Category Archives: Poetry

Unknown's avatar

For my cousin, wherever you may find her

by

Sweet girl,

I remember you.

I remember you standing in between your father and another grown man.

Your wrists no bigger than the twigs we pulled off aspen trees.

You were so unbearably, heartbreakingly small.

I remember you yelling ‘NO DAD’

With your entire body and the strength your mother’s voice had forgotten.

…………..

In my dreams we are fighting the same man.

We are fighting your father.

In my sister’s dreams we are fighting the same man.

We are fighting your father.

In my mother’s dreams,

In my aunts dreams, we are all fighting the same man.

We have always been fighting your father.

……………..

We have always been fighting his father.

………………

In my best dreams you are safe.

In my best dreams I hold you in my arms and we convince you that you are not alone.

……………..

I remember your only public profile picture.

How tall you have grown since they moved you to the desert.

How beautifully you have grown since I last knew you.

……………

Sweet girl,

I will always miss you.

I drop a penny in every fountain I see and whisper your name.

I never hear a single coin hit the bottom.

…………….

Sweet girl,

I see you in every terrified girl-child that I meet in this plantation.

I see you in the mirror every morning.

…………….

May god bless and keep you,

My dearest, my sweetest, my bravest, my smallest sister.

May god free you from our family.

Unknown's avatar

On Tremors

by

Did you know you can drink for long enough
That without poison your body will seize and your heart will betray you?

Did you know you can love the wrong person for so long that your fingers will clench around your own heart while your nervous system betray’s you?

Have you tasted the seduction of despair?
Do you know how addictive feeling your body die can be?

Have you ever fallen in love with your own destruction?

Sweet man,
Do you still not know the difference between killing yourself and fighting back?

One day I will learn to believe I am a real person.
One day I will hold myself without contempt.
One day I will learn to want to be here.

One day I will be an old man and I will run my fingers through the soil in my garden.
One day I will be an old man and I will see myself in a child and I will give him words for the suffering he does not yet know how to speak into understanding.

One day I will be old.
I swear to God; one day I will be old. 

I will force this body to live.

I will push myself through another 6 decades.


I swear to God;
One day I will be old.

Unknown's avatar

Psychosomatic

by

I dreamt about you today.

Washed ashore in a sea of blackout drunk and fever,

Drenched in sweat and saltwater

……..

I told my therapist ‘displacement’ was a sexist trope,

A hysterical comorbidity, of upper-class trophy wives, resurrected from an Era that didn’t know what epilepsy was.

……..

He asked me why my shoulders ache.

And I remembered I had carried you here

I remembered how I watch for you on trains.

I remembered turning to find you standing in the center of my nightmares.

……..

The muscles in my neck twist out my spine

As it hangs from your clothesline

A bucket of bubbles and palpitations

Churning in outlandish red light

……..

Sweep me back out to queasy seas

And find me picking your words out from between my teeth like old food

Unknown's avatar

Crashing Out

by

Missed my appointment for sobriety;

The bus dropped me off at jail.

These official courthouse letters,

Always find me in the mail.

……………………………………

A woman in hijab got on,

Six stops down the line;

I saw my best friend in a tweaker

Who assured me you were doing fine.

……………………………………

I sacrificed my handwriting to tremors;

Vodka makes me gag.

Of every ex who haunts my nightmares;

You’re the own who moves most like my dad

…………………………………..

I saw a dead man OD on the sidewalk,

It has trapped me in a daze;

There are children I will never see again; who I helped raise.

……………………………………

My roommate is resentful.

My mother is concerned.

There’s not a friendship or a bridge inside this town I have not burned.

Unknown's avatar

How (not) to survive a Hydra

by

I am 14;

I wake up in a cold sweat; sober.

For 7 seconds, I see my ex-boyfriend’s silhouette in the corner of my bedroom;

The memory of a monster with two faces still ringing in my ears.

…………………………………

Iam 16;

I stand in between my mother and a screaming soldier, who I have learned to call grandfather.

I am 16 when I make him and his favorite son leave.

(It will be 12 years before I remember this.)

……..

I am 16 and I hate this place.

I am 16 and I do not remember my own  dreams.

I am 16 and monsters are coming back  from the middle east.

……..

I am 17.

I wake up on sleeping pills and SSRI’s.

The monster has three faces now.

