Forget your personal tragedy.

Dear followers,

I haven’t been posting lately. Why? I’ve had some major issues with people stealing my work. While I know this is a risk in web-publishing, it’s reached the point where I feel too nervous to keep posting new poetry online. I write my prose poetry for very personal reasons so it stings a little sharper when I see someone snatch it. Somehow, despite my lack of posts, I’ve gained an incredible amount of followers so I want to thank all of you for reading my work. I’m not deleting and will continue using this blog, but I’m not sure if I’ll continue posting a prose poem a day - there will be creative writing, by me, and there will be exercises, statements on poetics, literary quotes, &c but I can’t promise I feel comfortable enough to post my previously unpublished work every day. For those of you who don’t steal, and I know that’s almost all of you, I’m sorry. For everyone else, (and I mean this with total sincerity) please, please, please write your own work - you can do it, I promise.

If anyone would like to get in touch, please don’t hesitate to send me a message or ask for additional contact information. :)

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     I slurped an oatmeal cookie
        and licked dribbles
        off my chin, like
        crumbs
        of organs in my palms;
        the pieces I snatched from
        surgery, feigning intelligence
        in a nurse’s garb - mismatched scrubs,
            purple and blue, skulls on my
       stethoscope. Hours later,
        you told your mother
        “I saw the light”
        and asked her to sleep with you
        because if I were there,
        I would.
    

two sticks of butter, a bar or two of cream cheese, confectioner’s sugar - bah bah bah beat it and grease the pan and set the oven because it’s his birthday and this is what good girlfriends do; heat up a microwavable meal and set the table for one. eat the batter back in your apartment, alone, knowing this has got to be what he meant when he used the words equal effort and compromise.

i loved my little green pencil sharpener. you knew it, too; that’s why the day you left me you left with me everything - pictures of us, still framed, lining my bureau; your half-used bottle of cologne; an ache in my hips when i smell apple cider and pine trees - but slipped it into your front pocket. now, i nimble on colored pencils and watch the pink and yellow and orange and magenta stain my front teeth. i wonder if you’d still kiss me, lick your tongue over my teeth and laugh into my mouth; accusing me of ruining you in one more small, soft way.

your lips on my cheek, tongue poking out like your fingers grazing my breast, stealing my wishes. now, years later, i lick my licks and pluck a lash a day the way some people exercise or call their mother or make love. stripping down to the minimum, looking for wishes fate’s been hiding from me; my eyes, unprotected, cry a little easier, from the pollen and smell of piss. the lashes, stuck to the pudge on my round, little face, grin at me like war paint: sacrifices are a part of winning the battle. 

oh she’s a prettysmartsweetfunnycharmingyoung girl she’ll recover, no worries - nodded reassurance between friends who got too busy and boys who got too scared. she’ll float in again on those stubby little legs with a flower in her hair and a story about an old man and his puppy and end it with a giggle and a punchline so bad her audience can’t help but laugh. she’s happy, she’s complete, she’s whole. but in the mornings before she finds her dress and her flower and makes up her funny story on the way to class, she lies in bed and thinks about what her comforter feels like against her bare stomach and how  many opportunities she’ll have to make someone else smile that day - before lunch? five, maybe six, if i leave my room early enough. she hopes, a small, little hope, that someone will smile back, and that maybe, just maybe, someone will offer her a flower before she bends to pick one herself.

lying in bed i imagine bouquets of roses (red, not yellow), bare feet in the sand (cool, not hot), little boxes with big price tags (it reminded me of you) and i feel a little sad and sick inside - the tangibles of love, worn on my friend’s fingers and grasped between their hands; they feel misty inside my stomach, drifting and dragging through my organs like the moments before bile bursts. i think of you and know you don’t love me, and that you haven’t for a long time, but on a sunny summer afternoon i cried in a park and you offered me your sleeve, no explanation asked, and let me blow my nose on the shirt you wore for the rest of the night. you loved me then, in that moment, no roses or rings necessary.

the painter, crouched on the floor, his back bent like a nail kicked out of wood; he jotted blue paint, half on the canvas, half on the wall, and i wondered what he thought he was doing - what color is that, sir? what does that stroke mean, and that, there, to the left? do you use blue because you’re sad? and that shade, the deeper one, is that because you were sadder that afternoon than this one? i hung back. finally, he stood, clutched his lower back and groaned. the paintbrush, still clamped in his left hand, left a long streak across his t shirt. i watched, unabashed, now; he walked by me, head high, eyes focused on a distant figure, some intangible desire which transcended my mousy little face. he left. i sprinted to the painting, the blue, an omniscient monarch, watched me approach, my sagging shoulders, the pudge jiggling over my stomach - i leaned my face against the paint, felt the cold color rub into my nose, cheeks, forehead. i pulled back and admired my art. i walked away. it would get no lip print from me. 

your eyelashes against my nose i wonder if you can see all the faces hiding within my tear ducts, all the letters and numbers, words and dates, the splitting and restitching of stomachs and hands and eyes. i wonder if you could dip your lashes into the crevices, small and soft and pink, like the tender flesh under a fingernail clipped too short; watch memories spin by like a bruise fading then blossoming, backwards, the ending first - i survived, i’m still here; there’s no need to hold my middle and keep my ribs together, bound, like the twigs of a mother’s loving bird’s nest.

my hair tucked under my chin i wonder what it feels like to be a man with short, coarse curls budding out like the hair down their navel and between their hips. i wonder if it feels like testosterone, the manifestation of masculinity; a natural sticker on their face - “hello, my name is MAN”. my face, small, round, young - i imagine twelve year old boys gluing mustaches to their lips and stuffing their pants with yesterday’s gym socks - i grin. 70 cents to the dollar or not, i don’t envy the years of an adolescent boy.