there’s the set of highlighters
funny how a set of highlighters have burrowed their way
into the section of her brain
labeled “relevant”
yet here are the highlighters
pink orange green
and everything in between

I remember the guilt I had as
A nine year old girl
When I kissed another girl
Just for fun.
I wouldn’t have
If she didn’t lead me on
Freckled
Blue eyes
Red-brown hair.
After the first time she kissed me
My heart hurt

Barricading our creativity and emotion
they stand
As tall as our dreams
And as vague as our goals

Amplifying the feeble ground
they stand
Constructing our world
Limiting our thought
Cubing our flexibility
Opposing our expansion

The rain is immediate, and collects in every pore like blood clots. 
For this moment, coiled small, a child’s figure shaking sleep —
I move. Pulsing water smudges the dented car hood
three blocks down, and there is a caution to both of our actions.

She’s not sure what to make of herself
stranger at home 
unfamiliar face in a sea of faces that
should be everything she’s looking for

Our love was born out of infinity,
Full of promises and late-night murmurings.
We chased each other around and around the loops of our symbol,
Never ceasing to catch our breath,
Never stopping to let our minds catch up with our words.

If loving yourself is a drug, then I am slowly becoming an addict
A habit like this isn’t hard to fall into,
I didn’t even have to try
It just felt so good,
I didn’t want to stop
High on pure admiration
Drunk on the strongest adoration

There is absent space in my chest where pain used to be 
And the muscle memory has not yet learned to let go

Love everlasting
Love is only lasting
When you put yourself last
Kinder a love within lantern light flames and
Let the wax drip to seal the cracks of your previously broken heart
Redeem your wrinkled hands and

I feel like a shattered stained glass window.

On November 8th, 2016
(“a date which will live in infamy”)
I sat like a child on my bed
I had always thought myself an artist,
So I took a pen and drew a map — 
Every line
Of every state
I drew my home
And my family’s home.

snap the barrel of a boy fully loaded with good intentions 
and shoot yourself.

break your own heart,
into jigsaw puzzle pieces 
so you can practice the art of putting yourself back together.

Slut.
A word so keen and so sharp,
Thrown at me but never to me
To be muttered under the breaths of the boys who I’ve denied
And whispered from the girls with whom I have never exchanged a word.
It drips from the lips of people who do not know me,

Start small
the changes we swore to in
resplendent troths, without vision because
I burst forth from childhood
flat chested frail wristed pinions
not yet grown: all down
and yielding. So told do not fly
compress
    bind

We look at a distant light 
With hope for self discovery 
fear of catastrophe, 
and self-inflicted wounds 

We dig through the mountain
in order to escape 

Eclipsing, 
suffocating our souls

When I rewind the tangled film of that year to replay again,
the transcript hitches, a tainted roll of chromatography paper,
taken out from the closet a few too many times;
when I carefully crop it to the segment in question,

I was born at the wrong place
At the wrong time
Both my parents seeking a better life
For my sister and I
To find comfort across the border
Where movie stars and country folk
Looked deceivingly happy
Slowly becoming part time parents

Why do they keep praying
If nothing has changed

Sleeping under dark clouds
Thankful for things
Like spearmint and snow
Senses like
A rotting apple
An eyeball
Decaying
Out of socket
I can see clearly now

Hi my name is Ayiana
Once upon a time,
I was a young girl
Seeing the world through rose colored glasses
my mother sobbed to herself at the kitchen table
Wondering why
Crying tears that would not relinquish 
depressed feelings

Madeline.
The first name I was ever given
A symbol of my mother’s overbearing need to go her way or no way
Her way had no meaning
It was simply a name she thought was pretty
And pretty was more important than memorializing my dad’s time in the Army

It’s hard to understand what
to feel when his words say
he loves me but the tone of
his voice says the only thing
he cares about is himself.
Scars stain his back
and my wrists
but the only real scars are
the ones on our hearts.

As our war rages on, I’m caught in a crossfire.
One side shrieks its anthem of misguided hope.
The other, facing reality’s certain dread head on.
While I, a teenager caught in the midst of battle, seek refuge.

I was sitting in my private school, around age 8
The religion teacher said, everyone sit in a circle
Don’t speak
Close your eyes
Raise your hand when you hear God speaking to you
One by one each child raised their hand
I sat
Thinking

heavy named girl, 
Your value is that of the anchor tied to your feet, the depth of your mother’s tongue when she looked upon you,
saw your grandmother’s eyes in your soft brown face and
pulled from history the consonants and long vowels that may jangle around in her apron

A big city.
Different people,
Modern architecture,
A whole world to explore.

I open my eyes to the gray sky.
I’m lying in the same yard,
Next to the same house,
On the same hill.
The same place I’ve been my whole life.

I have so many secrets to tell you through soft poems and open mouthed kisses on rosy flushed cheeks of best friends turned lovers and onto mothers and peaches bought from roadside shacks on small town access roads; toothy grins slyly hanging onto our faces —  

I sit 
in a green plastic booth
Sandwiched between a purple table 
and a streaky orange wall
I keep my fingers squished into my ears 
while I watch a librarian chase a girl my age around 
She has a purple skateboard in one hand 

The way they teach poetry in schools

Is not the only way it can be written

               Structured stanzas

             and 

  parallel pantoums

Put a limit on how poets can      speak what they FEEL

    Creativity cannot be defined

mango juice drips from my fingers seeps into the brown dirt dirt that holds roots that reach across countries roots that stitch together centuries roots that spread and cannot be confined mango juice drips from my fingers plunges to the earth earth my mother raced across earth that felt the weigh

(A palindrome poem meant to be read top to bottom,and then bottom to top)