​tired muscle
fractured memory
let me soak
in the uncertainty
of corrupted data
let me exist
within the gap between
reality and projection

​my lacrimal sac drained into the walls of my heart in a dream.
tears leaked and bloated the muscle to the point of near explosion.
the next morning I woke up with a faint sensation
of having survived drowning,
a twisted tongue,
and the trace of a sour half smile still warm on my face.

​All the men I want are fallen
fruit, not so much forbidden,
as inadvisable to the salubrious
a tad fermented
a worm burrowing through
dark spots and dull skin

Not looking to play savior
I am so fabulously saved,
like red wine on a white shirt,
like seeds weeping into black dirt,
like a number in my phone
I never called

Do I want to be
beneath the tree
soft and tired
like holed-up holy fruit

I'm not addicted,
but it's my favorite kind

The stuff that's started to live
why does live mean leave

Why do I always compare
the hairs on your chest
to winter vines

Why do I crave to make kiddush
over your body

Sinking deeper into the earth
hope a distant, circling bird
my mouth comes upon you
hungry, tasteless animal

But in reality, I turn the pages
of the prayer book
and wonder if I'm rotten

​june bugs cracking open. basil weep and wilt. late night illuminated by fake suns, sticky air, water hanging over us like thick film, glow & smoke. the sun set and set and set and never left.
 
under the moon, saw a fish drained. covered in butterflies. so sweet in death. so full of cold water. mouth leaking. finally after life the body tries to save itself.
 
three fireflies & soft flesh falling off the pit. all tender things i couldn’t catch. the air is supersaturated, threatening rain and birdsong. the wavelength of a cicadas scream is now palpable. see that redshift wail in between the trees? 

over the phantom trees by the back wood,
girls find shelter in laps and butcher
hands, which slip like river water. i remember
that cold, that gray mistaken as exit wound,
that girl who told me to keep walking through
the billow, unsmoken bodied and hairstill.
we bury the shrapnel like pearls as the thaw
spits on the war exhibit with hail chips.
the scythe squeezes a blue syrup in the sky
and we assume this is the process of forgetting.
we learned what parts of ourselves
to kill                    and un-hue          and how to nestle in other
people’s mouths -- to lose the mass of your own
ghost and the glints of family portraits
that ricochets like a white asterisk. our bellies
are filled with half-sharpened knives and apples
​throat-rottened and beautiful.

We take your blue Cadillac,
paid for with a summer’s worth of minimum wage paychecks.
Sometimes, the driver’s side window falls off its track
and you lay on the hot blacktop with a screwdriver
trying to poke it back up from underneath the door.
I burn the backs of my thighs on the navy leather,
turn up the dial on your cassette player,
roll down the window and stick out my hand.
 
For the whole weekend, we dine on sliced oranges
and vodka for every meal.
When we hold hands, our fingers stick.
I walk around wearing almost nothing,
red toenails bright against bare feet,
and pay for my bravery with burnt skin.
 
On the Seaside Boardwalk, you buy me
an impossibly tiny cup of Dippin Dots,
freezer burnt and deliciously pink.
Astronaut ice cream, you call it,
and in the 3 pm sunshine, we snap our eyes shut
and imagine ourselves in the darkness of outer space, floating.
When I peek, your eyes are so crinkled
they have swallowed your long black eyelashes.
Every last one, whole.
 
On the amusement park swings, you are a blur of color:
hand-me-down green t-shirt, worn blue jeans,
white white teeth, red red popsicle lips.
You are not mine but yesterday,
my favorite song came on the radio, all sunshine twang,
and you knew all the words.
I turned around and in the backseat
I saw that you had packed two pillows.
You, brighter than white sunshine
bouncing off cold May waves.

​When you love a boy who did not always know that he was a boy,
loving him will be the most interesting thing about you.
You will have endless answers but their questions are always the same.
They want to know how long you knew,
how his body is changing,
how expensive it is,
if you’re, like, straight now,
and most of all, they want to know how you fuck.
Even the ones who don’t ask are asking how you fuck.
 
