To leave a hemorrhage  of violets wherever I walked? 

No. A lost son is called prodigal.  A lost daughter is just called lost.

I want to see this legal battle

i was on a walk the other day and someone had the perfect combination of his cologne and whatever-else. it was almost exactly his scent. i fucking hate that. after all these years, i remember that? i tell my therapist - i feel like a fucking wolf. try telling a middle-aged blonde lady. oh i scented him on the air. i'm 30, and i'm having a panic attack over something that would be a plotline in the omegaverse.

what they don't tell you about mental illness is that if you are lucky enough to survive it into adulthood; it becomes a weird slice of your life. because you do, eventually, have to build a life. i realized in a panic somewhere around 22 - oh. i don't know what i'm fucking doing, because i always assumed i'd just go ahead and die. i didn't die, and i'm grateful for that, and i'm very happy about that choice. but it does mean that i am an adult in an apartment, living with my conditions side-by-side like. oh, that's my roommate, adhd. ignore the glass, bytheway, that's ocd.

so you pick your stupid life up by the scruff of the neck and you're, like glad for it (so much laughter and light and friends you would have never thought possible, when you were in the worst of it). but it feels so strange to be dancing around these odd little microcosms, these patchwork moments of your symptoms. if you have a panic attack at night, you still need to wake up and walk the dog in the morning. if your depression is making everything boring, well, you don't have any sick days left, and a job's not really supposed to be that exciting anyway. your ocd tears out each individual leg hair, and then, an hour later, you sigh, patch up the bloody bits, and go get dinner with friends. and the life is kitten-quiet, mewling and pathetic, but it's also like - it's yours, so you're fond of it.

and it's like - you're real. so you still enjoy pushing the shopping cart really fast and then riding on the back of it down an empty aisle. and you're not, like, so sick anymore that when you accidentally drop a mug you burst into tears (except for the days you do that. which are bad). and no, you're not allowed around certain items anymore. oops! but you've learned to be good about brushing your teeth most days of the week. and you sometimes in the middle of the day you have a little freak-out about how fucking unfair it all is, how fucking hard, how other people can just do this without having to fucking hurt the whole time. and then you sigh and force yourself to sit down and fucking journal about it so you can tell the nice middle-aged blonde woman yeah i had a hard day but i practiced grounding. you still sometimes want to burst out of your own skin, but you force yourself to eat kind-of healthy and to take your vitamins. you let yourself chop off all your hair in the sink in a dramatic poetry of control and relief - and you also have developed good hobbies that help you move your body more frequently. you feel helplessly behind, lost in the shuffle - but you also practice gratitude, taking stock of what you have garnered. because you're trying. even if you're never gonna be normal, you have something... close enough.

her fragments slip beneath my surface find silence and sink deep becoming more than ruin

they stir what never stirred a pulse a breath beneath dust the ache of something wanting to be born

flowers press through scars not to erase but to become

and he once stone begins again

I want to write you a poem for your birthday but I have to wait until I’m feeling softer and less hungry and I can tell you that you’re like a garden or the right hand of a piano melody

Today I can only tell you that you taste like a mouthful of river water, and that you feel like the scraped knee I got from the rocky bottom

Your birthday poem will be about the baby birds you nursed all night until you were aching with love and exhaustion

But this poem is about what our friend said when we found the hatchlings half dead in the chimney

That her parents taught her that in the world there was good, there was evil, and there was wild

If I would love you then I would love you wild

Frenzied

Thighs trembling and slick with black oil, with black ink

Love down to your marrow

Some days you feel like something stuck in my teeth (you love to write about teeth)

And I hate that I can smell when you’ve been in a room

A shiver an ache but an ache not in my head but my stomach like hunger: I’m only myself when I’m wanting

Everything they write about you is also about me and also about you

I get nasty when you insist on being soft I can see that you aren’t all soft that’s for your birthday poem

I don’t want to be holy I don’t want to be tender unless it’s tender like the flesh that you sink your wolf teeth into

For your birthday poem maybe I will file those canines down but in this poem I want a bloody lip

A dream I have not had but would like to:

You a princess with a blighted heart and me your gladiator

Sent into the ring to fight your demons in mismatched combat

I’ve never felt more alive than when they’re snarling and circling and I’m bracing myself for the first strike, spear and shield ready

Except for maybe I’ll feel more alive when you dance into the ring kicking up dust

