my poetry

is heartless, chews

like gravel on your teeth,

tastes like your mother,

the cornmeal on her hands

when she tied you up 

in a burlap sack and tried

to drown you in the creek.

i know you want to.

ask, what's it like

to lay down and die?

how many spiders do you swallow

in your sleep? how many

have you strung out, washed

and ironed to fit your piece? 

do girls like you still feel,

can i pinch your skin

until it bleeds, pretend your body

is for tourists and it's a ghost town

once i leave?

you will not take credit 

for the nothing that i am now,

even though we both know

i make a killing off of the pain.

you break us, i build colossus,

then redact your name.

and god said, your body

is eden. tend to it like eve. 

know the fruit that kills you

and eat it, drink its juice,

break the covenant. betray

your bones for the pain

so you can pray for healing.

herd sheep with one hand 

and with the other, strike

the shepherd. be extraordinarily

miserable, create your own

personal plague. crush

your jericho in your fist,

and it will be good.

Rumor beats paper and says she jumped

off the water tower, hit the soil

so hard that the earth buckled

beneath her and collapsed like the muscles

of her mother when the police called

her at 4pm. First responders teed off

later that afternoon and wedged

their way to the hazard. Her corpse ruined

their chances of a bogey, but the mayor

announces her death as a victory:

at least she didn’t hemorrhage

in the tank. At least we’ll have drained

the city of her memory by Monday.

Caution stays for the next seven days.

Sheriffs guard the dome with Chevrolets,

then replace their eyes with cameras

for higher definition. Bullying, the mother

shrieks to the reporter, but no one listens.

The principal hides his face. Utilities

reinforce the fence with concrete

and install searchlights at its base. I wonder

which our town thinks we’re protecting,

the water supply or the youth

who may choose to die by hurling

their bodies from thirteen stories

above the ground. How will they shield

them from the truth? She killed herself

with a noose around her neck,

yet they prefer to blame heights

instead of tongues because they can’t

stitch nets onto the roofs of our mouths.

we were too young to be legends but he wanted to leave his mark, so he used my skin as his canvas. i accepted. i bit my lips, plugged my ears, and closed my eyes, emptying my body of all it had to offer so it would be ripe for the harvest, ready to be coated.

his favorite color was violet. he dotted my cheeks with bursts of blue, drizzled some red in the background and let it clot. added ice to counteract the swelling as the black faded to yellow. he framed it so he was superman and i was a soundbite. his fist, my breath, speech balloons. he called it pop art.

when he wanted to keep things simple, he'd smash my teeth into a mosaic, just to kiss each piece and place them in rows and columns, rows and columns, each line etched by god. he collected the colors my gums bled in vials. he called me a stain. he would not work with pigments that had no purpose, he would not rest until my mouth decomposed to silence, until my molars aligned with the nails on the floorboards and all of my matter was squared away in boxes with walls ready to rupture.

eventually he knocked them over like dominoes and swept them to the side. cubism, he said, does not look good on you. he asked me to pose with him and i obliged. i wanted to be good for something. as we undressed, he asked me not to make a scene, told me his art was only a summary but it still had meaning, said if i thought i was more than a crude expression of reality then i was dreaming, called me a stain. he said he wished he had chosen a pigment that he didn't have to strain. he told me to detach my head from my soul and let him in, let him in, let his motifs cull. he drew his brush and began to paint, began to pant, and brushed shapes across my chest with his lips, each circle the size of my breasts, each spiral bigger than the next. he said we were an infinite pattern, an illusion.

when i had nothing left to give, he hung me up at the bar next to a portrait of a woman, bruised like a peach.

listen: there is a reason for the howling. we growl because it’s the only way we are heard. we are only listened to when we bare our teeth and break skin, and even then we are only met with a mere moment of attention before you twist the dial up on the radio and change the channel so our cries are out of range. you make us white noise, we raise our voice, and so it goes.

listen: very few of us still have our voices. most of our vocal cords have been plucked from our larynges, skinned, cooked, and chewed right off the bone. hear them smack their lips as they strip us of all that we have. we have nothing.

listen: we tried to be gentle. we tried to shake hands with the system and instead we wiped its spit off our wet cheeks. we retracted our claws, and our lion hearts were led to hope like sheep to slaughter. they invited us to dinner and served us our sisters on the plates, used our flag as a communal napkin to wipe their greasy mouths, toasted our blood in flutes of champagne. after dinner, they walked us out, exiled us from their backyard, their fields, their states, their oceans. they gave us a gallon of gasoline and a lighter and said goodbye.

listen: we must go out snarling. we will sleep in the crackles of the static, crouch and hold our breath between the waves and currents, bathe in electricity until we are ready to wage a lightning war. heart, kidney, sternum. we will never strike the same place twice. see our blitzkrieg socking streets near you. watch the sidewalks bleed pepper spray and tear gas.

listen: these actions cannot echo any longer. repetition rubs shoulders with insanity, and history herself cannot survive another night of close quarters. we have grieved so much for our brothers that we do not have enough energy to mourn for ourselves. there is a reason for the howling. we are only wolves when we have to be.

listen: they want us extinct. we understand this confuses you. we understand that to you, this word has no meaning. we understand you cannot feel the magnitude of this earthquake.

listen: you have never been trapped so you do not know the muzzle, you do not recognize the confinements of the cage.