do not look for me
(i came home to an empty village and in my innocence they drowned a thousand bleating lambs waiting to be bled)
a secret killed my father (or, a poem by my mother on the cultural revolution) back when the military had taken our father and our house and had forced my grandmother to her knees i could spell hope with two letters each patched over my two eyes like a blind prayer now the children are older, now they whisper secrets between themselves, a tree with many roots they dream in full color, history hot on their trail i unleash the dogs at night to hunt down all my ghosts
a week in passing We were hungry and fools in love. I wish you had not left me the fall-out of your radioactive heart. On Sunday I did not go to church again. On Monday I let the mint chocolate chip ice cream drip seafoam green on my white dress, and I did not take it to the cleaners like I should have. On Tuesday I carved curves the way your body carried them into my palms with my fingernails. Now I have crescent-shaped bruises on my hands and a dress I cannot wear again. On Wednesday, I did not do the reading as I should have, and my professor pulled me aside after class with a stern look. “Laura,” he had said, eyebrows scrunched together so tightly that only a sliver of skin was left between them. I noted the loneliness they must have felt being so close but unable to touch. “Laura, I’m concerned about your performance in this class. This isn’t like you. You seem like a bright young woman, so what’s going on? Can we talk about this?” No, we cannot talk about this. I noted the way his eyebrows were a living computation of Xeno’s Paradox. How we had always reached out halfway but never truly met. I told him I was fine, and noted how skilled I was at telling lies for your sake. (On Thursday I wrote a poem, and I — )
“This isn’t like you,” sometimes they tell me. As if I could be me and not be like myself at the same time. Recognize the logical fallacy in your language. Realize the inherent truth of your blithe blundering. I am at once outside of myself and inside, a half and a swallowing whole. “This isn’t like you,” a friend told me once, and I hated her for saying so. Who are you to presume what I really am? On Thursday I wrote a poem in silence, tore it to pieces, and swallowed it like the sea. And I want so much to write, but I do not have the stories. My life is a bore. On Friday the lady living one floor below screamed as if she were being murdered. I wondered, perhaps, if someone across the country at that very moment were actually being murdered. On Saturday I wrote down all the reasons I fell in love with you. (Because it was convenient. Because you were striking. Because your lips were lovely and the slant of your face was lovely. Because you told me sweet things when I wanted you to. Because I wanted to.) On Saturday I wrote down all the reasons I started hating you. (Because you annoyed me. Because you
always talked to me when I wanted to be left alone. Because I never felt we were on the same page. Because sometimes it felt difficult to talk to you when you should have been able to read my mind. Because you consumed me.) On Saturday I went to the pier and watched the seagulls dive for food, picking fish out of the sea like it were such an ordinary business. They swooped and called and took life easily. I could not help but think of death. I am perhaps a morbid person, but no more morbid than anybody else. Everybody is thinking of death. Everybody is thinking of life. On Saturday I walked back home, alone, and passed a mailbox, thinking of all of the people I could have loved but shut myself out from doing so because I had wanted to be alone. On Sunday, I did not go to church again.
wip the best writing i have done in the past year has all been really sad. i think about childhood: two girls in an empty room, melting candle wax with our mouths. i think of the way our parents gutted heart lines into our palms. i think of you, and all the knives you have stitched under my skin, like an infection, like a war crime.
i feel that i’m more truthful now when introducing myself to people. nice to meet you, my name is laura, and i’m scared of people. i’m afraid of everything, really. and i have a pathological need to be a savior. yes, good. tell the truth. let it spill forth like rubble in the rain. your mother would be proud.
