pink-tiled-bathroom

[pink-tiled-bathroom]

a letter to 25, 05/01/2025, 02:45

are your hands still stained with regret? does grief still pour out of your mouth where love once dripped?

is there still a hole in your chest with the same silhouette of wishing what can’t be?

did you try to drown your guilt in suicide again? did it almost work?

are we still trying to fill the gap between tomorrow and yesterday with week-old whiskey? 

i know you won't see light when you close your eyes.

did we get married like we wished we would? did you cry at the altar,

begging god to make the nostalgia of past loves stop leaving gaping wounds across your heart?

the church was empty, wasn't it?

did you ever stop forgiving? forgetting? do you still remember me?

are you still the leader of a support group of people who had the misfortune of tasting your name on their tongue?

is your head still an overcrowded emergency room, all poorly packed gauze and bleeding out,

or do you finally see yourself as more than the hospital you were born in?

did the flashing lights stop leaving an ivory streak in your vision? 

do you still sleep with a nightlight on in fear of your memories coming to haunt you on a midsummers evening?

did you ever learn to stop asking too many questions? 

i know breathing still feels like pulling shards of glass up from your lungs.

do you still stare up at god, fists clenched between devotion and fury?

you still know you’ll never be holy. your wings are still bloodstained and tattered, aren’t they?

do you still pray for redemption in a pair of bourbon brown eyes?

you'll never stop wanting more. you'll never stop looking for a way out, something to make you feel whole, alive, full of blood and marrow.

are you still full of rot? do you still lick the flames like you were born in a pit of fire?

i know you're still haunted.

there's still crimson dripping down your lip. carmine red, the same color of your desire. the same color of your guilt, repentance, and sin.

are you still decaying? is the decadence of being adored still too much to stomach, do you still get sick every time you feel affection?

you can't be loved if you don't stop running from it. but that's all you ever do--run, run, run, because you have no solid ground within you.

or, maybe things have changed. maybe you learned to stop running. (but i really doubt it. maybe you're just lying to yourself again.)

do you still have rotten dreams scattered across your living room, empty boxes of food splayed across the kitchen?

you'll always be full of sin.

does the mundane still haunt you? will you ever stop, for fuck's sake, wanting more?

i'm assuming the whiskey doesn't burn anymore. i'm assuming it tastes like sweet wine, going down like molasses and honey.

you cried at the altar because you couldn't rid yourself of your past. you sobbed, breathless, upon coming face to face with your twenty-sixth year of living,

because you knew it was another promise broken. you know that red string will always be tied around your pinky, whether you can find the other end or not.

do you still feel like you're sixteen? do we ever stop feeling like we're sixteen?

you're trapped in summer dusk, where the splintering heat makes home feel like hell,

and every promise feels like it’s etched into the marrow of your bones?

did you ever stop crucifying yourself upon every sin? your palms are already punctured through. it's more of a hanging than a crucifixion now.

you can't tell whether the wood slivered into your palms is from the pews or the cross.

with sincerity and my deepest condolences, i hope you're doing well. i hope you have everything i wanted,

i hope you were led to somewhere worth staying.

[pink-tiled-bathroom]

the taste of love (whiskey and wildfires), 31/12/2024, 01:31

this is only an ode to an angel that haunts me, a ballad of what never was and what i'm losing hope in ever being--

your memory besets me. the early summer mornings of adolescence and sweet july heat warming our chests,

blackberries staining our lips the ripe color of love. i choose to only remember the good in you.

i choose to try to forget what you did to me. it is always agonizing to be the one that doesn’t forget—it cuts through my being,

every fibre of tissue and bloody marrow that exists within my body. it hurts, y'know. it hurts knowing the past stays in the past, forevermore,

no going back to relive just a moment more, do things differently, savor the kiss just a little longer.

linger by the doorway to stare for another minute, let time pass without the constant fear of it consuming a memory.

you’ll always be tainted the color of summer in my memories, all strawberry red in the face and peach blush spreading across your warm skin.

it’s cold now here in this barren americana. the snow lays across the grass like the thicket of grief that keeps covering every memory i have of you,

like ivy tainted with the wish of what could have been had we not been just seventeen--we were just kids learning what the word love tasted like.

