I was ten and half of
a quarter of an orange
because he said my
skin smelled like smoke
when he hit me, and
I believed the bruises
were notable marks
of beauty.
Once I usurped helium
from the comets, because
someone told me I could
chase the double yellow lines
and find oxygen a long the way.
But he found me and told me
I wasn't supposed to be going
nowhere.
I was thirteen and
my bones had become
an escalator with weepy
bullets full of syringes
and sleeping pills and
the hospital knew me
by name because, i just
kept falling.
Once he started to fill
his veins with an in-balance
of sleep and beer, I could
paint pretty letters on
empty pages.
I was sixteen and my
ribs were being crowded
out by a turntable that
screamed '9' in permanent
marker, as humanity grew
beneath my belly.
Once I pressed my cheek
to the newspaper and
felt relieved when the ink
rubbed off because it meant
words could still stick to
my skin.
They showed me a picture of
placentas and toes and tiny
eyebrows of this little thing
growing beneath my lungs
on the day he took me for
them to tell me my life
was irrevocable because
it had been six months
now.
he started up the car with apple
juice and gasoline hands, and I
ran, following the yellow lines
to the train tracks and finding
trestle bridges and abandoned
quarries along the way, and moths
whose wings were still whole.
I didn't want her curls to be sticky
with tears and shadows beneath
her eyes, where the grief doesn't
always fall, because there's been
too much.
I left, for her.
I carried her to the edge of the shore,
and found the breakers,and we waited,
because then we were safe.
I wished she wouldn't be beautiful,
or colorful. Or empty, like me.
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