stained glass in holy light, i would be blessed if you tore me apart and left me in a pile of sinew and bone.

i am the lamb with dogteeth, snapping at your ethereal ivory touch, drawing blood from the unmarred dorsum of your hand.

divine carnelian, warm and fluid, now running down your fingertips, i realize the sin i have committed--

i cower, knowing the slaughterhouse is next. you sit, consoling, and tell me it takes time to learn

that not every hand that reaches towards me is the one to slaughter me. especially not yours.

the only nights that i've slept soundly are the nights i can feel your chest rising and falling near my own.

there is a love-shaped gap in my ribs that can only be filled by you, it is in the shape of your fingerprints.

there is a golden streak of sunlight in the sky. you are in everything i see.

[pink-tiled-bathroom]

sunsets and cigarettes, 21/03/2024, 19:39

i know my eyes are sunken in and my face is misshapen. please, touch me. it's all i have to offer anymore. i'll be quiet if you want me to.

my hand reaches for the reds the second i feel the anger growing. i was never angry before. i never wanted to be my father's daughter.

my hands have been cold for as long as i have been able to remember. there is a fire in my throat and it's charred my mouth--

every word that comes out smells like flame retardant that hadn't worked and I can't stop spitting sparks at the nearest victim. i don't mean to.

every word i say tastes burnt and its bitterness finds a home in the already-wildfire guilt in my lungs.

or maybe the fire in my throat is the guilt. or maybe the fire is my father's anger. i do not feel like a person anymore.

everything has been burning for the past 18 years and i don't really think anything helps anymore.

sometimes the alcohol lets me become numb to the pain of the burns and just feel the warmth of the heat.

i quit smoking for a girl i liked because she said she hated it. i don't know how much longer i can go without seeing red.

every day has become so monotone that it feels as if my life has lost its marrow. i live on the eighth floor, and i think it was a mistake.

my mother exists in my bloods and in my veins. we are both broken women. we still do not see eye to eye.

i look in the mirror and want to rip my skin off until i see flesh, i want to see what i am made of,

i need to prove to myself that i am human and that i exist. i need to prove to myself that i still exist,

i need to know that i am still alive because it hasn't felt like it since the summer i turned fourteen.

i know that nothing happens after death besides the seven minutes of brain activity. i hope that my seven minutes give me a lifetime where i was enough.

there is a graveyard in the marrow of my ribs and each headstone is titled hope. i have only ever been loved for what i can give.

there is something deeply wrong with me. the shadows won't go away anymore, ma. they're getting closer. they need to hurt me.

exacerbating any hint of daylight until it is nothing but a gutted body, blood seeping into the grout--

i am a doe with fangs, meant to be gentle; instead marring every hand thinking that it is the barrel of a hunting rifle.

i don't want to live like this anymore. i can't wait for the day it stops feeling like everything is burning.

[pink-tiled-bathroom]

// // //, pt.///, 30/11/2023, 00:50

//i don't want to feel like a mother again. i don't want to feel like i'm carrying my mother's agony for her.

the worst thing about time is that it takes time. what do you do with all the passing minutes,

hours, days, months, years; what do you do when it all feels like you haven't been alive since you were fifteen?

my mom taught me how to hold onto the knife in my chest but never how to pull it out.

my hands curl around my lamenting like it's the only thing they have ever known.

how long does it take for the human body to realize that it exists?

it is silent. the soft hum of the rain drowns out the feeling of blood pooling in my fingertips.

the days have felt like months and also like seconds. if i were to burn alive, there would be nothing of me but smoke and fear.

a pack of marlboro reds burns a hole into my back pocket and stains two fingers on my left hand the color of aching.

momma calls me, and mumbles some foreign prayer, says she's tired of fighting. i hold back a hum of agreement.

i imagine it takes a hurricane to realize that god exists. i imagine churches face the sky to ask the sun to keep burning.

where can i go to stop? where can i go to rest? my grief pours over my dirty dishes and pools in the sink.

some part of me dies every week. destroying myself is the easiest self-saving i know.

it feels like i haven't breathed since tenth grade. i have always been the one to leave.

[pink-tiled-bathroom]

// // // pt.//, 30/11/2023, 00:50

//some days it feels like i'm seventeen again and romanticizing the idea of someone's knife against my throat,

you call me and i pretend i fell asleep just so i can hear you say "i love you" one last time.

i listen with tired bones and drowsy eyes as you tell me your moondrunk forgivings--

i don't know how to look you in the eyes anymore. every time i try, my guilt eats and eats and eats until all that's left is 18 months ago.

i don't know how to believe you anymore, i don't know how to love anymore,

but i'm trying. you haunt my daydreams and my nightmares all the same.

on some days, it feels like you're more of a taunt of all the love i don't have left to give.

you taught me how to feel and dissect each part of the human heart--

heartbreak makes the aorta and left ventricle ache, and the vena cava sting. it all hurts the same to me.

the memory of you has made a home in all my veins. you've destroyed enough to create a celestial aurora with the fallout.

a familiar sigh of maybe crawls its way into winter. the taste of your want creaks in my kitchen floorboards.

you break bread with the pile of mistrust in the corner of my mind and share wine with my sanctity.

how do i knock at the door knowing you'll answer? how do i knock at the door knowing it's not the same anymore,

but merely a fragment of what could've been, coupled with a glass of grief poured into an unwashed cup,

orange pulp stuck to the walls of the glass and the print of your lips still on the rim.

