Baby Girl

Baby girl

You can barely move

Untouched

Untainted

You have nothing to prove

Little girl

Shoulders high with your heart

Giggling days

Away

Your own piece of art

Growing girl

You’re exposed

Pitted from

Memories

Of being taken and disposed


Big girl

Body a crime scene

Taped up

Filed away

Raped of what could have been

Poor girl

You can barely move

Fragments of yourself

You’re nothing

Left

To

Prove

I Met a Man Today

I met a man today.

He smiled at me and asked for my hand.

Tentative,

I offered it to him

As he danced me around into a decrepit pit

And left me there.

I met a man today.

He told me he would help me out of the pit,

I eagerly offered him my hand.

He declined, asking for my thoughts instead.

So I walked him through the corners of my mind

As he stopped frequently to replace the flowers I had planted throughout

With weeds

And left me there.

I met a man today.

He told me he would help me out of the pit,

But I asked him to help me get my mind back instead.

He agreed,

But demanded my heart first.

So I gave it to him.

As he cursed its lifeblood with corruption

And left me there.

I met a man today.

He said he could help me out of the pit,

As he slithered down

And lay next to me.

I asked him what he wanted and he said,

“Your body”.

I refused.

But he took it anyways.

Soiling my naïveté

And left me there.

I met a man today.

He said he could help me out of the pit,

But them he gazed down at my

Idle eyes,

Stained heart,

And debased body

Realizing I had no more innocence to offer

And left me there.

Isolation

I stand behind thick glass that separates me from the rest of the world

As I watch everyone dance, sing, and love

In the world beyond this glass.

On my side of the barrier I am alone.

I want to be with them.

I wave and talk to them

But they do not see me.

I smash my fists against the glass until my knuckles are a bloody pulp.

I continue to do this every day

But the glass gets thicker and they all become blurrier.


I see them together

Loving one another

And I beg them to come and love me too.

But they stay so far away from me and I cannot get to them.


I curl into a defeated fetal position

As they all turn and face me.

“Sweet baby,”

They say

“How do you expect us to love you when you don’t even love yourself?”

Efforts

I realized who I was

Would never be enough,

But that maybe

What I did could be.

So I presented you with the rarest flowers

And commanded the earth to sprout trees.

I nurtured the ground and instructed it to birth mountains.

But you shook your head 

And demanded an ocean.

I looked to your sky,

Which I noticed was brooding and black.

So I adorned it with the moon

And sprinkled your horizon with stars,

So you would no longer feel isolated.

But you turned to me

And demanded the sun.

I moved on to the air.

I told it to whisper nostalgic chills,

Wishing that you cared to remember

I made it accumulate tears

In hopes that you would feel it cry.

I ordered those tears to frost 

Into an overlay of snow,

So you’d know of new beginnings.

But you spit on my efforts

And demanded a warm summer day.

You wanted what I could not give you,

And you quickly disposed 

Of all that I could.

Flowers

I want to be where the flowers grow;

To be the dirt I was created with.


I want to inhale the soil I was taken from

Until I am suffocating in the ground.


I want the trees’ limbs to swaddle me,

Coiling around my neck like a noose.


I want to lie in rest beneath the earth;

For the plants to root themselves under my skin, intertwining with my veins.


I want the insects to infest my rib cage,

Nesting together around my still heart.


I want to be the home for the flowers,

Because I am tired of being the home to myself.


I want to be where the flowers grow.

Abuse and Love

Truth lies in perception.

So I guess you never really lied to me

when you told me you loved me.

Because maybe in your mind you did.

But your definition of love was conditional,

and I couldn’t live up to those expectations.

So I stepped away

and you yelled sweet slander after me.

Each word taking out a chunk of the earth between us,

as insult after insult it began to disintegrate,

until a crack formed in the ground and separated us.

I offered you my hand, 

but you spit on it.

I offered you a rope,

but you set fire to it.

So I stretched my body between our grounds

and offered myself as a bridge,

willing you to walk across me.

But you began to kick my back,

bashing my body into the pit,

Using your fists to brandish my skin,

and leave on me your marks of defeat.

If this is your idea of love,

I want no part of it.

Maybe This Year You’ll Know Better

Every year

I anticipate the first light of spring.

So you and I 

Can begin to bloom together.

But that eagerness turns to panic

When I remember 

That Winter is stalking close by

Planning to seize 

What we once

Were so proud of

And wilt it into something

Lifeless.

This Year You Knew Better

I am blossoming without you,

And you’re withering from my side.

I’ve uprooted the tree you planted in my mind.

And your leaves that once seemed so beautiful

Are dying and falling away one by one.


A Letter to My Love, Ana.

You have been in and out of my life since I was nine.

Nonetheless, every time we meet again it’s like you never left.

Holding my hand through each meal, 

teaching me of right and wrong.

You help me when I slip up

To scrape my guts clean.

Bending over the toilet until nothing but stomach acid is left

leaking over my hand

burning my skin.

You help me hide and deceive.

“I’m not hungry”

“I already ate”

You encourage me through the sleepless nights

When the hunger becomes a razor blade,

raking over the walls of my stomach.

You encourage me to keep going.

And when my eyes become rimmed in black 

and my complexion turns pale and sickly,

You tell me that I am more beautiful than ever.

And when I am too weak to stand

and too frail to walk,

you clap your hands and cheer that you are so proud.

And when my skin becomes a thin plastic wrap stretched around my bones,

you pat my back and will me to the finish line.

And when I see that you are slowly killing me,

I realize I can’t live with or without you.

And it’s the most addictive feeling.

Children, Go Play Outside

I watch flames flicker in the sky.

In the night, I dance with them. 

They are called fireflies,

Lightning bugs,

Little suns that have fallen 

And made their homes in the grass.

I catch one in my hand

And watch the fire glow

Through the cracks of my clenched fist.

I begin to run as fast as I can,

So that the other flames do not catch me.

I am glowing.

I get to my door,

And up to my bedroom.

I slam the door shut and turn on my desk lamp

So that it can glow too.

But the lamp’s glow is all that I see, 

Because the light in my hand has burnt out.

I stare at my palm, astonished.

All that is left is a pathetic, lethargic beetle.

I sigh and pierce a needle through its heart.

I pin it to a board

Next to all the other flames

I tried to capture for show.

Maybe tomorrow night I will catch the lightning bug’s flame.