the cost of divinity is everything one gives to become mortal. the cost of mortality is divinity. there is no other version of this paradox. 

there is something haunting about seeing once pale white wings plucked thin and painted the color of shame.

there’s been a cold weight on my chest that doesn’t go away. the only thing that makes it warm is the sweet whiskey burning the insides of my cheeks.

it's the last day of december in the last year i'll ever be a teenager, the last day in a year where we loved like kids in the midsummer sun.

i don't think i'll ever stop waiting. i never wanted my name to be a wound to you.

either we will have another chance at being, or my daughter will hold the name of my biggest grief, and she will hold your name.

i’m tired of the gaping hole in my chest in the shape of your name. i’m tired of my sternum being shot through with the silhouette of your stature.

i still have so much to tell you and so much to do. this just serves as an excerpt of the hurricane your name carries.

the light spills onto the floorboards like spattered blood. i think the crimson in the divots of my hands will always serve as a reminder that i couldn't be enough.

we will never be seventeen again, but i hope you keep the love i gave you in a box under your bed for you to reminisce on when you need it the most.

january dawns on the horizon with a red sun and a sky painted the grief of twenty.

do you think of me when it's silent, cold, when the frozen peak wraps around you like venom? or when it's blistering, hot, like the wildfire we once were,

flames sputtering from every orfice, vicious, consuming; i can still taste the smoke in the back of my throat--

whether from the bad habits i picked up after our love broke apart or from the embers our love held, i'm not sure i want to know.

i'd still carry you to the bed if you fell asleep in my arms. i'd still be the one to make the drive, answer the call,

i'm not sure why i've been so angry lately. it's moreso that i can't stop imagining a life where we had a little house under a starry sky,

full of love and laughter and good food. i still want you to eat well. maybe someday i'll stop writing you into all the tenderness i come across.

your ghost sits beside me through every beautiful moment i experience, when the world stills into silence. i wish it could sit a little closer.

i think the shape of our memories will always hold a jagged edge, razor sharp that cuts to the bone.

i think the shape of our memories will always hold a soft side, tender and warm through the coldest winters.

come haunt me, my sweet angel.

[pink-tiled-bathroom]

only the flame can melt the snow, 20/12/2024, 14:30

i've been drinking water from a whiskey glass, spending late nights in empty bars roaming empty halls--

the echo of your name laminates every thought i have with a resounding murmur of guilt, shame plastered on every corner.

there's a gentle warble of "i'm here, i'm still waiting for you." the days have grown cold, there's no saving within these closed-in walls.

faded colors of the midwest painted on the city skyline, empty calls of hope bounce across the city-country border,

i wonder what we could've been had we gotten a little more time. we were only kids. we were only still sixteen in our hearts.

a streak of luster whips across midnight, neon lights reflecting in moondrunk irises, already buried knee-deep in sacrilegious sanctity.

looking between every pew to find what could make me holy--what won't cure me is drowned in wednesday nights of putting together all my broken parts.

for what i lack in rationality i make up for in letting the bitterness set in from the alleyways of this run-down saint city.

your kiss tasted like warm august afternoons, peppered with auburn autumns and sunkissed friday nights.

i turn to look over my shoulder and i'm greeted with star-speckled sunsets, ancient tales of teenage years lost to love--

i remember the way your skin tasted like salty-sweet innocence. i remember giving you my seventeeth life, in the faded july lights.

your touch was my religion, your breath my confessional, this church was a sanctimonious home for the golden sunset and ivory dove.

but this church is now a graveyard, this church is going up in flames, my love, so what are we to do except pray?

doomed together, doomed apart—we are the flames of the fire, nothing without one another but burning everything in sight once alight again. 

i have a recurring nightmare where your taillights are fading into stars and all i can muster is a weak cry--that you can't hear--for you to stay.

it's not like me to admit that i wanted more. we could have been tied together in golden sunlight, but the singed ends of the ribbon are clear and plain.

tell me darling, would you rather have the truth from all the lies you’ve been told?

would you rather the aching in your chest be cured? would you rather it stay, because it’s the last left of a love already gone?

sweet cinnamon seeping over the scalding sunlight like starfire, daymares crowning through the sunbeams already cold,

i am the lamb in the slaughterhouse, forgiving after every slash. i am the song of the crimson-soaked-ivory, beaten to blue swan.

