Spot of Time

Borrowed in a spot of time
The birds see me and whistle
A flamboyant tumble weed
Loud flower, thorn, or thistle
Painted fuchsia to deceive
Protected like the treasure
Pricks my finger now I bleed,
Turn mute but all the deafer

Take me nature, I digress
Rain is only permanent
Each petal reads love me not,
I have loved the time I caught.

soiled sober

Hands!
Unclean hands!
Unclean hands of those
Full of drunkenness
And unsobreity
Hands unclean with sex and lustfulness
even too treacherous to sink into the Inferno,
Seventh layer…
Those fingers composed of sex and intoxication
Touch my skin
My shoulder freckles
But… I….
I am so pure that dirty hands do not stain me.
I simply clean them.
I cannot be tainted but they can
Be
Sobered.
Worry not, I will make them drunk again.
My words like drugs,
My lips addictive.
Bitter nicotine in my
Poetry and out of my mouth that alcohol
Oh, how it is that I am.
So pure.
Permanently sexless.
Crawling
From
The Inferno
Cleaning you
Along the way.
Almost bleached,
Like my heart when you touched it.

Originally published in the 2014 FACETS at the Butler County Community College.

Taking Up Space
There are a lot of things my mother didn’t tell me
that could have saved my life.
She never told me that I was going to
have to apologize for
how much space I take up,
that my apologies must be sincere
and that I’m worth more than
the space I’d leave behind,
if I left
and that spaces don’t matter so much.
I wouldn’t think about leaving,
if she would’ve told me.

She never told me to stop falling in love
with everyone who was kind
because some people are kind to strangers
and sometimes
strangers are supposed to stay strange,
just because someone holds open the door
and says thank you sometimes,
doesn’t mean you have to get married.

She never told me that when the television says
“growing up is optional”
to not take it so literally,
and she didn’t tell me that
when I grew up,
I’d lose way more than I gained
but I could give more than I lost.

but she did teach me that
if you have to get something done,
do it

don’t wait for men to plant flowers for you
and don’t let them manage money
don’t wait for them any longer than it takes to brush your teeth

and she taught me
that people take up the same amount of space
despite how big they are.

Originally published in 2014 in The Bridge Literary Journal in Franklin, Pennsylvania.

Add-or-exic

she was a straight-C math student
who hated graphing fractions,
in a flood of A’s and extracurricular
until she started skipping
lunch
the excuse sounded something like
the half an hour to do homework
was more mandatory
than the menu
in two months she brought her
math grade up ten percent and dropped
ten percent of something else,
the way she was
learning to divide her body
made her understand why she had to find “x”
each meal taught her to add
and she invented new ways to subtract
in five months she
became the fraction
and the only thing on the graph
was two digit numbers
and red circles to mark
every
wrong
answer.

Originally published in the 2014 Poetry Marathon Anthology.

Infected Mushrooms

I’ve been several sorts of hungry
in a minute this past hour
jaw clenched between two
needle nose pliers;
propped open

plaid-coated spelunkers
chiseling my cavities
and chewing on my enamel like
infected mushrooms;
tied around

my canines are clever mountains
my eye teeth are a gold harvest
my molars are beds
of lava

I seep into your hive-mind
when you eat my words
like infected mushrooms and
disobedient
opulence

Originally published in the 2014 Eye Contact at Seton Hill University.

The Ache of Creativity

I want to buy sixteen Halloween costumes and wear them
during the third week of every month
that isn’t October
and I will never answer a single person
when they ask me why—I will pass them,
witchy-fingered, evil-eyed,
entirely in character,
I won’t even smile

Someone told me today that I am so lucky that
I am smart and talented—he wishes he could make
such beautiful art,
but on most days I feel that is the opposite of luck
I just want to sleep
I don’t want to earn degrees and throw my name onto books,
I’m sorry that I’m too tired to learn anything
I’m sorry that I know too much to sleep
but I sleep so much
as a result of never sleeping, the combination of the two
is nothing like insomnia, and all of this—
I wouldn’t call it luck.
It’s more like a costume. I won’t even smile.

The Anvil Diet

sometimes people tell me
to stop worrying about
my weight
like I hadn’t already been trying
like the idea of
shoving the worry to recess on the moon
wasn’t already my favorite
I carry the launch in my backpack
on the way to school sometimes
ignorance sounds a lot like
“you don’t even need a diet”
“you’re not that big”
“life is too short to worry about it”

life is too long
to be stuck longing to be
yourself in a different way
to say “I will always be here
I will just change the way you see me
I will be altering my first impressions
and my right to exist.”

this weight is an anvil.
ignorance sounds a lot like:
“size doesn’t matter”
“you’re beautiful despite it”
“you’re too young to worry”…

but too damn
old to waste any more of a lifetime
throwing dimes into wishing wells
and picking up lucky pennies
asking for self control
a smaller jean size
the relief echoes
as I walk down
the stairs
to being
myself
again
my
identity
rests within
my ability to shrink

Originally published in the 2014 Overlooked by Overkill at Allegheny College.

Hurricane

Say this storm will bring down a tree—
five hundred pounds of integrity…
Say that you are the space between my teeth,
obsolete only when I breathe.
Now, smirking, exasperation ceases,
a life of only smiling leads to
a face that’s full of creases.
I am working to achieve a standard
on which I could thrive,
for my body to be dead
but my mind to stay alive.

Speaking

Anatomically speaking
the space between my lungs
is no larger nor no wider
than another anyone

Realistically speaking
my heart beats
thirty-one times per second

and I learned that from experience,
not just merely guessing

Hypothetically speaking
I have been in love with everybody twice
And I still haven’t found a lover
who is worth half the price.

To Rattle the Bones

To rattle the bones. Am I a bird?
My frame shattered by inadvertence.
I could brush it off or lie to die. I am a bird…
Flock or not, so singular.
Fleeting, and yet I am bruised.
The shell to house my thoughts…
Demolished by ignorance,
unrestraint and self-indulgence.
So, I feast.
I seek nourishment in pity and pain…
I see relevance from what I earn or gain.
The fruit of many trees has poisoned me.
Only it may have been less accidental.
To rattle the bones. I’m a feline.
I’m owned by many or by none…
I am cunning and strong and do not bask in luxuries.
I watched as inadvertence took my prey. So I feast.
To rattle the bones.

Originally published in the 2013 FACETS at the Butler County Community College.