poem: woman vs. truth

his future was in his face,mine is in my crouch: a laundry-listof menial prostitution, bracketing the old crushesand old trauma and old men (hoveringaround the desk, watchingme work). i am reselling myselfday by day, in twenty-twenty-one,trauma is profittrauma is business. he thought he was terriblyoriginal: pretty boy, fucking the systemand then me after. next timei…

poem(s): split

boy in his head she is a woman I knew, when I was younger. she starts and stops— like porn dissolving, reloading into a face like Iceland, two eyes, two fishes swimming into my mouth— reloading their shaking pupils. when you tip your neck, I would like to bite the wet skin. - - -…

poem: the ancient man

his hands, holding me were like the ocean exploding in my mouth. and I brought the long fingers, the star-fish arms studded with sea spray and drowned crow gilt— i let them buzz me, the edges of things breaking against me like i was the world and he was the water.

poem: maniac pixie dream girl

when I was younger I wanted to be the personification of some artist's inner life— i would be the girl with the mask tacked on backwards, the girl over-thinking her image— i would be youth, hope, the red blushes in forests, the red blushes when boys lean in close and say things from books—like this…

poem: the unexpected boy, the girl rewriting her ghosts

I do not believe men speak to smart women as women. They talk to us as men, as nameless faceless hommes d'affairs: we are leaning against the conference desk, in a (power) suit, with pin-tacks in our neck and the unfortunate addition of long hair, breasts, adultery. The young adult novels lied: there is nothing…

poem: crush

you were not supposed to do this to me. this is not fair, this is not what I wanted. please get out of my mind and stay brilliant somewhere else. Don't you understand? Everywhere you are and I am, there is so much in the air, I cannot breathe: Color still chokes. soft death is…

poem: “guess what? i’m not a robot”

what we have is not social justice, it is not even justice. i am sitting alone on the ground, there is blood around my legs and you are gate-keeping, putting your hands between my brain and my spine and pulling out the pins, tacking me up like a dead flower, a dead girl, ice cream…

poem: we were the world, at war

hello to the dead years hello to the girls in yellow hats, kissing the library windows and pretending they are kissing husbands. hello to the young dead men in trenches, pulsing with no heat, maggots curling around skullcaps and helmets and dead dreams. hello to the girls standing at the train platform, waiting for him…

poem: what is a woman?

when we were talking, he treated me entirely different from last year, he looked in my eyes and said, "i believe--and i'm sure you do too--", already giving me credit for having the right opinions, the right ideologies; this un-pretty girl who can talk of post-modernism, intersectionality and all the necessary college-activist ideals. but i…