this meat is scary

Struck with a bright vermilion,

the shrink says you’re fucked.

You are here in the West LA emergency room

because you have tried everything:

peppermint oil, lexapro,

your boyfriend’s old t-shirt, marriage.

Here, people like to talk about the black,

but no one likes to talk about the fade into it.

You have been experiencing the series of

locked doors before the windowsill,

the maelstrom with a sticky gravitational pull.

Under the surface, you cannot hear people laughing.

You cannot feel the immediacy of ground.

Please look over your post-visit care instructions.

First, here are twelve ways of cleansing yourself

from this longing.

Before resurrecting yourself with forebodings,

don’t forget to un-ash.

Before you frighten the leaves

with the heaving in your lungs,

hold it in like the years of inner cruelty in your shirt.

It’s not about holding too much.

Its about not knowing where to put it down.

You are not unfamiliar with the feeling

of closing elevator doors. Please understand

that your feet are nailed to the floor.

You keep putting your make up on only to wipe it off.

You keep trying to get off the train a stop too early.

Give yourself only Wednesdays,

Not Fridays or Saturdays or Thursdays or Tuesdays,

to bite any happy-go-lucky laissez-faire attitude

with fanged, repulsed diatribe.

So, curse everyone who tells

you that “everyone feels like this at 21.”

Remember that empathy is finite.

9 out of 10 people

will mistake “self-preservation” for “bitch”.

(That one will sting.)

No one’s body has a recurring appointment for earthquakes,

A catheter pouring out premonitions of ending,

A preemptive decay coming

on like we expect cars to turn right on red.

Like we expect water to boil.

This is Taxonomy 101.

Grab your cotton balls and your hammer.

When the sunrise comes harsh this time of year,

and you’ve asked yourself whether

you’re allowed to hurt, check if you have two hands.

This is the endless misery of Sundays,

the endless rape of what it means to have a home.

How do I know it’s really you? When he asks you

how many fingers he’s holding up,

don’t ask if its a trick question.

Against a milieu of puncturing, learn how to let go

of all the strength in your palm as it is shaken.

In your premonitions of hard-closed fists, unlearn how to bite.

Stop quarreling with your hands.

They are too big for your body.

You must be taught to drink milk.

In your clenched jaw,

you will not know whether help

looks like a shoreline or a shotgun.

Do do not apologize for who you became

You sit down to dinner and the world stops. The last

supper. I gave you a handful of fresh persimmons,

chopped cilantro, and stiff beansprouts—to hard to chew.

You are meant to swallow whole.

The saccharine sharpness

from sweet apple seeds laced with cyanide

has been wrapped up.

I wanted to tell you before dinner,

I have a mouthful of flies, a swarm stuck

in my cheek.

I wanted to tell you before dinner,

I unleashed them into your throat.

My mother told me not to play with dead things.

The eidolon of love has taught me how to kill

and you have made me merciless.

The space between was a narration of

who could love less. I struck you silent with

a sliver of cut-glass in your sleep,

without wanting to. And I sat in my second-chance car

fighting with my hands about whether to hold you or not.

With our mouths and their inward emergencies,

Love isn’t what we were good at.

Brown egg, twelve for a dollar.

Subtly resistant against a milieu of puncturing

and a briny exterior easily cracked open.

Hit me softly, hit me barely enough.

Against a countertop,

Against the oven.

Falling out like emptying sour wine.

Fried too easily.

Shell against tooth, depending on how you

break me.

If only you looked hard enough,

If only you thought before you turned on the stove,

If only you punctured me in the right places.

This is the iconography of people who have

taught you how to build brick houses on

a foundation of popsicle sticks and Elmer’s Glue.

In the holiness of silence, you are

hip to hip stomped into the corner of the oven

preset to 400 Fahrenheit.

Against the dish towels,

he leaves himself in you

marking his territory.

You a fire hydrant.

You a line at the end of a lawsuit.

You the moon, him an astronaut

forcing his America onto the surface

until his flag is waving proudly—yours turned white.

Until he’s made a place for himself inside you

and you are learning to scoot your ugly flesh

to the corner of the bed, shivering without sheets,

learning to keep him warm despite your lack

of central heating.

This is the iconographies of people who have

mentored you into deafness.

You’ve run out of lullabies

and the stream of punches holds

your head under the swimming pool

while Sunshine Superman plays above the water.

This is the iconography of people who have

taught you how to build brick houses.

The broken melismas of forgetting are mapped out

like the continents and somehow

you’ve become Hawaii.