(null) i want to be missed. i miss people like it is a new fad. either i’m too depressed and i want to be left the fuck alone, or i want people and i get depressed. i miss people like cancer. i miss my mother, i want her to care for and protect me even though i’m too old to be cared for and protected. i want to be able to crawl home when things haven’t worked out when my dreams have collapsed and i want her to tell me, “i don’t know much about gentleness, but i will protect you from now on.” i want her to tell me that everything will be okay. i miss bella, i want her, i need her. i’m scared of hurting her. i’m scared i only want her when i need her. people say you should love yourself or be mentally healthy before you fall in love with people and i am neither of those. i’m scared i will hurt her. i want people to miss me and worry about me and protect me, i don’t want people to worry about me. i have this undue desire to be worried about and to not be worried about. i don’t want people to worry about me because i want them to see me as strong and indomitable, i want to be strong
and indomitable for them. i care for and protect people because no one had done so for me. in this world that is so callous and uncaring i want to be the thing that cares. i want to be the golden torch. not to feel important, no, none of that, i can’t even handle importance, i just want people to feel hope, i want to bring hope because no one else will. i want to make people feel loved and important and cared for. sometimes i feel like a terrible person because sometimes i feel too tired and pissy to but if i don’t then who will? i don’t want people to worry about me because people shouldn’t have to worry about light, the only constant in the universe. but i am not strong i am very weak and soft. and yet i push people away and convince everyone i have very hard edges and sometimes i have become something brittle and hard-edged. i want to be soft. i want people to worry and care for me because i’m needy. i don’t think very many people care or worry about me and i’m afraid that will make me sound whiny but sometimes i highly suspect that is true. that they don’t think or know that i suffer constantly almost daily from depression and or bipolar disorder and that during the shower just now i had a panic attack because i was so scared of everything. i was so scared of my future and wanting things and wanting to be wanted that i cried but i couldn’t cry so i just had a panic attack instead. i want them to know and i don’t want them to know. i don’t want them to know my dirty secrets. i want them to know so they’ll worry and care about me. i never get the things i think i’ll have and i always get the things that i didn’t think i’ll have. sometimes i think this is a test of god challenging me not to expect things. sometimes i think god is just cruel because it messes me up, it messes up my plans. i’m childish and immature. i just want to have what i want. i’m frustrated when i don’t get it. but it’s understandable, i think. i have settled far too long for second-rate things, including the way i treat myself. i don’t want second-rate anymore. i just want to have what i want.
I’m broken, Mommy. He tore me a new one. Last Sunday he took me out to dinner, fancy four-course thing at the Parker Meridien, and he broke me. He broke me! I was so angry I stomped down on my left foot and broke my heel and fell into the street and grazed my knee against the grey/black cement. Oh shit, I mumbled through my tears. I watched the blood pool in the little dips of the bones and mix with the black specks I’d collected from the pavement. It’s gonna get infected, I think. Do you need help, miss? Are you okay, miss? Holy crap, that’s a lot of blood! Miss, do you need help? Leave me the fuck alone! I swatted all of their swaying gorilla arms away. Does it look like I need help? You’re the ones who need help! God, do you even know what heartbreak looks like? It looks like this! So fuck off! Jesus Christ, lady, we were just trying to help. Looks like you got what was coming to you. They stalked away, little children with hurt feelings, boo boo, poo poo, and I staggered to my feet. My heel was broken and the blood was pooling at the top of my knee, dribbling down to my ankle like an anemic waterfall. I wore my best dress, my best pearls, my best furs. I was puffed up on pomp and circumstance. I couldn’t see my reflection even though New York City is a funhouse mirror but I could see in my mind’s eye streaks of black down my cheeks, pathetic panda eyes. I’m pathetic, Mommy. I hailed a cab and the cab driver was grouchy. He had a bad day. In the back of his mind he was composing a four-hundred-wordcount rant against the Wall Street fat cats who left him a twenty cent tip on a thirty dollar fare, like, fuck, do you think I can feed my family with that? Do you think I can survive on twenty cent tips? But he kept this to himself, serene face, gruff tongue, where to, miss? Home. Where’s home? I don’t know anymore. I lived with my fiance and he doesn’t want to see my pathetic panda face again. Look, lady, if you don’t know where you’re going, sorry, but get out of my cab, I need to pick up another customer. Okay, okay, I said, take me to 33rd and 8th, I said. I’m broken. You’ve all broken me, you heartless fucks. I’m broken. I gotta see my Mommy.