crown from the neck of the bottle, ain’t nothin left for me here besides the dust your train left on the tracks, sin split in two, splattering. 

everything around me is shattering, every mirror splits into shards of sharp stings, i'm standing in the rubble trying to pull myself together,

this love keeps pulling me in, but my heart knows it's wrong, there has to be a means to an end, a verse to sew the fracturing,

there has to be a good ending to all of this, there has to be some divinity behind this wreckage, some meaning to this pain, whether

it's us or not. this recurring nightmare ends the same--knees to gravel, neck to blade.

there ain't no hope for the beggars. there ain't no mercy for the ones with bloodstained palms.

your irises aglow meet mine. i open my eyes and there's nothing beside me but dust and rubble, the last drops from the bottom of a bottleneck, pin-gone grenade.

we were holy while we were young. we were witnesses of our own cain, the keeper of our misery. we were the prayers, the clasped hands and psalms.

[pink-tiled-bathroom]

angels don't fly in december, 09/12/2024, 09:39

angels were made for roaming highways. angels were made to breathe dew upon the grass when the nights hit below zero.

it's gotten cold here without you. i wonder if you ever got any of my letters, or if they got intercepted halfway by the choke of "no, not yet".

i don't know if i ever got a silver platter. maybe god gave me one someday long ago, but i tucked it under my wings in some spin of fury for not answering prayers.

sometimes being a teenager means abandoning any faith of being a child again. sometimes being an adult means abandoning any faith at all--

red wings furled out across the span of a three lane county highway, half dead with the breath of americana fogging up the night breeze;

you can't find a love like mine across the midwest. you can't find spite, spitting flames in the face of a god like mine across the north.

michigan came a close second but i'd be damned if i let another god try to chisel a blade into an already-open wound, clawed-up hands gripping the hilt.

bloodshot eyes staring at me from across an old fucked-up toyota camry, the angel of a truck bed sitting atop the roof of the fading red paint--

your name is chiseled into my bones; my insides are guts, red-black blood, and runes. i have all it takes to encompass divinity in its rawest form.

but the pastor says i'll always be a fallen angel. the priests all say i'm beyond help. maybe this is some fucked up attempt at redemption, self-saving.

maybe this is all some fucked up joke only told in alleyways behind bars at 3am, too drunk to think and not sober enough to hold back.

there is no solace in this december snow. all it brings is cold. the wind bites, and all the scars peppered across my shoulders open up in blooming carmine streaks.

it comes as no surprise that my name rhymes with heaven. but what happens when the pillars holding up the ivory gates come crumbling down?

defiance comes as the definition of early december, no matter how much you try to fight it. the fight is all you have left in you this time of year.

my wings are bitten and bruised, plumes coming out in bundles. there's not much left of me but fire, fight, and spitting in the face of god.

your god has never been benevolent to me. i was three years old, already praying for the fear to go away. i was three years old, prayers unanswered.

i was fifteen when i knew god was dead. i was fifteen when i figured gabriel would hide his trumpet beneath his wing upon locking eyes with me.

these buckeyes and milkweeds have always reviled in disdain in secret whispers behind the bushes. ain't no pride in this americana.

bruised conscience painted purple across the city skyline--the city don't take away from the fact that it's still all grassland and hometowns here.

her eyes got lighter. they're the lake frozen over, the cold january ice creeping up on your front porch, covering the grass in a layer of steel blue verglas.

starlings carry your voice outside my windows. i wake up to endless cries of what that fated november night must've sounded like.

there ain't no rest for the damned in the silence, only evening in and evening out of choked-up sobs of purity taken and lost by now-strangers.

gold glimmering in the only sunlight left of the season, salty glass teardrops splattering down on the still-warm pavement--

the blood on my thighs runs down my legs in some pathetic attempt of discouraging another stab of taking away whatever innocence i have left.

cure this malady with your divinity. cure my bloodlust with the ferrous touch of your sacreligious breath.

angels were made for leaving god. angels were made to fall from grace, to roam this desolate wasteland wondering if there's any salvation in the whiskey at the bottom of a glass.