If only love where a little longer,

Think of my name as a burning 1996 Ford Sedan.

The hood is smoking. The engine won’t start.

Think of my name as holy water distilled with Svedka.

The shrink wrote my name on the dotted line,

crossed all the boxes, and wrote it like a waiver

for euthanasia.

This explains the effulgence lurching like a steeple in my throat.

This explains the headaches.

I guess it’s just religious tradition to light candles

and bathe in bleach.

I count my losses like days. I count my lost bets in order to win.

My sister stands like a tombstone with a cookie in her hand like a relic.

Instead, I wrote my name in flower stems and hid

the pedals so the funeral attendees couldn’t drive away.

They opened the car door and only found

Deliver my pizza like bad news.

We talk about self-referential prostitutes who are

powered by celebrity memoirs. Consider this

my resignation. We talk only in the infinitive because

we never learned how to jump ship.

We preemptively decay at the thought of romantic cubism.

When doubt seeps in like mustard gas,

clarify what you meant by “straw man”.

As we fall helplessly into the our armchairs

and the dissolution of individualism, I fear the empty

space on the page. The empty space

between my fingers lets me liken my

dogma to an empty coke can.

You claim plausible deniability for the spilled blood

on my bed sheets and on my sheet of cookies.

The bloody jar is still empty. I explained the exegesis of

putting all your eggs in one basket

to you. You nuked it in the pan. I drop a question

Here’s to “elite apes” and claims of authenticity

and generative grammar.

Here’s to “colorless green ideas sleep furiously”

When the human body claims

semantical tyranny,

our ideas will turn will green with envy

at their oblivious counterparts sleeping past one o’clock

until nonsense takes over and the meaning

becomes deranged.

When the subjunctive seeps in like mustard gas,

I urge you to give Master Bates your last banana,

your last bowl of oatmeal.

When the amnesiac sees itself in the mirror,

I urge you to give Master Bates your dominant hand.

Then, we crash our cars like parties—with sax and violence.

Then, water spreads through our jeans like an infection and soaks

our American Spirits like an anthem for abjection.

Who is going to tell us to change our clothes?

Who is going to mentor us on drowning?

If Chomsky can rescue us from the imminence of chlorine

and the immanence of faulty lifeguard rafts, he can

As the story goes, everything was going well.

I could really go for a beer.

If you go, I’ll buy one for you.

That tie really goes with your suit.

Let’s go now.The tire will go

flat if you keep driving crazy!

The motor of his car won’t go. We have to go

home before its too late. They told me you

would never go for me. It will go

in your favor if you turn the lights off. Can we go

all the way? You can’t go

back on your word now.

How do we go about this without anyone hearing? Go

slow. Go easy on me, please. Shhh just go

with the flow. I’m going

away. He goes by J. We go

well together. It goes

without saying, don’t go

telling everyone I’m on anti-psychotics.

Our time has gone

quickly and I’m going away now. You’ve gone

to my head. I’ll go to pieces if you don’t finish your coffee.

Suburb boys have always had kink for the local jail.

Men have always feared domestic freedom

and the freedom to be homely.

If the idea of home is a penny gun,

it shoots prelapsarian dreams. Learn to address these dreams

as letters to the past, as nostalgia for a hackneyed teddy bear.

In mourning, the present is interrogated

because of past conflicts and politicians wonder why today

cracks under pressure and why acolytes bomb

the federal building. The sky drowns in technological ennui.

Bloated with silence, pre-pubescent suburbs read the first page

of The Hegemony of Survival and use it to prop up their camera phones.

Founded on the backs of ‘otherness’, they don’t know how to hold

their own— drinks in a bar or babies in their million dollar homes.

We carry them home on our picket signs as a gaggle of sorority

girls swallow up the sidewalk strand.

We redeem their bodies from medieval scholasticism.

We try to paint them with divine brushstrokes.

I go to bed in my head. I pay my dues in the form of a poetry assignment.

You can’t come to the party if you’re sad. You can’t come

if you’re sad. If libidinal lexapro wrote its signature

on the dotted line, the contract would be doctored.

I must ask you to read the fine print.

Please sign here.

Tonight, my sister asks me about dental dams. she uses them

to cover her tupperware full of chicken

and she looks at the mirror with derangement.

I told you, it’s like giving a strawberry daiquiri to priest.

An anathema in disguise. Here’s to hoping

he chugs it in the prayer room, or his bedroom

likened to a synagogue, likened to a confessional booth.

If I said he had a beautiful body, would he

hold it against me?

