i am unpoetic, the toad’s face, less than cheek boned. amorphous, like the poem, my feet, both swollen with bacteria because i never wear shoes. i regurgitate a gecko with a blue tail & a green body & it tells me all about the undersides of squat bushes & i feel lonelier than ever. the toad’s face. the toad’s face. i throw up my medicine which doesn’t sound as good as regurgitating but it’s what happens. the toad’s face. i’m a gecko with the wrong colour tail & all the other geckos hate me. i have a face like a serial murderer, & a blue tail, & red hair & an extra finger on one hand. i wander the streets pretending i look like everyone else. i wander the streets with a cigarette behind my ear, with a gecko’s voice in my throat. the toad’s face. i hate my cheekbones & my swollen feet & my bloated fish body & i wander the streets & no one recognises my face. i wake up. i am unpoetic. the toad’s face. the toad’s face.
i'm loud and lonely and twenty years old
i occasionally write shit like strange ways to love people
my favourite thing of all the things • ask
• submit & then another bound of the changeling
i remember looking at the streetlamp to see
if it was still snowing. i remember my best friend drawing
the veins on my hand and pouring glue
on her arms. it was all a day when nothing happened.
the streetlamp is still there and i checked but
it stopped snowing. i have a little space to sleep on my bed
where it’s not covered with books, and when i was little i wanted
to be everything. all at once.
with feeling.
we would have owned a farm. maybe found someplace
for all my music boxes. and the walls made of bookshelves.
i believe in space heaters and gandhi and
the wispy curl of blood as it slithers
down the drain, how it looks like smoke, and not
much else. things are changing but
the streetlamp is still there and i’m still spitting
blood into the sink, trying to french-inhale my way through
this mess.
i did yoga for
forty minutes. he kept saying
two breaths. two breaths. i breathe
a lot faster than that.
find the end of the breath.
i sunk into every
pose like i belonged
in the dirt. relax, he said
you’ve earned this pose.
i breathed and breathed and
cried and thought about crying
and about the depression
commercials i couldn’t stop replaying
in my head. he said the end
of the breath is most important, so i
breathed in and in and thought about
my lungs exploding or filling with halogen
and i breathed out
and out, all the light leaving, to a whisper of
my life and waited. eureka, i
am a genius, prescription pills
can fix me, i have
finished my novel, moving on
to end hunger.
lying on my living
room floor, how
ironic, and
failing to breathe
the right way. where is my
moment of enlightenment, my satori.
my alcoholic cousin says she
thinks of inhaling
a ball of light. she’s twenty
one and i trust her most. so here
i am
on my living room
floor in the pose that i
could not have earned,
chasing the end
of the breath.
my back troubles
and i
are longtime
proponents
of defeatist
literature. i spend
most of my time
on buses with
strangers
and the world. i spend most
of my time saying
oh,
making the whispered coo
of expelling smoke.
i’m at art school,
i say,
i count things. important
things, like
beauty, which
can be counted –
one to ten, one to
one hundred, one
to infinity – which
is purely
statistical
but i’m
at art school.
i give a stranger
a cigarette, i
am told, you’re
a pretty girl.
but there aren’t
enough cigarettes
or strangers in
this world
for me to believe
that.
i just found somebody i could have done without finding
but i looked anyway.
i found.
it just sucks to read about the person
you wish you were.
it sucks to know that there
is someone
who could have been
for you, &
that person is out
there
loving some
body
else
, or
trying
to
& it breaks
my
heart
to see
both
of us
so
miserable
in failure
just a feeling like
a ladder,
stepped
all over
just hello &
you
kept walking.
i keep replaying
every scene
like it will
change
something
or help me
see where i went
wrong.
it’s not so
simple, my mouth
tells me. my
head keeps
rewinding
to the part where
you turn
your head &
comfortably
automatically curl
your fingers into someone
else’s, like it is the
easiest
devastatingly simplest
thing in the
world. you
walk down the hall.
the someone
else is not
me. it is
not so
simple.
no one should ever be able to decided the size of oyour heart
no one should
Ever
be able to
decide the
size
of your
heart
no one
should look at
an elephant and tell
him he is ugly or his heart
is too big
no one should ever
tell an elephant that
and his hand was around
my insides and i thought i
felt
something
thought i heard
something but i
probably
just imagined
it.
his hand was
too hot, he
grabbed mine for
cold.
i guess this
is our
fortune.
i smoke fast i drink fast i run
fast till i can’t breathe.
watch her drink that, tiff said
she drinks so fast.
i just want to die sometimes
you know
it’s all about who you know
i know death and he looks
friendlier every day.
why not, i asked a man on the street.
he asked me why do pretty
girls smoke but i wouldn’t know
anything about that.
i just want to know that i
have a say
in how i
go.
death sure is looking
friendlier
every day.
i swear, i am the biggest liar you’ve ever met
they are all lies wrapped with bows and feathers, happy things
& they’ll be the death of me.
i am
not
a champagne girl, the cute grin.
for me it’s a lopsided smile, it takes up
my face, it leaves no
room for
truth.
there’s sadness
that doesn’t
translate.
i keep
smiling &
hope no one’s
got it
yet.
keep
lying if you’ll
keep
believing.
please i
try my best.
i smoke,
sure & i love
vodka.
but i don’t eat
meat or
burden you with my
truth.
i love you & if
it’s a sin i’ll
take my
punishment.
i keep
lying.
don’t know what
else
i would do.
i don’t understand what it means
to read poems and cry. i am a ghost
in a wedding dress. i try on feelings
and nothing fits.
we shared a look that said, our grandmother
is not sick but she is lonely.
let me move adrina’s bed from the backseat, she said.
vava, minha
linda, por favor: your dog is named deon.
you used to drive at night. your depth perception -
bem-amada, vava, let me move the bed.
adrina está morta, she is
with vavo,
you remember.
she sleeps
on the ground.
we shared a mortal look, more than
being mistaken for sisters
we as philosophers read awareness.
por favor, mortalidade, let me
please. adrina está
morta, she has
no bed.
that is a poem
i would have read
and cried.
prominent veins, my force of habit, read as
nervousness. i chew multivitamins but i don’t care
about what can’t be reflected. i developed a twitch
because i thought it would translate in the mirror.
it didn’t. i pay people to interrupt me with needles,
i try to give other people the option of
ending me if they think it would make something
right. every failure reads as a personal flaw.
if you believe in god, he killed the sunflowers
because i dared to bring home something brilliantly
alive. if you believe in god he adopted me
to teach me how to surrender, how to let my eyes fall.
i spend my
in-between time
in the pursuit of
art.
cigarettes, tea
gone cold, lighter
in my pocket.
i am a city unto myself.
sleek and corruptible
expiring
in the name of
reconstruction.
simulated
as the menthol
fog of boston
rain
i could have
smiled.
my father smiles
at strangers
for
a living
but i
i am a city unto
myself.