[pink-tiled-bathroom]

sin is a synonym for living, 29/11/2024, 20:00

i let you rest your name on my tongue like honey. i let you rest your head on my lap in a daydream i keep on an endless replay between broken sobs.

your lips met mine like it was religion. our hands met together in a muddled pool of sunset, and we tie this knot in holy matrimony--

but darling, would we not be tying a noose?

i make a point to not notice you staring at me across the room. i make a point to avoid the knives in my kitchen drawer.

you are god's sweetest lamb, perhaps too sweet, as even the sugar can make you choke. even your blood runs like syrup and crystallizes on the grass.

there is something so deserving of repentance after once coming face to face with sanctity.

i spend my nightmares running away from the grasp of being holy. its a divine paradox that i still don't understand;

whether holiness spells purity, absolution, or control, it's laden with mistrust. can i ever really reach divinity if my soul is already tainted the color of my sin?

my wings glow red and yet i still run away from any sense of saving within arm's reach. ive met a girl whose name felt like god's,

whose touch felt like eve's, like mother mary touching her newborn son for the first time in the damp winter barn.

mary, did you know your child was a curse? did you know your child would bleed out in front of the romans?

mary, your son was a blessing turned bitter--a blessing once taught me grace could be found face-down on my bathroom floor at the bottom of a bottle.

mary, ask your son if there is redemption in suffering, because all i have left are these scars, and a blade i used to call holy-- the echo of your name.

darling, did you know your touch would burn my skin?, leave your fingerprints seared into the divots of my waist?

was your touch ever holy, or did you wear a coat of the lamb's fur? i don't think i ever truly knew you.

i'm sober now, i promise. but the bottle calls my name night after night, whispering the way you used to, murmuring "i love you"s in the dead of night.

sobriety is the crucifixion, drunkenness the lamb's blood spattering on the roman asphalt. self-destruction is his collapse in jerusalem.

your name left a gash in my throat and i called it love. your hands turned from clasped in worship to clasping the blade now in my sternum.

in the yellow-gold light, anything seems holy enough to save you. i licked salt off of knives and called it sanctity.

maybe i am a deer with dogteeth. maybe you are a lamb with fangs. all we had to offer eachother was ivory stained eachothers' shades of crimson.

i don't believe either of us were made for redemption with this much blood on our hands. i think we must live with our sins on our palms and call it being alive.

[pink-tiled-bathroom]

promise of a bronzed sunrise, 25/11/2024, 12:05

you grow old with the promise of a salvation just out of grasp at the end of our time,

spending senescence with clasped hands, shaky with the prayer of seeing a light not deserved when put on the scale; your sin outweighs your merit.

you walk my mind like an empty hall, you're a ghost without a body, a faux martyr with no soul--

this ivy is overgrown, leaking sunsets from its bruised stems. i wonder if your mind is stained the color of my name.

i let you carve your name into my bones; i took your grief and let its tears pool in the crevices of my palms. why wasn’t that enough?

reading in black-and-white, not knowing if the words are tainted elysium or bluebells already arranged in a bouquet;

i've always found it paradoxical how my name spells "heaven" in another language i'm not sure i understand anymore.

the barn is burning a bright tawny bronze, the horses keep galloping towards the azure but it keeps flowing cardinally away.

this hometown is desolate with grief; every driveway is cracked with could-have-been, every backroad laced with lost loves.

saturdays have always been for the wicked. i'm convinced god only exists in the unholy 3am on these midwest highways.

angels still fly over bridges, sometimes in dealership GMC trucks with the engine light burnt into the dash,

angels still fly over state routes with nearly-clipped wings in roughed-up chevy hatchbacks. most angels have abandoned any hope of valhalla.

the angels don't yet know that these highways all have a dead end. they don't lead anywhere besides their own sanctity being split open in front of them.

i still see my wings when i look in the mirror. the biggest ones sprouting from my shoulder blades got clipped when i was sixteen--

but the rest still remain, glowing a blazing, bloody shade of red. i remember when they glowed ivory in the gleaming sunlight.

there's a ghost that creaks my floorboards and presses a divot into the other half of my bed. i used to know her--sometime that feels like eons ago.

that ghost holds an insidious presence in the mundane and the extreme, allowing no escape from what the past held between us--

between getting groceries and the nightmares that disturb my sleep, your ghost will not let me know the definition of peace.

