One day, I promise you that flowers will grow from even the quietest parts of your being.
let go let go
Dear Valentine,
I’ve come to realize that I will
probably never ride the bus
with you or hold your hand
or wake up to watch dawn
unpeeling from its skin with my
arm on your shoulder.
I don’t know why I dream
so hard or so deep, why
my poems taste like sand in my
mouth and nothing is ever
even possibly as beautiful
as what it could be.
There are questions I will never
ask you. I am trying to leave them
to drown, but they show up
in the canals as I walk to my classes,
bloated and belly-up, their faces
blue in the soft drift of the water.
I sat with a friend of the boy
who I thought was God and it felt
like choking on old ghosts.
I’m sorry I am so bad at
letting go of things.
I wanted to pin your heart
to the inside of my locker
so I would have something to look
forward to when I went
rummaging for textbooks or
gym clothes.
I guess the souls we want to claim as ours
aren’t always meant to be in our possession.
I’m just trying to be less materialistic.
Every day I grow a little bit further from the Holocausts in my blood. I picture my grandmother and she is a frail woman in a bed that she cannot get out of. I creak up and down the stairs hoping she will not notice me. It’s as if all we are is small talk now; I am afraid of her smallness, how a woman can become a vanishing act, how bones can bend into themselves. I feel too far away from her to ask about the war, what a city looks like bathed in broken glass, what ocean looks like from the boat you are on when its sailing away from everything you have ever known. Where does blood go after leaving an artery? I was born from fleeing in the night, from a nation completely on fire, gasonline in the tap water, my people’s matchstick tongues. How much of me is a country that spat out the names of my mother’s relatives, ground them into cement beneath their boots, filled the sky with their ashes? I live in a city of refugees, people whose homes were torn out from underneath their feet. I am too afraid to ask my grandmother about her past. She carries the weight of a Holocaust within her chest. I don’t want to put extra weight on her breathing.
undone
I am back home
and the sky has opened
up into a rainstorm
and there is this ache.
I ask what is it with you
and swallowing your lonely,
sucking it off your fingertips,
licking your lips, hungry?
I still don’t know why
I grow hate so deep or wish
so often for a different skin,
wish for beauty.
I find traces of the only person
who ever held me and it makes me
want to scrub the world
down to the bone.
I try talking to the same girl
over the internet but my words
just catch in my throat.
I saw a dead deer
on the side of the road
on the way back to Lowell
from Long Island
and it felt like the biggest tragedy
in the world.
Someone come tell me how to untalge
the nooses in my stomach
and feed me stars
and hold my hand (forever.)
this is not writing/shame
Yesterday my sister found my first grade class picture. It made me cry to look at it, because even then, I remember being unhappy with myself. The shame of my six year-old self is still there. Welled up and scrunched into knots in my palms and beneath my tongue. I don’t know how six year-olds could be so cruel. I don’t know how I learned self-hate around the same time I learned how to read. I think about my sad and ashamed six-year old self and I want to give her a big hug and let her cry on my shoulder. Maybe eight years from now I’ll want to give my teenage self a hug and somebody to cry on. Maybe I’m the same little girl, too blinded by whatever evil is growing in her head. Shame is such a vicious worm. It keeps crawling, crawling through me. I am ripping apart the seams of my being searching for it, trying to pull it out.
Journal Entry
Lately I feel like I’m exploding out of my skin. I keep holding my heart in my teeth and trying to crack my bones into oceans. I look at the dust on my bookshelves and the layers of dirt on the kitchen floor and want to punch a hole into the universe.
I will never try to trade feeling too much for not enough, but having a heart with so many valves and channels, so much space to collect dust, gets fucking heavy. Sometimes, I feel like I am carrying the weight of the sky on my shoulders. A gallon of strangers’ tears on my back.
I don’t have answers for exploding hearts or fire escape souls. I am a flammable dreamer. I light up. I burn. And yes, it’s beautiful, but I am never held
by anybody
for long.
I am always looking for ways
to prove people’s cruelty. I look
at the way so many of us
live to break and twist
and I search for the worst
in people like extra insurance
or a barbed-wire fence for my heart.
It’s second nature for me
to search the palm lines of beautiful
looking for destruction.
I try to find fault in pretty girls’
souls, tell myself that everything
I want to hold
will bury me in glass shards.
I have spent so many years
finding the faults in my beauty
that there’s nothing left.
All my barbed-wire fences
and extra protection
are nails in my spine.
This is not how a prayer
learns to grow its wings.
Selfish
My grandfather died
yesterday
and I vowed
to not write a single
poem about it
until my grandmother
is dead too, their
graves left to grow
moss and their souls
somewhere drinking wine
in a place where there is
no Holocaust
or decay, no chains
or spit
because I’m selfish enough
to want to believe
in true love
more than I want to believe
in her breathing.
Mania
I think
I am splintering open.
Backs of my knees
and elbows cracking
into oceans.
I have begun
to greet dawn
ravenous and open-mouthed,
all tongue and
teeth.
This is learning
to become
less contained.
One day
I will break open
all the jars
and grow cherry trees
from the glass shards.
Question Of the Day:
Why
do the smallest things
leave the biggest bruises
on my heart?