The sex does not really change but your hands do.
They learn where they are welcome
(the flat space in the middle of his chest, his ribcage,
shoulders) and recoil from the places they are not
(his breasts, the curve of his hips,
the slope of his thighs).
No one asks how you are but many people will call you brave.
This is confusing because you are not brave,
you are impatient.
 
When it all began, he shut down
so you gently corrected his mother when she talked about
the side effects of taking “steroids.”
You think maybe you never want to be a mother at all.
 
They rarely thank you for the information
and never ask what else you know.
(On average, there are 613 seeds in a pomegranate.
Virginia Woolf published Orlando in 1928.
Girls love boys all the time, and he still
takes his tea with three heaping spoonfuls of sugar.)

       When we were 16 you let our friend Rodney tattoo you in his basement. He had rigged a makeshift tattoo gun from an electric toothbrush and guitar strings. The hum began and your gaze locked with mine. I wondered if you could see my heart in the glaze of my eyes.
       More and more lately we had been hanging out alone. You’d gotten your driver’s permit and your parents didn’t give a shit about teaching you, so I would ride shotgun as we cruised around the neighborhood after school in an ancient Toyota Camry. I was younger by a few months so I didn’t know how to drive either. Nothing seemed as important as the rhythm between us when we exited the car, our heads bobbing up, the chorus of doors slamming, the beat of our Converse hitting the pavement as we walked in step to wherever we were headed. The last few months, you had become the world in which I existed. Sometimes you called me your moon.
       Rodney tattooed the word “punk” on you while you were wearing a denim vest that you’d dedicated time to, sewing patches on all over. It smelled like booze and cigs and sweat and it made you a punk kid. You explained to me that girls have to try harder to be punks. You said we were always seen as weak, that we had to prove ourselves. Once, I saw you kiss another girl at one of Mack McKenna’s basement parties. It made me feel like seaweed, like the gravity had been pulled out of the room. I thought about you kissing other girls a lot, even though I liked boys. I was kind of seeing Mack’s friend, Dylan. I saw him on the days that you worked right after school, or if you had a family thing. You said you didn’t like him. He reminded you of Dr. Frankenstein’s sidekick, Igor and you hated how he shuffled when he walked. But Dylan was my denim vest, my signifier that I deserved to be a punk too.
       I guess it struck me how ironic it was that you had to brand yourself with the word “punk” to make you feel punk. To be fair to you, Rodney wasn’t exactly a certified tattoo artist. He had been after us for the past few weeks, begging us to be his first victims. You weren’t afraid of being the first piece of human flesh he was injecting ink into but I had to come with you. His previous experiments with orange peels sat shriveling on the concrete floor. He pulled out a metal folding chair for me, and you sat on a couch, Rodney perched next to you. The basement was the kind of cold that made you quiet and sank into your joints even though it was the summer. You reached over and grabbed my fingers as Rodney prepped your skin with rubbing alcohol. You’d worn shorts for the event and your tooth white skin glared under the fluorescent lights. I gave your hand a squeeze. Rodney looked over, catching our secret message. He grunted, pulling your leg closer to him, so that his own knees pinned it into place. I smiled but it felt like I was baring my teeth. “Is this safe?” I asked Rodney and he looked up; grinning big and holding the buzzing rig close to your skin. “Of course, babe.” He called me babe a lot, like it was my name. It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Once, I told you that I hated that he called me that and you said he didn’t mean anything by it. He called you babe too and yeah, you didn’t like it but that was just how it was. After all, he knew you were a girl who dated girls so he couldn’t mean anything by it, right? You told me punks aren’t so sensitive. Why didn’t I ever ask you who had given you these lessons? Why didn’t I think it through? Your words were tarnished silver to me and I held onto them tightly, hoping that with enough attention I would be able to uncover what was underneath.