Cut through the numb silence of the spectating crowd

And hold me covered in sweat and iron and demon blood

it’s not that i know how to cook. it’s that the biggest christmas present i got was a little plastic kitchenette i never used except to climb on. it’s that my brother used it more, his hands ghosting over pink buttons and yellow dials. it’s that when my work needs cake for a birthday, they turn to me. i get it from costco. i don’t even like cooking. a boy burns popcorn in the dorm microwave and laughs. a week later, i do the same thing, and he snorts at me, “just crossed you off my wife list.” it’s that i had heard something like this so many times before that i laughed, too.

it’s not that i don’t love being feminine. it’s that i came home with bruises from trying to be a trick rider on my bike and heard the word “tomboy,” felt my little mouth say, “but i’m not a boy, i’m a girl”. it’s that they laughed. it’s that until i was sitting in my pretty dress and smiling with a big pretty smile and blinking my big pretty eyes, i wasn’t given back the title “girl”. it’s that until i wore makeup and styled my hair i was bullied; it’s that when i don’t wear makeup i’m a slob, that my mental health diagnosis hangs on the hook of being dressed up. it’s that my therapist sees me returning to bright red lipstick and tells me i am looking happier and i have to explain that i am more sad than i have ever been. it’s that i dress myself in as many layers as i can every time i ride a train because it’s better to be laughed at than harassed. 

it’s not that i know how to clean, it’s that my brother’s chores were outside where i wanted to be, and mine were inside. it’s that i would have weeded the garden better than he did if they had just let me. it’s that i am put in charge of fixing other’s messes, expected to comply without complaint.

it’s not that i can’t open the jar. it’s that you ask my brother first every time. it’s that i am pushed into docile positions, trained to believe that my body when it’s strong and healthy is ugly, trained into being less, weaker. it’s that the jar is also science, is also engineering, is also every job, every opportunity. it’s that you laugh faster when he tells a joke, that you take him seriously but wave off me, that when he raises his voice he’s assertive but when i do i’m hysterical. the jar is getting into a car with a stranger as a driver and wondering if this is our last ride. the jar is knowing that if something happens to us, it’s our fault. 

it’s that i’m weak and i don’t know if it’s because i just am or i was trained to be. it’s that we need to sit pretty with our pretty smiles and our pretty words trapped pretty and silent in our throats, our hands restless but pretty when idle, our bodies vessels for nothing but a future white dress. it’s that we are taught someone else needs to open the jar for us.

Ah you wonderful blessing, you absolute softness, you charm.

i get tired but everybody is tired of me saying i’m tired so it just sounds like i’m saying “i never tried anything else.” i have tried everything else. i am even sometimes not-tired-anymore, and then i slide like ice skates back to the starting space and i’ve used so many hands to pull me up that nobody is offering them anymore. i don’t blame them. it’s all hard enough without hearing “i’m tired” for the seven-hundredth time this month. but i am tired. 

in the movies, i am tired only until i learn better. in the movies, i’m only tired because i don’t have a lover, or because i’m lonely, or because i haven’t had enough kale/holiday joy/near-death-experiences. in the movies, i kiss the right person or i string the right garland or i look over the full choir during caroling and i realize - i’m not tired anymore, and i’m cured forever, and i go home and throw out the liquor and clean my apartment. in the movies, i am not tired, i just haven’t tried the right thing.

baby hang on. i want to try the right thing. but all of this, and this beautiful earth i love - it feels numb, and raw, and bleak. i’ll be down in a second. i just want to sleep. i’ll be down in a second. i promise, i want to come, i want to be there, i want to be wanting. i want us all to never be tired again. i want us all to be happy. i want to say “merry” and mean “bright.” i want to say “i’m better” and mean it forever this time.

how do you say goodbye, you know? it’s not an unfriend and block kind of situation. but you watch the people you once loved go on and have a life and you’re outside of it. and it’s bittersweet because of course it’s okay that you’re both thriving. but she used to be who you’d call if you needed to cry. she used to be who’d you’d be binge watching the new series with. you used to be hers, in a way, even if that way wasn’t permanent. and now she’s someone else and so are you and your friendship is clicking heart shapes next to pictures where she smiles next to people you’ve never met. you know where her birthmark is. she knows where you’ve buried your dead.

but I will answer to knife. Sometimes I think we have the same name, Notquitelove. I want

to be soft, to say here is my underbelly and I want you to hold the knife, but I don’t know what I want you to do:

plunge or mercy. I deserve both. I want to hold and be held.