When I was a little girl,
I wanted to be a princess,
then a vet,
then a president.
I know many girls who at my age
shared those dreams.
The ones I look at now and think
What was I thinking?
Those aren’t possible!
But for a little girl,

it’s been a while
        since I found encouragement
        to rid myself of this
        writer malnourishment
        I guess I lost myself
        trying to explore the world
        yet I still found my mind in the gutters

Hours are not spent well in lethargy
nor in deep-seated exhaustion
Hours are rarely spent
more – lost

a house can feel like a whole world
when you’re lying in your bed at 4 a.m.,
too early to rise in a coup against the lingering stars,
too late for the soft black of the backs of eyelids to last long enough,

Your polaroids next to my polaroids
Yours taken with your ‘new’ polaroid camera (1960)
Mine taken with my friend’s ‘new’ polaroid camera (2017)
Yours, yellowed, colors fading,
Mine, stark white with bold colors.

I break down in the supermarket grocery aisles
because I only have five minutes to make the choice
between a variety of granola bars.

screaming letters warn
cautioning, threatening
but I lean in
revel in the reveal 
most don’t like spoilers
but I live for them

I see the pieces on the ground,
So broken, scattered, torn.
The pieces long forgotten,
Continents and oceans overworn.

Nepal, Hawaii, St. Lucia
In a long, congested heap.
The passed families stay afloat,
Souls torn by the Reap. 

prometheus — light crammed between his jaws
licking up the insides of his teeth
scratching enamels in their
his climb — ran triumphant
meek made resplendent tossing
the ember from his mouth and
great golden blooms sprouted into the loam

I self-reflect
And I gaze deep
To try to forget the secrets that I keep

I bind myself
And hide my chest
All day long until I rest

I stay at home
And lay in bed
Trying to drown out what you said

Sometimes I go through days where I will buy a whole bag of fortune cookies from the Panda Express drive-thru 
and eat them all in one sitting, just so that someone can tell me something good. 

If I were to pluck my feathers,
I wouldn’t be able to fly.

But I want to feel the grass underneath my feet

I hop like a robin on the sidewalk
(away from flight, towards dandelions
sprouting in cracked concrete)

The moment I was conceived
And my egg was fertilized to have xx chromosomes
Instead of xy
My body was taken away from me
And placed in the hands of men
The hands of men that control dress codes
The fingers that will slap my ass as I walk down the street

        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