SEX, DEATH, VOODOO You press your cold, hard lips to my forehead. It is a quiet day, and there is sadness in my heart, and I want someone to put their lips to my cunt. Your fingers rub circles into my back, like those Swedish masseuse girls do at fancy spas where you take your clothes off and pay a hundred fifty a pop for strangers touching you, but without the grace. I want you inside me, but I’m reminded of loneliness. The melancholy of sex. How for you to be inside me, I must consume you, how I will never be able to completely consume you. How friction must exist between bodies in order to produce any heat. You murmur in my ear, “I wish I could love you, but I can’t.” It is not a wish, it is a promise. I’m pathetic, me, here. “Me too.” Such a pity. “Me too.” – She calls me on Sunday, tone worried, calls me “honey bear” and “baby boo” without prompt. “Honey bear,” she says, “I’m worried about you, I really am — you haven’t replied to any of my emails — is everything okay?” I press a cold compress to my head. It is not raining outside, and I do not fever for the sun. “Yes,” I murmur. “Baby boo, that doesn’t sound very convincing. Tell me what’s
wrong, baby. Please, tell me.” “Don’t call me that.” She pauses. “There’s no need to be short with me.” I take the phone away from my ear. Its curved, conch shape and naked creaminess stun me. I’m half-convinced that if I put it back to my ear, that I’d hear the ocean. That I’d hear something more meaningful than the fruitlessness of conversation, useless human babble. “I’m sleeping with someone else, Tara.” There’s a sound like a fish gulping back down water on the other end. “Tara?” “Well, fuck you too.” – I have such nostalgia for the sea. (When you sleep beside me, I only have nightmares. The ocean beneath me churning a dark, ancestral magic, the large black teeth of its waves swallowing me whole. I toss and turn. I cannot sleep well beside you. When I wake in the mornings, there is a strait of space between us, as if a knife had descended and split us from each other’s embrace, as if you had crossed on to the other side, moved on without me, and I am still here, shipwrecked.)
veritas These are the things we wish we had the words to say: breaking into the bank at night, coins singing. A lone dove. His feathers pearl grey from nesting in chimneys. The echoes you left, like crime scene evidence, on the floors of my apartment. We haven’t been honest, or kind. Think of the way we crumble at the center and then mend our way back together again. Think of the way we always feel empty after we kiss. Here is what I know: a forest regrows five years after a wildfire claims every soul it owns. It has been five months and you are still lighting matches in the dark, claiming mine.
I wasn’t thinking when you told me you didn’t want me. I wasn’t thinking about anything. My mind was blank. In the back of my head I was writing a poem. A few brilliant lines had swam forth through the static, like a child’s last wish. I hadn’t written them down, and I’d forgotten them. Parts of me (my lungs, my heart, my thighs) had known this wasn’t meant to be. That I was doomed. I can sniff out prospective ghosts like the best bloodhound on a fox hunt. Or maybe I just knew that I tend to fall for the wrong people. Either people who tread my heart and I love them for the tire tracks, or people who don’t want me and I love them for the chase. I think you were both. I think you were neither. Parts of me (my eyes, my hands, my stomach) were caught totally off-guard. I think they had expected otherwise. Especially my hands, which had ached for every part of you for the longest time that resolution almost seemed inevitable. Damn their pain. This isn’t the first time a boy has made a fool of me. I keep telling myself that this won’t happen again. That I’ll love
better people, or I won’t love at all. I hadn’t been telling the truth when I said, “I’ve liked you for the longest time.” I’d meant to say, “I’ve been in love with you for five months, yes I goddamn counted, I loved you enough to care where you were when the bombs went off and I loved you enough to care about what kind of music you listen to. I inscribed poems into the surface of anything I could find, mostly into my own skin – look, here I am a canvas for loving you, paint me blue. I loved you so much and so foolishly that I think I began to love the idea of you more than the actual you. But it hadn’t mattered at the time. At the time, it was perfect,” and was too scared. Look what you’ve done to me. I say this to make you feel bad. I write this so you’ll understand. I had long stopped writing things for people for fear of hurting them when all they’ve done is hurt me. But I suppose now I am unafraid. I tell you, feel bad. I have felt bad for myself for much too long.
i wished u a happy birthday thru anonymous tumblr message and all i got was this shitty desire to make u love me again oh, and this t-shirt that said “bitch this is ur own fault, u loved me until u couldn’t love me anymore, i wrote a letter to you on a morning in 2013, that was before we knew anything changed, you always left me for something better, now you best be dealing with the shame�
i want your teeth pressed to my collarbone like a branding iron “whore,” it will read “harlot, hussy, slut” foolish girl the bathwater seethes when i scrub your sweat from my skin tomorrow morning
[persephone] i don’t last forever. i last seasons in your wake. the last time you left me i was watching the plow chug through the streets from my window on the second floor. i said, wow, i won’t get to see this much anymore. wow, this must be the last time i watch you walk away. mother earth is kind to me. she planted roses in my chest so my heart would look like it had bled a deep, mournful red. roses para los muertos. mother earth is kind to me. she kissed my forehead and said, ophelia is not your sister. i said, okay. the roses stayed permanent but the bleeding didn’t.
