#sasspoems

hand over mouth like we’re surprised you’re in your sunday things, ready for bed we could’ve been something if it wasn’t for - everything noon settles over the windowpanes and we sigh it’s over, it’s not enough that paint is still drying but we’re done noon stands unmoved but we’re -

i love you like a moth to a light like a blonde loves silver (dress / screen) my belly murmurs of hunger deep i don’t think it’s about you but maybe it is, because it always is

my skirt tightens over my swelled stomach stuffed with all the things i haven’t said to you what is love, if not smiling as you bite your tongue? blood in the gaps of your teeth, like aphrodite described

i mumble into my coffee-stained skirt ‘i have to sweep, cook, clean’ you sweep home in a daze of flowers soup cold on the dinner table 'clean, clean’ from the sink to the toilet to my inner thighs i rub between my legs to try to be clean enough for you

it’s not that i want to die dying is so ugly,  a crude face made on a commissioned portrait unborn isn’t the word because still there’s a violence to it like the clacking of teeth i want the middle ground of the unclear prefix not the un- dis- im- slip into nothingness like a sip of water  the peace of erasing the not-yet like a sip of water down a faded throat

medicine is so bitter in a way that seems unnecessary. birds flit in the spaces of your outstretched fingers, blue fragments peeking through. medicine is a cherry bitten whole, a chalky sense of wellness. on a good day like this, your body is bare: mind clean; feet dirtless.  the grass seeps water into your blood, a mother wiping down her filthy child. no admonishment from the whistling wind. only a sweet whisper, scraping the flat of your bitter tongue. on a good day like this, you don’t need your medicine.

a young girl, nameless as all young girls should be, walks into a skyscraper and demands a pedestal. sit me with the stars, close enough to know their heat. pretty as sin, as all young girls should be, she shredded the filmy night, with her big voice and bigger thighs. slicker than honey, she was, softer and sleeker that she had any right to be. a satin being; a woman being. i’m an effigy of a star in a glittering dress. this young girl, man-loving as all young girls should be, spent her nights licking pearls out of pig’s mouths, spent her mornings scrubbing lipstick from her hands. volcanoes erupt on my blistered tongue and i beam pretty still.