Cut out the bruised part of the apple like a prolix essay.

My knife isn’t sharp enough. I bathe in myrrh as an aphrodisiac.

My body is barely mine today.

Nathan stands over me like a stoplight turning orange.

With my finicky wish for longevity, I go towards the light.

I would like to formally invite you to my funeral.

Did we ever learn the difference between ignorance and apathy?

Your body is a sentient 1996 Ford Sedan.

You drive helplessly past the church spire without

directions, without glasses, without socks.

Acolytes always lift their hands in there, shoot up in there.

Every Sunday, the vernacular of indigene shrinks itself—

tender with the day’s shame.

Every Sunday, you’ll briefly experience mild discomfort.

It’s a long needle, but its not bad. Take a deep breath and hide.

You can cover up yourself a bandaid.

Do you want me to put that in the bag?

I’ll declaw the cat. We declaw our words

so we don’t lose our jobs and our tempers.

I lost the keys to my apartment.

After my sister  joined the church, her hopes

of the afterlife turned to ash. Her 1996 Ford Sedan

had its fuses cut by an ascetic Facebook status.

Delivered in advance, you are formally invited to attend

a display of disintegration. Before you grab your keys,

destroy 21 years of evidence of embezzlement.

To speak lightly of derision,

this family reunion will be a euphemism

for taking your clothes off midday in a supermarket.

The present tense. The tense present.

To keep your grandparents from paroxysm at the table,

put up your dukes. Put your governors in your nicest room

and bring them a red sheet and an analgesic wine glass.

Nathan is white as a sheet. He listens to divine syllogisms

butchered like a suckling pig.

Those Chinese New Year envelopes are empty like

ascetic ex-pastors hiding their poker bids and

biddable philanderers under the table.

Struck with vermilion, a boiling coloration,

The wholeness darkened by holiness.

I wish I could stay longer but I’m having an old friend

for dinner. When I was ten, my dad paid me a

Where Do We Go From Here?

I’m graduating. What?

It’s crazy to think that time has slipped away faster than it should. It was like holding a handful of beads while my skin was soaked in olive oil. I’m gonna miss my tiny one-bedroom apartment. I’m going to miss the way the floor creaks when you try to tread lightly, the scattered instruments in various corners of the room, the graying strands of a once white rug, the dirty dishes that never seem to go away, the brick laden porch perfect for morning coffee and silent study sessions. I’m gonna miss having easy access to my friends who are also my neighbors, having late-night talks about family dynamics and romantic interests, Saturday afternoon impromptu jam sessions, and the booming sound of laughter in the courtyard. I’m going to miss the 20 minute ‘casual stroll’ to class that always somehow ends up being a 10 minute sprint because I couldn’t sacrifice drinking a slow cup of coffee in the morning. I’m going to miss the solidarity of only having a collective $20 between three friends and commiserating over the absurdity of final exams. I’m going to miss philosophical discussions with my professors in office hours only to end up doubled over in laughter on their couch because of some vague common interest. I’m going to miss having a space where my primary job is to consume knowledge. Where the future is always forthcoming. Where something exciting and insane is around the corner if only I would walk two more steps. Perhaps the beauty of being twenty is the thought that there is always something extravagant waiting to jump-scare you at every corner. That we are one step closer to saving the world or making monumental change. I can picture myself, with a clarity that makes the hairs on my arms stand up, when I moved out of my house and into to a new city. But I can’t remember when it stopped being magical for me. It was slow. 

At one point, moving out was a new kind of goodbye. It was a goodbye to the comfortable bubble of Claremont, CA. It was detachment and a Twilight Zone-esque suspension of ‘real life’.  I’ve always been attached to the idea of leaving, of changing scenery, because at that point, it almost felt like I didn’t exist and I could be detached from my old self and what other people expected of me. I didn’t have to live up to a certain ideal of who people thought I was and instead could be who I knew I was.

Now, as I move out of my tiny little apartment, this is a new kind of leaving. A kind of leaving that isn’t running away from “should be”s. It’s kind of like being shot out of a cannon pointed blindly.  I’m not thinking about whether I checked the fuses on the cannon, whether I have enough supplies to survive, whether I’m headed in the right direction, or whether the entire collection of people I know stood in awe on the ground.

I’m more so just holding my breath. I’m feeling the wind rush on my face as it dries from its coldness. I’m making sure I don’t crash into pine trees or get in the way of the birds. I’m keeping my eyes on my landing and preparing myself to fall on my feet.

Who knows what will happen.