       You winced when he started. I imagined it felt like bee stings. Rodney’s legs clamped around your own and it looked like the two of you were overlapping. Rodney’s greasy hair strands kept slipping from behind his ear and nearly brushed your skin. You kept your eyes on me and kept your hand clasped firmly in mine. I thought about the time I found poetry in the margins of your math notebook. You told me they were songs. I asked if they were about me because when you are 16 everything is about you and you are about everything and you blushed and said no, that’s stupid. In the basement with fluorescent lights shining on your skin being carved up I summoned words you wrote and knew they were about me. A thrill of fear plummeted through me. If your poetry was about me, if you thought about me as much as I thought about you, maybe things would be different. Maybe love would look different than I thought it could. My eyes stayed on the makeshift rig, dipped into india ink every few seconds. The color beat it's way into your skin. I wondered how this change would feel tomorrow. If you would ever think about this night in Rodney’s basement and what you would remember. If it would just be about the letters sinking into your thigh, or if you would remember me holding your hand.
       I wondered if you would grow up to become a lawyer, or some straight laced office chick and you would have to explain this when you wore short skirts or a bathing suit. My heart jumped again, this time so hard that I could feel it, electric between my teeth. I wanted to kiss you, but punks don’t kiss and punks don’t have hearts and punks get basement tattoos that are crooked right atop their knee caps. And I wonder if maybe I’m not a punk after all. Maybe the need to kiss you was something else because I’d never felt it like that before. The feeling radiating from my lips down to my kneecaps. I never felt it for Dylan, or the guy I kissed before him, or any boy I’d ever batted my eyelashes at. I almost jumped up. You smirked at me, all knowing, keeping me glued to the folding chair.
       After Rodney wiped your new tattoo down, he took a picture “for the portfolio.” He gave us a shot of Jameson and we left. The liquor settled bitter and thick on the back of my tongue. We walked side by side. You in your denim vest and Op Ivy shirt, me in my cutoff Nirvana tank top and jeans.
       “What do you want to do now?” You asked. It was almost midnight. When you are 16, summer is the thing of miracles. The world is warm enough to hold you and you have enough agency to weave situations, twirl circumstance and the need for excitement together and see what happens.
       “We could go to yours and watch TV?” I offered. My body still felt warm and melted, strange and empty. Even with all of the possibility in front of us, sometimes it seems best to stay safe. Huddle inside and feed our impulses to quippy television shows that we can quote to one another in the months ahead.
       “Do you think that people will like my tattoo?” You looked at me, eyes shining like a Christmas tree.
       “Duh, none of us have tattoos yet, Rae. You’ll be the coolest of them all.”
       “You’re next,” you laughed. “You are my moon, you always follow me.”
       I wasn’t sure if I should be offended or not. Were my choices not valid? Did I only follow you and ask for your permission?
       I asked you again about that poetry and I really don’t know why. I think it was the line “I just thought about how you sit on couches next to me,” that began the elegy that really caught me. You turned to me and there were street lamps lit all around you, that dead quiet near midnight where things start to feel wilty. You jammed your mouth against my own fast, like a lightning strike. I heard heavy guitar crashes and the air smelled like lilacs and you tasted like fresh cigarettes spiced with irish whiskey and my heart was there. I wondered if you could taste it as your tongue slid against my own. I wondered if you were thinking of the way I sit on couches next to you, facing you, back to the room, staring into your brimstone eyes as if that’s what keeps me upright. You broke away first and I was left kissing the summer air. You said, “I knew it,” as you looped your fingers in between my own and we started walking down the cul de sac to my house, hips bumping, hearts jangling, skin shaking with the aftermath.
       You knew it. You said it and the words burrowed into my brow like shrapnel. You knew it, knew me better than I knew myself. I was jealous of the knowledge you had apparently known all along, and had never thought to make me privy to. Still, your lips brushing against my own at the end of the night were enough for now.
 