[pink-tiled-bathroom]

// // // pt./, 30/11/2023, 00:50

//you made me feel like i wasn't broken anymore.

you cupped me in your calloused hands and carried me to bed, the same way my father did for me when i was eight and untouched.

you tasted like vermillion sunrises and your embrace felt like warm august afternoons.

the four carnations that i kept from the bouquet i made you in late october--

they're still standing. one wilted, and one still hasn't bloomed. i'm not sure if it ever will.

the fire in my veins hasn't stopped burning. i think my blood is redder than it ever was before.

you look at me and my ribs collapse. i hold this grief in my hands and it's slipping through the cracks,

i've known you for barely three full moons and i don't think i'll ever love the same again.

the roses you got me still look like velvet; i wonder if my love will always be stained the color of my sins.

my body is a haunted house and you are all the spirits. the doors have not stopped creaking in weeks.

our ambrosia-lacquered nights still run thick through every mention of a tuesday evening.

most days it feels like i have rocks inside my stomach instead of organs,

most days i want to open myself up to check, because i haven't felt human

since we sat in your car that morning and you cried and i couldn't do anything but sit there and stare at you because i couldn't feel anything at all.

i wanted to rip everything out of my body and seal it in a box for you to keep as a condolence.

the notes you wrote me are still on my fridge. it breaks me a little more every time i go to reach for the milk.

[pink-tiled-bathroom]

daybreak, 09/20/2023, 19:07

warm fridays painted on the city skyline, single streak of golden sunset through the start of dusk. candlelight and cashmere nights, september lulls into a liminal hum-- you whisper against my skin and tell me i'm holy, sacred enough to be held, kept, wanted. you taste like divinity and daydreams, like the stardust of the sun's warmest heat. take me downtown to the chandelier, kiss me until our lungs bleed the same shade of red; kiss me until they aren't able to tell our bodies apart. this house is full of sunlight and hope and bandaged dreams, and i can taste the ambition on your lips. you hold your cupped hands to my mouth and let me drink the sunrise that you hold in between your calloused palms. your eyes are full of all the colors of everyone i've ever known, i've known you for eons, across universes; you shrouded me in light in another life, carried me with tender embraces and a touch like silk. you kiss the marrow of my bones and the undersides of my ribs and a month ago you'd say i tasted like tequila and broken memories but you kissed the ache out of my sternum and left me whole again. i let you set my soul ablaze and i stand with blind faith, solar flare slowly blooming in my veins-- trust is a haunted thing but you feel like home. there is a calm life somewhere for us, some quiet house that murmurs, "love, love will be felt here. the windows will open and there will be stars scattered across the bedroom floor. this kitchen is full of hope and we will eat well."

[pink-tiled-bathroom]

daughter, 2023/09/20, 14:52

i am my own mother and i am my own eldest daughter-- i carry my grief in my front pocket and my agony in my cupped hands. i've made my sadness a religion and worship it on bruised knees and clasped hands. i'm stuck in a half-alive of hell, (nostalgia is a wretched thing) but tell me how will i ever let this go-- being a woman is rising out of seafoam and devouring nations. a drowning man will grasp at straws and the water is already neck-deep, my darling, how will i ever let this go? my childhood haunts my dreams and i was eight years old when i first wished to be reborn as a creature of reverence. to love a poet is to be immortalized in art. to be a poet is to wear your grief on your shoulders and i wear my father's anger and my mother's regrets like hand-me-downs. mama, i started loving again. you told me not to and i still won't listen. it'll kill me and i'll still reach for the flame. you never taught me where to put my aches instead of carrying them all the time. there is such a broken thing about dragging the guilt of all your loves like weights of self-imposed persecution-- hurt fills my lungs like smoke but i can't find it in me to cough it out. there is such a broken thing about forgiveness; when you've been hurt&hurt&hurt and all you can do is forgive. when you would rather wear your mother's pity than your father's anger.

