#aavillianess

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We don’t live in that house anymore we lived on the other side of a beach bride we could always leave the light on and out there sea turtles never crawled up to bury their shells in sand,  never thought the shining beam of pool light that swam a faded yellow through the pool as we sat dangling feet through the streams could be the pale white moon

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We don’t live in that house anymore saving up ten dollars in quarters and pennies and cheap plastic lighters hidden coves of cash from young thief siblings with too sharp grins over giggled out lies

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God forgive me but i wish we never did i can’t handle thoughts of back yard adventures snuck around neighbor’s houses whose faces we never saw  maybe our hose isn’t the same without in ground pools to pour tap water smells into maybe childhood memories prefer the backyard rainbows we made with chubbed fingers over sprouts to change the spray but i’m still recovering from memories when the mist comes the kind my mind made clinging  to those four pink faded walls in that room i never fit

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Mother I know you want to go back  and spread yourself over the king sized bed, the one fourth acre lawn but listen that house never did anything for me but make me cry father, would you forgive me if i never liked my childhood the way you loved us running through the grass that house was always a memory trapped in a metaphor, we all needed to leave.

- Old Addresses | L.B  © 2017

See, right now i’m just trying to walk slow unsteady steps of an overgrown colt /  With no one to lean on, I cannot afford to fall /  I must stumble down the path of childhood the way I stutter over these words /  I can’t help it when I let Mama down on Sundays, it’s not my fault I don’t know which traps to set for myself and which fences to build /  I want to get stuck inside the small backyard of my mind, it seems easier than running and losing myself to the leaning grasses of fields and fields of possibilities whose flowers are too wild for me to grow /  

See, I’m terrified in the way of night terrors with too vivid quicksand filling my mouth and hindering screams in a dry drown  - no -  /  In the way of teenage hormone cocktails rising up sternums to build bile and anxiety and hearts tap against the walls of their cage trying to ask ‘how much more adrenaline do you need?’ Or maybe not even that, but I can say in the least poetic way possible I’m scared to be the teen angst poet

See, because I can’t tell if I’m as raw as the girl with the night terror past /  I believe like a rooted subconscious habit that one day I’ll burn my poems the way I’ve burned every single one of my diaries, trying to destroy evidence of the crime I was a person I cannot bear to be anymore /  Trying to delete the way my voice sounded when scrawled across an inkskinned page the way others delete texts from phone contacts they can’t bare to see rather than heal with the closure of a final phone call, the long lasting 1 hour and 20 minutes one /  I’ll backspace all my poems letter by letter then delete my  / docs but even in this - this untrained untested unsure dream - I want to mean something /  

See, I even have a list to prove my whims don’t last /

ONE

I no longer feel homesickness twisting my belly and making my nose pull back in a defensive snarl when the scent of downy detergent on suave body wash rises off clothes /  I can’t even regret the loss of my spreading back muscles laid upon a bed in a room that I called mine and the closing of curtains when I thought that meant safe /  When I thought that meant I didn’t have to think and I thought that meant just me and my distracted mind /  Just the occasional hand missing air and ear missing words I swear should have been whispered just a decibel too loud and drift down the hall /  And a yellow dog too, of course /

TWO

When my brain is heavy with haze but light with thought I just want to read poetry written by greater poets, cry in all the right places and laugh when the I look up, and remember the ways sunbeams fall through blinds and mosquito screens instead of the stifle of a closed window and a sun that heats a fevered curtain /

Today I’m reading poetry to the tune of a severe thunderstorm warning eating chinese delivery I wasn’t home to eat the night before /  I'd lie if I said I was ready to enjoy the way the rain tinkered down my tin shed roof and draw love poems from the awe of a wrathful sky, I’ll just let my bones rest instead /

THREE

For every animate person that hasn’t even screwed me twice over yet, a metaphor poetically describes the beauty of my sore body ache in inanimate terms /  I’ve learned them in the essays for books I’ve never read but now I’m writing poems for a life I haven’t really seen yet /  I fake the different colors for red if it makes me sound pretty, let me imagine love that explodes vermillion and anger spills slow sweet cherry while ignoring the red regret of the veins in my eyelids during too late mornings /  With too late alarms blinking dull red to remind the chipping bitten away red of nails flying to meet deadlines of slow written poems /  

FOUR

My head used to lean against the thrumming window of my family’s biggest car until my teeth felt weird without the constant friction and my temple shot me off center /  I think we all counted the seconds between lightning and thunder just to know how far off the storm was even when it pounded sheets across the thin layer of metal between itself and me /  I just liked to know /  It’s just too hot air meeting cold streams but I don’t think my peeling sunburnt skin will meet cool long fingers anytime soon /  While the goddess of the sky and the goddess of the sea may meet to bruise purple, kisses in the clouds this car ride is the journey of a small small girl touching her own /  I can’t tell if I’m as raw as the girl with the night terror, small fingers to her own shaking mouth and learning how not to bite /

If I made this a poem my metaphor would run back to the dying leaves /  I wish I knew what Autumn time will do to me /  If I will still reach for the summer sun or miss the rain sheet falling storms - that’s a habit I can’t remember /  

- Metaphors  L.B  © 2017 (edited by @a-lil-peach)

Originally written for @soliloquiemagazine:

That’s how long it took me, after you left, to crawl down ocean dunes,

Sand filled my mouth, scraped down my tongue like thousands of apologies I should have said, stuck forever in my teeth.