        The next day you wore jeans with big holes in the knees so that everyone who saw you could see your new tattoo on display. You greased it up with aquaphor every few minutes and your car smelled like band-aids and cigarettes. It turned my stomach in the crushing heat.
       There was a show in Mack McKenna’s basement that night. His parents had a two car garage but since his mom took off his dad had just let him have the run of the thing. You were excited. You said we didn’t have to tell anyone about us yet, if I wasn’t ready. You knew I had never been in a real relationship before and you understood if I was having trouble with the whole coming out thing. I smiled and it felt like concrete on my face. I wanted to tell you that I was having trouble with it. That it seemed like a spin on my life that I had lived so long without, and even though kissing you felt as natural as breathing I still hadn’t gotten used to the frame of what things looked like now.
       “Was this easy for you?” I asked, my face turned to my legs. I could see the tributaries of shiny white stretch marks from where I grew my tree trunk thighs too fast. I picked at the frayed edges of my shorts, pulling strings free and dropping them onto the floor of the car.
       You were driving, one arm hanging out of the window. You glanced over at me. Your eyes reminded me of dark beer bottles, gleaming and full. “It’s never like, easy. But I guess I just wasn’t patient and I knew what I wanted and I never really thought it was wrong or anything like that. You know my parents are hippies.” Read: your parents rarely showed up or gave a shit.
       “Is it weird that I’m scared?” I was ashamed of how small and metallic my voice sounded. When I looked back to you… Well, it all happened so fast.
       I screamed. They weren’t words, just some guttural noise that only made your warm, dark eyes widen with surprise.
 
       When you woke up in the hospital I was sitting next to you. Your moon. The Explorer cracked into the side of your Camry, pinning your left arm between two behemoth metal monsters. I was safe, a little bruised and shaken but otherwise untouched. Your arm was broken in three places, your wrist fractured, each finger sporting it’s own silver splint. Your head was done up in a white bandage. It matched my own.
       “What happened?” You asked into the crisp, medicinal air. Your voice was sandy with confusion and pain.
       “I was just thinking of the way you look at me when you drive,” I said. My words were overpowered by the rush of your parents to your side. The coo and glow of their relief that you were awake, you were alive, you were battered but otherwise the same girl you’d always been. And after you took in their faces, felt their tears on your skin you looked to me over their shoulders and the look in your eyes told me you heard me. You were scared too but I was there and somewhere inside of you maybe you doubted that. Maybe you thought the fear would have kept me from you, hurled me back into my room for you to come and uncover later. And that was the day I learned that punks do have hearts and punks do kiss and sometimes punks get scared and hurt because at the end of the day we are all just people. 

​I let everyone sleep while I
pour over pillow stories,
wondering if
this is  penance
for greedy moments of slumber
taken in lieu of
coffees shared  between friends
 
tiptoeing around, foraging
for snacks and coffee  at 5AM
slowly crinkling a Cliff bar
out of its  plastic prison
I become  what I hate
ruining soft hours with
incessant but quiet  noise
who knew it only takes
six weeks to turn over
a lifetime of  public grievances;
no rest for the modestly
wicked  sure
changes people
 
odd hours  make you powerful
the master of all sleep
except your own,
crawling into crooks of arms
whispering “it’s time to get up”
like the little voice  deep down
beckoning me to jolt
awake  and prepare
the day  for the sun
to rise and strip me
of my squandered magic

Previously published in {m}aganda magazine, 2018, under the title “The Body of Lilith”
 
They said my body belongs to my future husband. Be touched by another man and I’d be marked as impure. In high school, we were required to wear long-sleeved, loose blouses and long, plaid skirts; in spite of the rage of summer, all for the image of purity, enduring the heat and suffocation for the sanctity of femininity because isn’t that all there is to being a woman? A woman has to be pure until the day of marriage. There is no room to explore our sexuality—why would we even have to? We were created from the lower rib of Adam, molded to be a lifelong companion of a lonely male.

They said my body belongs to the men I meet day after day. In college, I was told several times to lose weight. I’d look better with less pounds, they said. More men will find me attractive if I get slimmer, they said. No one wants a fat, sad girl, they said. There is a standard of beauty you must uphold: huge breasts, slim waist, small feet, round ass, flawless skin, upturned nose, perfect teeth—these are your keys to success. Life is so much easier if you win the genetic lottery. Take catcalls as compliments; at least someone thinks you’re fuckable. Wear something tight but decent. Let them see how defined your shape is, but leave something to the imagination. After all, you were made to become a spectacle that feeds the male gaze.

