“Google search: how to feel grateful that you didn’t die that last time you tried to kill yourself. How to feel like you didn’t belong in the ground; how to feel like you deserved to survive when so many other people are living lives so much worse than anything your eyes have ever seen. How to stop feeling like a fucking loose canon in the body of a human girl; ready to blow ready to blow at any second any second now. Google search: how many pills can I take to come close enough to death that people will finally start paying attention? How many pills to kill the demons without killing myself too? How many pills to lay comatose in a hospital without losing your life completely? How many pills should I take to have people care more than just a week after ingesting poison that I am still alive? Google search: how to get attention without destroying your own body. I don’t know how to ask for help without slicing my stomach in half and handing my intestines to the people I want to pay attention to my heartache. I don’t know how to verbalize my sickening sorrow when I don’t know if anyone will respond with love and reason and empathy. How do I get people to show me that they love me without needing to douse myself in gasoline and light a match; how do I get them to care for my well-being before I am on fire? Google search: how to be grateful for surviving a suicide attempt. * Overall, a recent review of 177 research studies around the world found that 4% of people who survived intentionally hurting or poisoning themselves went on to die by suicide within 10 years. Google search: how do I become part of the 96% who survived this? Google search: how do I stop wanting to die and become grateful for being alive?”

little miss manic pixie

PERSEPHONE Tell me darkness is all you’ve ever tasted. Tell me my lips are like ambrosia from Olympus.  Tell me this body is made of moon beams. Tell me the stars are woven in my hair. HADES Tell me your hands crave the feel of my fingers. Tell me that loving a monster is knowing the monster is nothing but a man. Tell me oblivion is not enough to tear you from me. Tell me the journey down to hell was worth it.

Start by pulling him out of the fire and hoping that he will forget the smell. He was supposed to be an angel but they took him from that light and turned him into something hungry, something that forgets what his hands are for when they aren’t shaking. He will lose so much, and you will watch it all happen because you had him first, and you would let the world break its own neck if it means keeping him. Start by wiping the blood off of his chin and pretending to understand. Repeat to yourself “I won’t leave you, I won’t leave you” until you fall asleep and dream of the place where nothing is red. When is a monster not a monster? Oh, when you love it. Oh, when you used to sing it to sleep. Here are your upturned hands. Give them to him and watch how he prays like he is learning his first words. Start by pulling him out of another fire, and putting him back together with the pieces you find on the floor. There is so much to forgive, but you do not know how to forget. When is a monster not a monster? Oh, when you are the reason it has become so mangled. Here is your humble offering, obliterated and broken in the mouth of this abandoned church. He has come back to stop the world from turning itself inside out, and you love him, you do, so you won’t let him. Tell him that you will never know any better. Pretend to understand why that isn’t good enough.

It is a night heaving with stars, ambulance flickers in your eyes, all the red we dream of, all the red we conceal. Dripping out through the warped ceiling, bleeding down the bark of murdered trees. Your love lingers in the room like a corpse like a sigh, and I curl up like a crescent moon, relieve my hands of this shame by stitching them to your neck. Now the shadows render us like fairytale beasts and little red riding hood is in the kitchen rearranging knives for teeth and I blossom with peculiarities. I am the percussion of a poisoned ghost, roaming these wayward streets in her sallow night gown, her sorrow a sacred dome enwreathed like a garden hedge around her. I am a nightbloomer in flames and all the chaos reconciles me the way the rain hushes the earth, the way you grasp for grapes in candle lit rooms ablaze with your name. Sometimes I don’t feel human. Sometimes I don’t feel like I belong. The world as a violin that isn’t attuned to me, the world as the actor who plays my enemy. Listen, I’ve heard of flowers burned into bridges, hearts like funeral homes that will store all your skeletons for safekeeping. I’ve heard of wolves with kind eyes and seas that speak, but these are stories of ghouls and gods, marring my skin with their speared tongues, whirling sleep. I miss who you were in the summer, fissures in your bones and fault lines in your chest, a voice like scripture and paintings of bees hung on your walls. I miss sleeping with you - playing the perpetrator of all your animal urges, how you faltered knees and rotted apples. The kisses that had me hanging by the edge of evanescence, the kisses that usurped a throne against a shameful sky and prepared a legion of rosedrunk martyrs to die in your stead. Your charred heart a black beach that we all live in, your words like halos in the sparkling autumn air, unforgiving as death and just as beautiful. You, the tsunami, you the bullet, you the shattered axis at the tipping point of my rabid world. We are winged creatures, osculatory blips on the crow’s nest of entropy, carnage in the caustic crumbs we leave behind, song sheets in our sternums. We whisper now of old worlds and spirit wine, of galaxies that fall for the twist of a woman’s hip, of cities burning for less than love. Of all the tragedies that were and all the tragedies that will be. Of the tragedy that is your soul, that in hindsight, is mine. Finally, I turn to you, blood brimming from my lips and desire spoiling my lungs. Find me in the ruins, in weeping poetry, in a meteor shower at the end of the world.