“I want to know what to do with the dead things we carry.”

“you appeared in kindergarten with a dress your mama sewed you and hands that would never stop trying to taste the world, hunt-pecking and unsettled with a body full of blueberries you picked out of the bushes in the backyard right by where the nightshade berries grew (stop-your-heart-like-nothing-do berries) and when ms. music teacher sits up pretty with her white bird neck and trembling body and pretty dress she says, “repeat after me,” and the whole class does mouth open cheerio-style into a beehive hum of discord trying to repeat that pretty white neck note and you do it the best out of everyone. she asks you if you sing and you have to check ; does this body sing ? does this body know more than how to dance pretty ? you say, “ no , i’m just good at copying things ” your mouth like jelly and your tongue rough because you don’t like speaking up and she laugh-laugh-laughs at that so you laugh too, because you’re good at copying things and that’s what little girls do your mama wasn’t ever as disappointed as when you said of her friend, “ robin looks more like a chicken, ” but you were in second grade then and you didn’t know yet that cancer comes with skinny waist and raw skin and bare head. the gospel grows in her too harsh and she’s surrounded by tumors, you cry at night for fear of them growing like termites in your skin and cheat on your math test and your teacher says, “she’s not her brother, that much is certain” and your father says, “girls just aren’t good at math” and you think: my brother’s crooked nose and mine are the same hawk-witch melding. i smell just as good as he can. math means nothing. there are people out there dying like chickens. brother genuine genius, tested, brother learning-disability, brother certified sociopath. tests came back. he says he can’t trap emotions they flutter like fireflies for him, he says, “i’m blind and everybody else pretends like i could see if i just tried harder,” so you learn for him. you learn tiny train signals people got to organize their faces. you learn their inside ways like you are a peeler. when your parents take you out of school for three weeks so you can set foot in all 48 states, your spine is devil’s tower, your ribs are sequoia, your father says, “stay in the car” while your brother changes the tire. when you come back to fourth grade bright lights nobody asks what the fog in san fransico tastes like. you fail the music test because you were busy listening to the stars out in the desert and you picture your kindergarten teacher’s white lily throat as it sings out a note. there are people out there who are dying like your mother is. she smells so much of radiation, a church choir ringing out hospital trips. you swear you hear the devil surging in your ribs but you hide it. your eighth grade social studies teacher bellows, “all of you girls are so over dramatic none of you have any idea what real pain is.” eighty-four percent of your daddy’s ancestors died in political prison and your mother’s body is a multiplication table nobody remembered to finish and is now completing itself ad infinitum no matter how sick it makes her and you say “ i turned down the boston ballet because they are all crazy ” but if they asked it’s because you once saw your mother with her white neck bobbing up and down in hushed sobs about a hospital bill and you saw your daddy degrade himself to afford dance class and if people were cars you would have swerved into oncoming traffic by now just so somebody would hear the low-key screeching that’s been building in your system teenage girls are a laughtrack. in ninth grade maddie takes apart her father’s razor and uses it to spoon out the river styx that was boiling bright inside of her. lex says she’s addicted to the way puking feels after it’s all over, she says, “it’s like love, it hurts and then it doesn’t" and in tenth grade sylvia serves herself up to a boy and comes to your party with her teeth chattering and tells you that if regret was a spoonful of sugar, she is all of cuba’s export and then some teenage poets with their pathetic broken hearts like yours who holds two sides of a coin your father would spit out if he knew it read “has kissed a girl and has kissed a boy and liked both of them” because catholic rocks don’t grow down they only make straight diamonds never rainbow bismuth’s bisexuality and besides the vast wild empty that has no name or place outside of a poet’s page is only hormones anyway, this crippling numb which swallows all and all and all and teenagers obsess about their hair and never stop texting, right, in the eleventh grade you finally make the choice to cut your father’s heritage out of your head and look like one of them and act like one of them and in the same year you lose two friends to suicide and in the same year your friend says, “i haven’t eaten in three weeks” and in the same year, you discover that maggie is a bully and you’re easy pickings and the next year, you go to prom alone with nothing but a red dress and excellent hair and makeup and suddenly the boys who pushed your body to the ground and stepped on you and made you gravel and disheveled and punch - line, the ones who took your soul and smashed it between their palms, they say, “listen, you seem cool, we should hangout more often” and it doesn’t feel like victory, it sounds like wind through a dead tree, all rattling branches inside a heart that doesn’t stop flinching at things teen girls grow up to go to college where teen girls take too many shots and swallow themselves in the process, where you hold back hair and hold back tears and hold a girl who won’t stop crying about her stepfather and hold your tongue when some frat boy with a guitar you can play better than he does says, “you’re a pretty girl, what could possibly be heavy inside you” and you laugh but later alone with your roommate half sleepdrunk and half too tired to carry it any farther what comes spilling like whales out from your lips are big fat heavy memories from that summer and the funeral for your mother’s murdered friends who were killed by their sociopathic 18 year old son you kissed when you were both seven and eating mangoes and how at his trial they said sociopath sociopath sociopath “he beat them to death with a hammer so that he could have a party” says the prosecution, sociopath - your brother’s face is melting into a puddle and late that night he wakes you up and says “i would never, i would never, i would never” and you say, “ i know, i know i know ” and when you tell her your roommate says “oh my god” and later she’ll pour you six extra shots teen girls pretty girls ugly girls who learned to be funny before they became somebody, devil’s tower spines that are crumbling in the desert heat the dress you’re wearing is too slutty not slutty enough come on let’s party until our heels break or maybe our hourglass hearts nobody wants to read the poetry of somebody who tastes like you do, honey, if you call out, the world won’t answer, if you howl, when you inhale, you’ll just inhale the night and maybe your skin keeps calling for a great divide, a break in the music, a white throat, a garden you can grow, a place that’s actually real-life, no-joke home teen girl freshman college co-ed syndrome, a nirvana that nobody reaches without first feeling nothing, a body already covered in every insult they know, a body already used to catcall heads hanging out of windows and the fear that creeps up in their throat and a body ready to explode, never a person, no, just a body, trying to be better, trying to copy more, trying to trap emotions on butterfly pins against pretty white corkboards, always sorry, always apologizing for something even if it’s just existing, at nineteen you are a spiral, an EKG cart, a warning label, a scream girl as hymn. girl as ugly turned pretty cinderella dream, a knife in her pocket and hurt crunched like feathers between her teeth, girl with fingernails covered in bones and dirt, but girl who crawled out of her own grave like lazarus, a demon or a daughter or a twenty-one year old who counts birds and touches puddles with one shaking finger and hands who cannot stay steady but instead are palm trees, bending easy, a locker full of bad dreams but one that is slowly being emptied, being cleaned, being made livable by re-narrating the story, bed as nest not bed as anchor girl as offering plate instead of empty place, girl as round cheerio mouth holding one’s own whole note, not copying, one’s own body, resonating, one’s own catastrophe made flesh made savior complex made self made fists made gentle made accidental poet made it and made it and somehow thank god made it.”

For whatever we lose, a you or a me.