Endings

            Tonight was the CHASMS launch party!  It was awesome, with epic live music and epic poets.  The Salt City Poetry Slam team evoked insane laughter and chills.  It was wonderful to hear the talent that is in and around this magazine.  I am proud!
            I was met by a person who is either naturally super-enthusiastic or was fangirling over me... which is completely flattering and shocking, either way.  I've had a few people tell me they like my work in the magazine, and it means a lot to me.  It means the magazine is actually being read!  Readership, FTW!!
            I do cry at endings, but I've been surprisingly devoid of tears at the ending of high school, and all the things that includes... I expect it will come eventually.  Literary magazine has truly been my favorite class.  Ever.  If I could have only attended that class, I actually would have.  The people are so funny and, as someone else said, like a (very weird sort of) family.  I will miss my classmates.  I will miss the writing and uncontrollable laughter. 
            Peace and love to all, beginnings and endings and beginnings.

Mortuary Stagelights

My lungs empty
dormant respiration—
the deep hum
of the bass drum
creeps up beneath
my ribcage,
trapping itself in
my bones.
Don't you want to feel
my bones
on your bones?*
My eyes drift
behind my teeth
into the green and red
darkness.
My marrow pinned
against the wall
and taken.


*"Bones" by The Killers

    Composed of circus-
cars composed of rust
A melancholy drive
         locked and loved
    praising and cursing with
  sun-blistered lips
and severed teeth, priest-
blessed by blue.
I search in neon,
signing off
          of loss
The bear growls
in copper rain


A Semi-Exquisite Corpse we composed in my literary magazine class.  I wrote the last line of this one and each person took turns writing lines from the end to the beginning.  We got some really cool results from everyone!   It really brings it all back home — that soon we'll all be graduated and it's unlikely we'll see each other again.  That's been my favorite class of all time, with some of the greatest people of all time.  So to anyone from that class... thanks for not forgetting to be awesome.

"...pollinating deep Narcissius's
spread wings..." 

Never write
          the truth.

An Entity

Catching people talking
through cardboard-slab walls
collapses into overheard
humming to herself. 
The empty spaces the disconnect
between synapses and fingering
cotton lace and oyster-shell
buttons down his chest.
Warm and earthly, molding
itself into the breeze
of the late-night cricket air,
she breathes in
and out.

woven synapses and jute
stain frostbite and heatstroke
reflect me in the foothill penstemon
saffron star-spots trickle into the dirt
I'm not sure I'd be able to sleep with the ghosts
but I turn the tinge to my mouth
with a thoughtful kiss
momentary panic and splinters
static in your hair
sigh with the ceiling
we give no fault to the sand
a quiet God
in the small of her back
long lungs
in our fast of extraterrestrial embraces
let our hair be cold in the sunrise
and let the petrichor be thick
as the mountains beneath the snow


They were never meant to be together, but I like them.  My favorite lines of a few pieces, arranged as I encountered them. 

It’s a white truth we like to tell ourselves, that there is room in this world for the Unconventional Beauty. And red ink makes you younger
“Anyone can be pretty if they try”, if they rip out their teeth, root by bitter root, and plant them down along the plod, again.
A giant "fuck you" to your teeth. I have a toothbrush and a hand stretched out on a puddle of paint.

Sometimes, I just can't work on something.  I was frustrated and anonymous, as one is when all her writing alludes to "you" alone.  And I want to go back and make my words better—concise and "beautiful"—but the words lay there and do what I want while crumbling under other people's obscurity—like with these words.  Frustration.  I thought that writers controlled words, but sometimes I feel pushed into a mosh pit of moving words, grinding because they grind.  Leaving the bright lights with bruises and not-quite-right hearing.  Stumbling and crawling on the war-torn pavement until I open my eyes again and forget how I bled home.
My clothes are still white.  My eyes are still dry. 
Tell me the blood is still there.

Asleep in summer's clothing