I am 17 and we are still in the middle east.

…………………………………

I am 19.

I wake up hungover on bottom shelf vodka, the empty plastic bottle eyeing me from the corner.

I am 19 and we have always been in the middle east.

I shrug off the exauhstion of fighting a four headed monster and try to push my body through an upperclassmen history course.

I am 19 and monsters are teaching my coursework about their victims.

………………………………..

I am 24. I bury my college textbooks in the back yard.

Dreams have always been nightmares;

So I bury them.

I change out the trauma stained sheets.

The monster gains another face.

Maybe rage will save me where reading has failed.

……………………………….

I am 28 and I can not remember a night I was not terrified to fall asleep.

I am 28 and the doctor has pity in her eyes.

The Hydra behind her has so many faces it has been years since I could remember who they all were.

…………………………………..

I am 28 and I have never been young.

I am 28 and I am 12.

……..

I am 12 and I  have always been at war with grown men.

I am 12 and I am old.

I am 12 and somehow the monster already has too many faces to count.

……..

I am 12 and I am going to survive you.

I put a towel over the puddle the sweat of night terrors has soaked through my sheets.

I am 28 and I am still surviving you.

I am 28 and monsters are coming back from the middle east.

Unknown's avatar

If God was real

by

If god was here; He would leave.

……..………

If god was here, he would notice the stabbing pain that shoots through my ankles and shins.

Who knew I needed this many failing joints to stand up straight?

……………

If god was here he would burn for the 15 new martyrs buried under our silence and the desert sand.

………………

He would tell you every time my daughter did not come home.

He would watch the unmarked desert graves burn the edges of every soul in this colony, like paper.

He would wonder why none of us have moved to stop this.

…………………

He would rage.

He would scream.

They would put him in a 72hr hold.

…………………

He would grieve for a million eternities, at how little any of this guilt can fix.

……………

There is no god here.

No community. No solidarity. No people.

What will you say when you meet him?

What of our souls will remain?

…….…

What will you say when you meet him?

What of our souls will remain?

Unknown's avatar

My mothers son

by

Sitting on the balcony of a mega complex;

Looking down at the houses still holding out.

I think my father missed prison.

I miss you with every shattered, lonely atom in my body.

How could you?

How could you break me into a shape you have no use for?

In the eye of an empire,

With traumas as vast and varied

As it’s violences;

I will my body to accept change as the only constant

I will myself not to become a martyr

to the despair and hedonia

that materializes out of the shadows and concrete of this place.

I will myself not to internalize the way the allostatic load splinters my elbows.

I will myself to believe people

When they tell me who they are

My father missed prison more than he loved my mother.

I will this new body not to be his son.

Unknown's avatar

I remember you.

by

An invocation. A declaration. A curse;
I remember you.

I summon you. I bind you. I name you my past.
Stand. Feet planted at the center of the nearest fault line, ley line, or graph line and make peace with these charges;
I remember you.

I remember you as you were;
Counterfeit, tired, and cruel.

I remember you as you promised;
A garden. A refuge. A forest.

I remember myself as you never were;
Liminal, transcendent, home.

I call my desperation and anger. I bind them. I name them reckoning.
Stand at the doors of their temples and burn.

Unknown's avatar

in another life you were better

by

Rod Serling haunts me;

The way my father intended.






You leave copies of bell hooks out when we fight;





While your boyfriend calls me a pussy. 





In another life you were better;





In another life we were better.










I owe the people $128.





You owe some broken girl-child from the mountains everything.










You of all people were supposed to understand me.





You gave me every book about myself that you have never read 










I watch the tendrils of apathy and capital coil;





You could not hold the pain of a widow if she payed you 






			

	
	


				
					



	

		
			Unknown's avatar		

		
Labor Shortage in Omelas


				

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I will myself to hold the taste of this failure in my mouth.
Just one more flavor my white parents did not know how to cook with.





I smother the bitterness of asparagus and your contempt in garlic and white wine.





if god where my dinner guest;

He would ask me which brown woman we owed for tonight’s spice blend;
He would remind me that none of us have ever lived anywhere but Omelas;
He would remember how the acid of the lemon juice cut through the grease and your vitriol.





There is no violence or abuse
This sous chef pretending to be a line cook; did not teach me how to plate.





Salt. Fat. Acid. 
I have always held my own magic.