They said my body belongs inside four walls, preparing dinner plates and doing laundry. I was not born with physical strength ideal for hunting. My bones and muscles were meant to carry a child, not the universe. Running a company, a country, the world—these are a man’s job. I ran everyday errands. At 20, I already get asked how many children I want to have, at what age I plan to settle. I tell them I don’t want to give birth nor get married. “What is the point of being a woman then,” they ask me, “if you won’t build a family?” Is the essence of womanhood solely to become a mother, become a wife? Can I not aim to fall in love with another woman, to conquer the world of art and science, to start a revolution?

They said my body belongs a deity I cannot even believe in. My physical pleasure was an offense to my so-called savior. They keep asking why I do not pray. I keep asking why god is portrayed as a male, when the truth is that women are the ones birthed to create. I will remain agnostic if being faithful means having to kneel in front of one more man just for me to prove my loyalty, just for me to feel that I am alive.

They said my body was everyone else’s but mine. I may be in charge of its function, but not of its appearance nor purpose. Life as a woman continues to feel like living in a room you cannot get yourself to call home, no matter how familiar you are to every crook and cranny, every edge and stain on the cream-colored walls, because something about the place still leaves you alienated, and this thing you just cannot come to grips with, the je ne sais quoi bleeding through the windows, it always finds its way into your little private space, painting itself on the walls and leaving you yearning for comfort from when comfort should be found in this very room.
 
I am done apologizing for giving into the temptation to explore more than I am allowed to. Why am I even living within restrictions when I can own the stars? My body is scarred, exhausted after decades of thinking that I was birthed solely to become a subordinate. Women deserve more than this, but the problem lies in the sad truth that most of us were brought up believing that we do not have a say. Women must realize that our lives are a constant struggle, and we are warriors in defense of our femininity. There is a need to rebel, assert ownership of our own body, find strength in what they call imperfections. We are not boarders of our own bodies, and it’s about time we show the world who’s truly in control.

Last summer I learned that victim was synonymous to sinner.
            I never set out to stand on a pedestal, be on the other
                        end of an empty prayer but the sting of concrete
                                   against fresh wounds, of flesh burning
                        did not numb me enough to not feel
            the way they held me down, force my mouth open
            to accept unwanted Eucharist--
 
            words began to lose
their meaning the way they robbed me of mine.
 
I began to call abuse as experience
because no one believes in demons anymore:
how they claim women’s bodies as theirs, feed                    
on their blood and turn them into slaves, insert themselves
in places they only want        
to destroy. Suddenly whore became another word for survivor.
 
I lived with violence growing inside my womb.
I tried to swallow as many pills as I could just to make
its heart stop from beating, its mouth from
 
consuming all that is left of me,         
but I never got to undergo a proper abortion.             

​i remember when my dreams weren't about you, when i saw incandescent lights and pulled my own body from the river, bruised and rotten. now, i anchor you to the bottom of the ocean, where the water is red and tastes like blood and salt. we sit on parked cars that aren't ours and watch the moon grow so big she touches our hands with her tender blue warmth. i tell you i've never seen snow before and your laughter fills me to the brim, it's excessive, spilling in all directions until we’re both choking under it and i look at you but you've disappeared, leaving behind a soft silver outline and fragments of the memories we had together: touching sweaty foreheads under the blinding february sunlight, me tasting your apple cider mouth until my tongue felt sticky, sewing a gardening patch to the inside of your mothball covered denim jacket. come morning, my body is damp and weightless. your absence is reminiscent of my early-teen heartaches, thick and syrupy. when i dream again, you're looking at me with grief and joy at all once. i sew the image to the back of my eyelids. this way, i can keep you forever.

​My mother told me she was a witch
She would prove it on the cribbage board
A game never lost
She hid herself behind card games
Pick up five, queen of spades
 
One word too far and she’d let tears fall
And the blame would rest on our cheeks
Like the freckles we stole from her
Her teeth, the white chipped peg of my childhood
 
She casted spells over us
Quickness to anger
Rounded nose
A sadness that lives in our blood
Conjured in the womb
 
Her heart-hope festered in us
Swaddled, we never stepped far from home
 
My mother told me she was a witch