someone else ate my little heart out:

my brother is still dead,

my lashes still dry

the sheets are wet.

better write it

years have gone by and

what lovely new spines:

unbending,
unending bone,

untended decimation,
once open now

inflexible.
once swaying effortlessly

like reeds in your lake,

now planted firmly in the dry
“no”

spines that are walking,

sauntering,

coming back for an earring they forgot.
machete sacrums.

nerves like fighters

marinading in indignity,
blood lust,
“no.”

so many years have gone by.

but they are spines that are
razor sharp and

ready to write

you.

he says my eyes are
“bright”
*pause for impact*|
they are traced with sharp blue pen,
smudged with charcoal
unblinking, wide open,
ready to receive and a very
false articulation of how I actually feel
when touched.
(shut tight, braced for impact)

Why are you melting into him and not God? My inner child said.

I stared

harboring

all 

soft slopes from a distance

harsh gray eyeliner smudged from the sweat of 

trying too hard,

partially parted lips,

glimpse of teeth that grind her dead to sleep,

one dangling finger that pointed to her skin

to remind you how she feels at night

(soft-shelled murder)

and those full moon eyes.

Watching.

–The photograph

. Then my overeager lover attempted to go down on me sixteen different times to prove his might to absent men.

Let’s play provincial gal. Uncrease my skirt, tighten my cardigan and stomp on. I spent the morning swearing at my hands for getting me into this mess before I learned to press them together to keep them from talking to anything else. Earth owes me

I showed up to his house full of food and a toothbrush I had stolen. I would keep the toothbrush here. I would take the food to work. It was in his room. He was at his computer, I was on his bed. I had been drinking diet coke but also an entire bottle of wine and was going to open another one when he said

“I think you’re an alcoholic.”

When I watch horror movies, I love trying to pick up on the exact moment that the character realizes they are not getting out of the haunted abandoned church basement alive. They had brought the Ouija board with good intentions, they had gotten a little stoned with their boyfriend, they were taking off their shirt. The first thud, the first punch in the gut, the first threat with the knife and the first time the ghost showed his face was just a “teaching moment,” but there was still time. It was an accident. They can run!  Now, they are chained to the radiator and she’s forced to eat parts of her dead  boyfriend just to survive and it’s with the first pluck of their friend’s esophagus, her chin smeared in blood and she’s sobbing and you know that she knows she won’t ever wake up in her bed again. She finally understands.

“I’m not an alcoholic.”

“You’re not like other girls.”

That is correct. I was insane and bankrupt. 

We were having an affair and every time we fucked I wondered if my blowjob was sloppy enough so sometimes I spit in his face before I left to make it clear 

i heard him.

“Are you drinking?”

I knew what to say based on years of rehearsed emotion.  I took a long sip and offered desperate reassurance that I was still quitting.  Tried to remind him I was dying.

He told me about the sloppy blowjob his girlfriend gave him and I hung up and allowed myself to feel one inch of my heart break before I polished off the bottle. Listened to the same song on repeat. I googled “suicide by asphyxiation,” “Hara Kiri” “self immolation.”   I spent most of that winter engaged in battle. I walked most nights to 7-11. I answered all of his calls. I pet my cat when she would have me. I missed my mother while she was alive.I was googling the death rate in Syria and trying to write about it. He and I were getting to know ourselves through the cracks in each other.