I fell down, surrounded by crushed rocks of many more things to tell you.

Until waves came up, lapping at my thighs while I lay burning blood,

Cooling my cheeks, ghosting my skin,

The tossing and turning of worn down rock made the water’s edges dark,

Further out, under a hanging sun, diamond seas glittered

Still, and at peace, simply because they touched you

- Is this what you felt after me?

Laying, drowning, somewhere between heat in your mouth and salted flowing bliss,

Staring at a half moon shadowed by the sun,

For a moment I thought it might be a cloud, would crash flood me, falling with the other gathering titans in the sky,

Because up there is the keeper of time

And he has consumed us all

These are the things I think about these days.

 What else?

I have forgotten you so completely it makes me afraid,

(That is why I can finally sit on these shores again)

I am shaking confusion and welling of lost because- who am I now?

Who am I?

Remembering the smell of you, sunscreened stained.

If I wrench the right shirt from the depths of my memory I can smell you,

I can almost remember-

Before I throw up, dizzy with remembrances.

This is not nostalgia, I feel so much more violent than that

Everyday is another key I forget in your laugh

I used to have each pitch, the sound from deep in your throat

Now, just the huffing of breath right before,

Sometimes a surprised “Oh-”

I wish they’d ask, “Hey, aren’t you the kid-”

Then I could break my lips with how fucked up I feel now,

With the chance to ramble out every word you said (I can’t remember them) and watch pity crumble their face

They don’t.

And so, I forget you.

I text you but not you, 

Not the ghost of you, but the ghost of me

- And isn’t that just me to ache because I hurt and not because you do?

(I remind myself who I am every time I don’t ask for your new address.

So hate me, so hate me.

I’m aching, I’m aching.)

I wish the summer sun would stop scalding me from afar

And just crash into me, emulate the space in my lungs so I couldn’t feel it

I can’t choke on my fire

So I fall into the ocean, don’t let my hands break the surface

It’s you, in these waves

Here, where they spread your ashes on a cloudy cloudy day

Letting them mingle salt and sand,

I feel the tug of a wave forming around me

And crash

 I breathe in

A confusing rush of water becomes a fizzling wave

I swear I can hear you.

- Let Me Drown With You // N.A

O  ur eyes meet. blue, brown, green, gray. a false sunrise of pinks clashed on blue skies in a terrible display of beauty. in those eyes lay just a little bit of beauty, just a little bit of everything. it seems like watching universes born and die in billions and billions of seconds, that planet’s floating dust come together and form explosions of rocky color, only to fall apart and float again. every color in the eye of a telescope is you.

R  eal life crashes hard on my shoulders sometimes in the spaces between that freckle on my back and the one on my neck. this moment doesn’t have the taste of real life. it feels like waking up sharp and letting my eyes fall, watching colors dance across my eyelids in reds, oranges, pinks, golds and the skies over beaches and lakes and cities and towns. letting my mind draw itself up and float around at the top. listening to quiet air. no thoughts, no feelings, just this, out of word.

A  nxiety pumps my heart, all that blood has nowhere to go. these veins were never made for fast track life full of scarlet passions and crimson furys and cherry lips and rose splotched skin, but a slow dream under yellow yolk suns and yellow honey’s slow drag and yellow flowers sway’s in time to light breezes. and then- your fingers are sharp when they dig into spaces between my thumbs and pinkies, and I am a fish caught on hooks after hours and hours of a glass still pond, dragged into a tossing salt ocean burning my mouth, tumbling my head.

- NORA // N.A

You stick to the leather couch, cold against your cheek, just a  m o m e n t  of relief in shadows of a window. 

Rising whispers of a half -no sixth eighths- forgotten emotion, whose stirrings just remain, when you’re with her. You, whose limbs are a day long dead thought trying to be sludged up from sticky dark recesses of memory- slow and incomplete. So you’re left to imitate the wisps, try to form them into solid teeth, tongue, mouth, try to shape it into smile, laugh, joke. And then she laughs-

And suddenly, your head is light 

So filled with bright light 

A moment of tunnel vision with just her, happy and so so alive. 

And you, biting out a laugh you didn’t know you had. A hot breath of surprise wrapped up in the air. Because she- she is happy so you sit there with joy in your lungs. 

- Khushi // N.A

Excerpt from FIFTEEN // N.A