(last night i heard everything in slow motion) i am strong and weak. i am a bamboo grove and a withering daisy. i am full of so many holes, i am empty, i am whole. i am broken and i am fixed. i have every scar pressed on my face like a gutenberg print. the sky rains bullets and fills my eyes — these are not tears on my cheeks, these are mother earth’s hopes and dreams. one day, i hope i can be as lucky as you.
i can only write so much confessional poetry before it hangs me out to dry. i think my productivity must rival a sinning man’s, the murderer, the thief, the adulterer. i have so much to say and it is all the same. “o holy father who art in heaven…please do not let this heart bleed again. i am done being made fool of. i confess: my wrists were born upturned straight out of the womb. on rainy days, i feel too much familiarity with the sky. father, i am guilty of the sin of expecting too much. of having skin so thin i can scarcely stand without wilting. of the churlish attitude my mother warned me about. above all, i crave the kinds of things that are not mine: the musk of mountain lions, honeydew in the mornings, the boat on the lake, parisian motorcycles, good sense, your lips, my bliss. i am selfish, oh lord, yes, i am tempted. forgive me father, for i have sinned.” (“ten lord’s prayers and ten hail mary’s.” i remember the boat on the lake. i remember you. “thank you, father.”)
I feel like a hyperbole. I feel the sticky fingers peeling me open like an apricot. I feel like a wasteland, a morgue, a braggart. I have gotten this far and I have not died. I feel ancient sap rising in my veins. It is not poetry, it is a lethargy.
I love this song, I tell him. Can you turn it up a little? He leans forward, his body across my legs on his lap, to dial up the volume on his computer. Better? I smile. My heart hasn’t smiled in years. In this dim orange room he looks phosphoric. (And you know what they say about chemical reactions.) Much.
love letter i love you, i love you, i love you, i’m drowning in you, you are my life raft, my safety line, i am losing every part of me in this ocean except the part that loves you, i am losing every part of myself but you, i don’t know what this says about me, i don’t know what this makes me anymore, i am always angry at you but i always miss you, i am always angry at you but i always love you, i know no one could love me but you, this is the part of our gorgeous, lifesaving, healthy relationship that is unhealthy, i wonder if everyone’s gorgeous, lifesaving, healthy relationship has these demons i can’t chase away, i need you but i’m scared that you will never really listen to me, and when you never really listen to me you will never know me, i’m scared, you said you’re trying and i believe you, on good days i love you and we laugh and we feel bolstered, on bad days i love you and i cry and we feel destroyed, i don’t know how to say this to you, i don’t know how to say this to you if i tried, i love you, there’s not enough of me that can say that i love you, i don’t have enough arms to embrace you or mouths to consume you out of love, i love everything about you from your hair to your taste to your secrets to your toes, i still don’t know why you love me, you tell me sometimes but i still don’t know why, i’m losing myself, i’m losing myself in this ocean called myself and it’s not getting better, i’m not sleeping well, i throw fits and i hurt you, but i love you, i throw fits and i hurt myself, but i love you, i love you, i love you
drunk poetry fuck me hard before you go oh sorry, those aren’t the lyrics but damn the way you talk to me in bed should be memorialized framed in a museum for the jealous bitches who lost you i love the way your arm curls around me in your sleep i dream about it when i can i press play on frank ocean you tell me that you love him and i tell you that i love you
imagine i am crystalline. imagine if i flared out from my arms like two calla lilies or two birds of prey taking flight. imagine if i were nature, and you pulled my crops from the earth gently. imagine if i were a thing of beauty.
i want to be a shining star i want to be a movie star and i am always afraid
I hope they never love you as much as I love you. In the dark, I spread your legs apart with my hands. I could call them the sea but only if I drown in them.
drunk poetry (pt. 2) I used to think about stars, and the quality of gas, those were things my youth used to think about, I realize the things I was not quite sated with returned to haunt me from my past, in a strange and wild stupor I realized the totality of myself, every nugget solid and cardial, I mined for diamonds but came up vagabonds, they said hey tell me what’s the time and I could not tell them and I could not see out of my front eyes and in the very core of the ore I found something resembling a truth
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