you are no saviour, you are no sufferer for the weak--the hands that grasp at the divine have no space in a peaceful passing.

i earned the blood on my hands. i earned the privilege for my wings to glow crimson in the heat of the sun--this violence is carved into my skin.

there is no pride in this americana, there is no pride in this violence; your mendacity has no welcome in this holy light.

the violence still hurts. it took too much from a child to be subject to violence that great. your lies only added to the burn, the night i found out it wasn't real.

the weeks following that somber night have been nothing short of a recurring nightmare. i walk around in a cold sweat, holding back grief behind my eyes.

you were a ghost, yet ripped the blade out of my already-bleeding sternum. i trusted that you would not draw blood.

salt in the wound, hydrochloric poured into the cut, no pity or shame for the red fingerprints around the hilt of the spear.

i licked the salt and called it love. it burnt my tongue and i called the sting benevolence. i did not wait for the salt to turn sweet before calling it desire.

i was the bearer of the blade before. i can only hope that you're drowning in the viscosity of your guilt, too.

the breath of november plagues my lungs a shade of a cut already dried, but the nearing of the exhale just opens up the sore again;

the same wound from which my attempts to take back the rapier were futile. the same wound i trusted you not to open.

did i let the blade rest too long within my chest, thinking the steel could turn soft in your hands?

if sanctity was within reach, did i push it away with the fear of its light manifesting my flaws? was i not enough?

i can only hope that you will be allowed salvation following your senescence. i can only pray you will find atonement for the other half of the scales.

my wings won't stop burning red. but i can only hope that i will find sanctity in a god i know won't hear me anymore.

[pink-tiled-bathroom]

even god hides from the wolves, 17/11/2024, 23:30

winter's fangs have already sunk into november's throat, and she will soon bleed the color of december.

i grasp at the streams of light spilling onto my floors like honeyed molasses. my palms face towards the sun,

cupping the sanctity of winter and trying to decide if it should be crucified in hopes of creating God.

this devotion is not reverent; this devotion is violent and the underside of its nails are stained mahogany with its ferocity.

i've been trying to drown the grief clawing its way up my already bloodied throat with liquid love

but all it does is make the wounds sting. the grief is still there. it never goes away. 

there is an angel with a broken halo that follows me like a dog and i turn away from it, not knowing the words to say that i want to come back.

i’ve seen its halo heal and break again ten times over. it’s seen mine shatter and be replaced with horns. 

the baby’s breath on my table whispers all the lies the wolves told me, memories of the porch step meeting my knees, spattering teardrops on the concrete. 

i don’t dare open my closet door. i don’t know what lays there anymore. sleep takes my throat and lets golden sunlight spill between our mouths—

she tastes like you. i open my eyes and you’re gone. the stars along the coastline are brighter than usual. i don’t ask why. 

sundays sleeves wrap around sacrilegious splices—seconds—of silence;

and thursdays feel like leaving your sanctity in the foyer, forgetting your keys at the door. 

the mundane holds no mercy for the weak. i figure i must be god to live this one out. 

my hands are calloused and my knees are bruised—whether from sin or saviour, i fear to ask. there’s blood on the carpets. 

i remember being fourteen and raspberries staining my teeth and tongue, gods name bore no place in the smoke filling my lungs. i was only fourteen. 

this is an ode to a conversation i've had stuck in my teeth since the beginning of november, since the day i looked at the bullshit lies clouding your eyes;

eyes of sunrise bleeding into twilight, ring of sunlight on the night sea, sunkissed stars across the bridge of your nose and midnight's kisses across your spine--

the decayed vision of you seeps into the nostalgia of the past coupled with the sting of propane. let's not get selfish here; you devoured me and spat me out.

it's july in appalachia and the mountains are calling your name. i don't turn back to look for you.

i gave you my barely-alive, beating heart, and you turned me into a slaughterhouse. my still heart hangs from a hook in the corner of your room.

a girl i knew last winter almost died two nights ago. in the silence of the aftermath, there is a susurrous hum of "god exists".

the sun will set for yet another evening. every vein in my body pulsates with the hymn of war, my irises already clouded with the smell of blackened ash.

[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.