• wear

    “i don’t understand, why do you not want to wear your skin for yourself?”“what does that mean?”“i mean actually wear what you have,”“I am,”“you are not”“I am”“why is your hand lifted like it’s begging?”

  • tethered

    in exchange, my eyes, and ears were given, in exchange, take all the sweet scents, take the salt on my tongue, take all of the things that keep me tethered, in exchange, give me my silence, give me not a spark of light, and give me my heart, my bowl of tears,

  • gone

    “where are you? the path’s gone off-course,” “i am not lost”“then where are you? there is only darkness here,”“i am not lost. I am.”

  • thinned

    speared through—aches—i didn’t know it mattered; that it all mattered, so much so, numbness eats; the edge of intensity is apathy; and i have been skirting where the air has thinned out, a wall slams shut; and i refuse to go back; forward is the only momentum it knows, even in foreshadowed, perpetual heartbreak—

  • clip

    i remember the look on your face in the first snip on the threshold of my bedroom door, i remember, your fears gathered in the corner across from where you sleep; i have cycled back to the first snip under a new winter sun, how funny, i’ve loved you through many faces, only to clip…

  • debt

    there is a word debt i owe, for having opened prematurely to things unsightly that wore your face; spider webs veil these caverns and Arachne has ceased to sing in her frenzy; have you seen darkness dense pressed against your skin? 

  • calluses

    there are calluses where softness was, i am not sure why what was owed required a blood price; don’t press even a needle towards me, i cannot take it, reason has left, the lines that defined now look like a madman’s quest for—what is it in the first place? 

  • invite rot

    you talk about life over platefuls of death, and never once invite her silence into the lights you so love; what about blue revulses you? yet i cannot take redness whole; too heavy even if my body carries the mantle of it; accents red can i paint over lips, eyes, neck, hands and feet, no…

  • static

    to be contextualized, carved by the wound from static; protruding villi from a mass of flesh; of it and not of it, it and not it, half-births and half-deaths, gravity and space, mirrors bent refract, repeated, repeated, still—

  • specter

    i like the strings strung from the abysmal edge cracked by the hammer of my promised lies; every breath whistles, strikes, vibrates into oblivion; so thinned, even sunlight shimmers like a specter through skin—i wish to play you as you play me,