oh, constellate

life was not a creation myth, but it read like one.

that night i tell god, forehead to sheetless mattress: i promise to stop using dead things in my poems. i promise to stop imagining girls together, skin hoisted and slung and lifted like fog, breast-to-breast, breathless with bright black light.

I will never know what it means to be afraid. As in compressing a body into a bruise & praying it will never be unclenched. As in boxing a mouth into a sound- proof oven, lungs scattering into a crooked ellipsis.

This blood is a waltz at dawn. A soul splinters on the ground, a thousand red vessels smashing to pieces. The doctors take pictures instead of putting it back together.

Some nights, I go to sleep with another language behind my teeth. Let me teach you how to speak with lightning, it pleads. Let me show you the vowels of river against rock.

He scowls when salt spills over dawn and nobody tells him to smile instead. He likes hips like a question, like clean-gutted fish, like a cherry mouth.

Search for soil, search for land. For sky. Search for blades. For wedding rings promised to the earth, and bibles written in the open curve of a river.

We wound ourselves like power lines over fields sun-soaked and stained gold, lips curled halos in screams, howling hoarse into the pit of adulthood.

My body – holy, ocean-like, and the world: walls, blood, hands. The single eye twitching in the corner, and my bones coming loose at odd angles.

1. Someone told you all the best fairytales involve strange wooded houses and autumn nights. In September, the forest is a knotted green ribbon with neatly tucked tails, just waiting for a hero to ensnare.

What I know about the body comes from the rhythm of flickering pupils, suburban streetlamps, dying insects. From the girls on street corners wearing nothing but a sign saying Don’t touch.

Imagine a tale of boy-flesh and betrayal, transmitted through a fist, a bodily instant. Imagine treating bruised cheekbones like historical documents.

I told my mother I was fine. It wasn’t a lie, I was damn fine, with the legs, the hair, the eyes, I was a forest fire.

my mother says there is only one way out of china and that is through god. god opens her mouth & rivers patter out like children in the night. children in the night spotting the street like a skin. children in the night & our veins neon & opened longways, our hands shuttered over our chests.

All of it soft, bruises flush with light, open and glowing, blooming and unblooming the way it is impossible to grow into something unstill.

When you start wearing makeup again, you realize you’re vain. When you start holding the door open each evening before your walks, you realize you’re caring. When you start debating with him about abortion and stem cell research and the incontrovertible importance of the serial comma in achieving clarity, you realize you’re strong. When you start hoping for the future, you realize you’re weak. When the sun shines brighter and the time passes faster, you realize you’re foolish. When you stop surviving and start living, you realize you’re in too deep.

The slate sky turned the color of breaking, and I wondered how much longer we would hold until starlight no longer hit our faces simultaneously.