#thetargetbird

I am writing you from a cabin 

somewhere east of somewhere.

You’ve been here before. 

I would call but the phone lines have been frozen

and I am scared.

I have a kettle steaming high-pitched

and what my mother assures me 

is an unconventional amount of anger and anxiety.

I don’t know what to do with my hands so

I am writing to you from the folds of this wedding gown, 

this blanket of white.

I’m not sure if I love you 

or if at this point you’re just something to break the silence, 

something to make my heart pound when it forgets I’m alive.

I am writing you from a cabin shoved deep into a drift of cocaine.

I’m kidding. 

This isn’t actually cocaine, 

it’s snow, 

but just the thought of you is like a chronic intake of crack. 

Is a brain full of gutter glitter enough to call it love? 

Is love such a big word, 

bright and blinding like the paradise white? 

My heart, it is a butterfly trapped in a child’s box, 

a moth kept in cupped hands. 

Call pest control, call a doctor, 

there are insects under the surface 

and the lump in my throat is starting to itch 

and I don’t know what to do with my hands 

and the trees are covered in eyes. 

I am scratching you too deep into my skin. 

Can you see me, or am I hallucinating?

I am writing you from the pines and needles, 

the crawling in my skin from under the trees we used as firewood. 

This is broken glass 

and you are reflected everywhere.

I am writing you from the cabin in which we had dinner together. 

I am writing you from the cabin 

in which we came home exhausted 

and shed our layers of jackets and coats 

and tried to pretend we couldn’t call this undressing. 

Pretended the tension of the mudroom wasn’t tangible. 

You taught me your hot chocolate technique

and the thought of you dissolves in everything

like the powder in the milk and

this is dependance. 

I am writing you from this cabin 

in which we were together, once,

in the simplest sense of the term. 

Can love seep out of a house, even if the memories stay?

And these memories, do you hold them too?

I would call 

but I don’t think I need to hear your voice 

You’ve got the stick of dynamite,

I’ve got the gasoline,

we can kiss with lips like matches

touch me as every city crumbles outside your window,

every building burning, every flower rotting black.

Tonight forget about lambs

we are lions

the kind of lust that makes the sky

fold around us like flames.

Our heartbeats are so tied together

even the anvils change their course,

and the bullets turn to daisies

our breath makes the canons hush,

the bombs stop ticking

your hips against mine,

the smell of thunder or gunpowder.

Is this war or a storm?

But you are neither,

you can arrive without ruin.

Are we beasts or gods?

We will rip darkness apart, shred by shred,

slice it with shivers,

the spasm and honey,

the liquid fire

darling, we will fuck the apocalypse into a genesis,

our touch will erase the world into newness,

turn death into a distant static,

impossible, frail.

We can go now, with the bedtime story

I can’t eat,

my lips are pouted shut.

Some nights I find myself 

tapping codes against the walls 

before balling my fists

into my sheets and

remembering there is no one 

on the other side to hear me.

I lay awake and count my empty pill boxes,

the ones I lined up on the window sill.

I’m a moth, a caterpillar 

still enclosed in the embryonic lull of the cocoon, 

still waiting for the colors to stain me pretty. 

No amount of makeup I brush onto my skin 

will ever make this cocoon shatter. 

No prying hands can split it, 

no boys can kiss it open.

Will my shoulder blades ever grow feathered?

I wonder if Icarus held his breath

when presented with his wings.

I wonder if he remembered how it was

to be flightless.

Was he ashamed of the fall?

Did they name his ambition failure?

Did he blame his ruin on the sun,

that bright light burning before us

after Carrie Wittmer

I’m sorry my bra size isn’t enough for you. Fuck you. 

You sing like shit.

no

I googled your name and was disappointed. You’re boring as hell.

Please delete my number.

Were the nudes I sent you not enough? Stop asking for more, you’re really fucking annoying.

Stop making promises you can't keep. My heart is too delicate for this shit. 

Stop telling me you miss me. You live on the other side of the country and also I don’t care.

I think you just text me as an excuse to talk about yourself. You self-centered asshole.

I am the only one who finds sexting hilarious and everything but sexy?

Stop this whole bullshit of expecting every text I send to be poetic and infinitely quotable just because I’m a writer. I’m a poet when I want to be and I’ll be whatever the fuck I wanna be the rest of the fucking time you dumbass.

ew

Stop fishing for compliments. You sound like a 12 year old girl.

I loved you for a whole millisecond once. 

I keep deleting your number and all your texts to keep myself from talking to you, but you always end up texting me first. Please stop.

go away u creep

You have a girlfriend. Stop doing this.

Rise and sleep, sleep and rise, numb and frozen 

and in the cold, brisk air you want simply to fold 

into yourself until you disappear. Will disappearing 

make you warm? Might as well try. Burnt bagels 

toothpaste smeared onto fingers, lips chapped 

and brittle, scraped, raggedy knees, bruises and 

dirt under your nails, waking up with deep lines etched into 

your face, dark splotches, frazzled thinning static hair, 

cold buried beneath our limbs like stubborn splinters, 

our legs the kind of shaken that makes us know we’re 

alive, trembling like the frames of abandoned farms. 

We can see our breath in the early morning, tangible 

proof that we are here and we are alive, and I think 

of Mrs. Gaudry, asking us how we know we exist, how 

we know we’re alive. Consciousness is the visible breath. 

We spend the nights speaking in whispers, damning 

or praising our peers, trading secrets like currency. 

This is a curious temporary home, the walls a little 

less sturdy, the ceiling lower, a muffling claustrophobia. 

We hear nothing- no sirens, no lawn mowers, no airplanes, 

no cars, but the silence doesn’t make us forget the home

we left behind. Constellations and blurred fingertips, gauzy 

grey mornings in this stark panorama, laughter and anger 

and smoker’s coughs. The stars stay out all night, we don’t 

have that kind of strength, but at least we aren’t voiceless. 

I read somewhere that taking pictures increases positivity 

and appreciation and so I click away and the camera gets 

passed around because it’s not that we want these moments 

to live forever, it’s just we want to learn to love them. 

They swim unplanned in the river, the iridescence settled 

deep into the bottom, to drown any remainder of the hike’s grime and dust. 

This is how we awaken, blurred and dizzy 

in a teepee made of flotsam and driftwood, 

our eyes still lit from the bonfires of yesterday, 

our breaths visible in the early morning. Our 

philosophy teacher always asks us how we 

know we’re alive. How we know we exist. 

This is how. Our breath looks golden, fog into 

the sunrise, dust glimmering in a shaft of light, 

the kind of dust we wanted to hold as children, 

before we realized that sparkles were just dust 

and light meant nothing. It is so beautiful, not 

having a door to lock at night before going to bed, 

not having a bed under which monsters can hide. 

We swam in the ocean last night, to drown the children 

in us. We drank for the same reasons. We told our secrets 

to the dunes, unwrapped them from our teeth and carefully 

unfurled them off our tongues like poprocks, nudged our limbs 

into the sand, still warm even in darkness. At dawn our hair 

is still rough and dry from the salt water. 

We are blind children groping the walls 

around us for balance, down dark 

corridors of a dark place. I’m a 

hypocrite for saying this, but I 

hate all those dumb things 

about teenagers being lost. 

You can’t lose what has