We carried our poverty on our rib cages,
          nicotine stained fingertips,
          grizzled dreams,
          and in our veins--
                     thick
          with the abandon of what was,
and the romantics that could be.
 
Our connections to each other
were ultimately built upon our
                                                               lack of connections
to the people
that culture told us would
care the most.
 
So we shoveled our histories
into compartmentalized valves;
hoping that
t i m e and pressure
might condense them into
something more
manageable.
 
And then:
                      rebuilt
with our only tools,
                      a FORTRESS
to withstand the blows
of those who told us
we were not enough.
 
What we failed to realize
is that you cannot build a barricade
                                                                  | To keep out
an enemy that is settled in your
           gut.

Sometimes I remember
he carried that ankle bracelet with more care
than his child,
            wrapping it tenderly,
                    bathing it with a soft,   wet,    sponge.
 
            And in the early morning,
on our family outing to the alley,
behind the grey building,
where he peed in a cup,
to prove his worth--
            we would cross our fingers for him.
                           For his son.
                       For ourselves.
 
And in the afternoon
we would park-hop with the baby,
playing P-I-G or H-O-R-S-E,
            swinging
on creaky play-sets,
            until the sun rested its brow
                       on the mountain’s ragged edge.
 
We would part
            when the messy family car
                       pulled out of the parking lot,
leaving me behind to
prove my worth--
 
It still amazes me
how many
different varieties of grease
can coat your soles
after a night of work.
 
How slick it makes each step
 
            ​as you walk home along the highway.

Here, we laid to rest the bones
Of my grandmother’s house
In the country dirt
Velvety with worms.

As we light the wooden foundation,
I realize
​In the blink of an adult eye,
A year disappears.
That’s why as children,
We can’t understand the value
Of staring contests.

Fighting the humidity
The fire climbs eagerly
Pulling itself along the peeling roof with blue-tipped fingers
Hungry for asbestos
Watching below, I remember:

Coffee, splashed with milk
Armed to the teeth with sugar
Marching across my mouth at the breakfast table
While she fanned a grease fire
Toward the open screen door.

Later, while searching for soda pop
In the back of the dusty pantry,
My cousins and I shrieked
Over the gams of a passing daddy long-leg.

Her nearby barn had a steeple
On top, a cloudy glass ball
She said it wards off lightning, 
But I know the truth.
There is magic in this place.

As the flames engulf the porch,
I can hear screams inside
The living room several Christmases ago
Tearing of wrapping paper, siren-bright.
Bodies everywhere
Flopped across pillows, swollen with ham and potatoes.

Now the house dissolves like a sandcastle,
On the beach of this bucolic landscape
As the moonless tide of prairie grasses
Sweeps it out to sea.

Here, we laid to rest the bones
Of my grandmother’s house
But in restless peace I find longing,
An ache for a home where magic from the sky
​Finds new passage underground.

​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.)

​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.