[pink-tiled-bathroom]

all that glitters is hope, 2023/08/26, 23:23

i want to taste you on my bedsheets. sun-bleached, covered in adolescence and broken history, drunk on moonlight and being eighteen for the first time-- the same-old paradigm of intertwined past lives. where the quaint woods meet the horizon, and the storm meets the summer breeze-- your eyes meet mine. time stills, venus wanted to let me breathe. getting drunk on late august moonbeams, fever wrapped around bloodied throats; to love is to hope, to spit at fate and create a soft epilogue. to love is to let you hold a knife to my throat and trust you will not draw blood. to love is to breathe; to love is to hold your face in my hands and let the paradox of mortality exist between our veins, co-existing with our blood-stained floors and haloed ceilings; to love is to belong. you make me belong, your love exists as holding my brokenness and gently, meticulously putting each piece together, painting any sharp edge with gold and making my whole soft and alive again. ivory light tears through the curtains, your eyes are distant stars, supernovas with no blast. mercy on my soul, gentle to the wounds on my heart; heir to virtue, heir to faith-- manifested into a blonde blessing. petrichor meets the sunlight and you hold me like glass. you kiss me and i taste the dawn on your lips, i want to wake up to the quiet hum of morning with you. this dusk is still pink with daylight, let me have a few moments more to savor your tenderness. tell me where your grief lives, and i will make it a home for love.

[pink-tiled-bathroom]

maybe later, 2023/08/26, 20:20

i reach for the dust of your shadow in my dreams. this church is a graveyard, shattered mirrors and 3 layers of peeling paint, neck-deep in misery and deathhounds.

i've got to make my way out of this mess.

the swallow has flown far from this home, and my spine and sternum are strewn across this unholy soil. i feel our grief in our bones and i can't wash it off, i don't know anyone i am anymore.

i've got to make my way out of this mess.

staring in the mirror trying to figure out all the blind spots my heart doesn't belong anywhere and the twelfth floor tempts me does this ever pass? or will these lonely nights wrap around my throat and anchor you to my ceiling?

i've got to make my way out of this mess.

knowing it will take seven years until you never touched me has been the biggest grief of it all; i'm moving out of my childhood room and it feels like leaving forever. i don't know how to give you the closure you want.

i've got to make my way out of this mess.

i'll keep strawberries in my freezer and taste them in my dreams for a while, but i'll always remember the taste of blood in my throat. my momma told me my love will choke me and god she was right. i know where your birthmarks are and you know where i buried my dreams.

i've got to make my way out of this mess.

i gave you my best and you gave me my worst, i taught you warm summers and you taught me silent winters. some days i try to blind myself to see the days of spring, but it always snows again.

i made my way out of that mess.

i'll always be sorry, but i'll always remember.

[pink-tiled-bathroom]

solstice, 2023/08/02, 03:00

august is july's still half-drunk mornings-- sordid candor in a spiked lemonade, love-struck tongue twists through peach and rum. the walls have grown bare without you here-- all chipped-blue childhood and choked-out chances. i lay in my bed and almost imagine you there, amber moss and fresh laundry and sweet coconut and home. faded-blonde highlights tangled all across my navy pillowcase. i remember how your spine glows red-hot at night, how your cheeks glow pink after a sip of wine; eyes like sunlit woods and freckled orange constellations, and you always tasted like a love-drunk july. my ribs ache every night, still, where your hands once held me. don't you wish we had a softer love?, a sacred love that bears no name to grief?, i look over at you and you aren't there. i still feel your spine pressing into my chest. my hands remember the curves and angles of your face. i think if you look at me the way you have been lately, i'll cry and cry and cry until i am no more than rain. my mattress hasn't felt the same since it remembers your weight. i happened to be the lamb in your slaughterhouse-- i have burned her over and over in hopes she will come alive in the flame. my hands are still covered in ash and cinnabar splatters. your name tastes like liquor in my mouth-- the strongest drink the bar offers-- and i will unlearn the burn in the back of my throat if it means having the weight in my mattress back in a softer, more sacred way. so let me get drunk on your solstice, if it means i get to taste the sun again.

[pink-tiled-bathroom]

..., 2023/06/19, 23:32

i haven’t slept in the past three weeks and wake up hoping you'll find me...somewhere. i wake up every night now from either nightmares or the ache in my bones, so i stay up doing nothing to avoid myself. the pit in my stomach has grown to my throat and im afraid what it'll be when i finally vomit it out. i still remember how you reek of summer and how your bones bleed red with heat. i am a map of all the things that never were-- the sun finally sets and i tell the moon all the secrets i never told you, she listens as i cry to her about the could-have-beens. tell me how the light seeps in through your teeth, tell me how you died ten times over in your not-home, tell me how your childhood is the knife still half-stuck in the marrow beneath your ribs; how your lips tasted like august, and i wake up and my mouth spills your name, saliva stained the color of our memories. i wish i could’ve told you, drunk on midnight's gaze, how i felt more or less not-human, how i feel wings carving out the space between vertebrae, how i feel the warm crimson dripping from each wound; each cry of agony is your name splitting my teeth. oh, how i wish you treated me holy as you seldom did. how i wish i could feel your want in the marrow of my aches. you took my holiness and ran with it, leaving me to rot. no matter how bloody my breath is, i am the lamb in your slaughterhouse; no matter how selfish it is, i wish you would be scared to lose me.