sidenote

The formatting on the poems is different then how I intended, always. Which is definitely a bummer. So if you could read them as a run on sentence in your head, that'd be awesome.

I guess this is what oh shit feels like (21)

tocsin/toxin

(the afternoon leaves my nails chewed and golden, but i swear
all this breakdown started with such potential)

tonight i am trying to fly on my cardboard and spraypaint wings and i just might
figure out the secret of uplift and rising, and i can, i totally can
if those guys over there will just put away their goddamn cameras

the reason i hung my ballet flats over the railing of the dormitory balcony in the first place
is because there's always a voice in the canyons of my head that tells me
if you bust all your crooked teeth, you'll be rendered perfect, weightless

this night is the first warning bell, softer than all the others.
tonight, i might be all magic but i don't know these people and i'm homesick
enough to go sit outside on the smokers bench and call my mother and cry

this is the first swallow of shame and it burns as it goes down and it's doled out in red plastic cups

(i'm trying to tell you the truth and the shape of things
but i'm afraid there aren't words for a truth like this,
a faith that makes you huddle in your closet and bawl and anyway,
most of the memories are a tangle of legs and pumpkin seeds
and it all smells like loreal hairspray and cigarettes.
the photos from last night reveal a distinct sensation of fluidity and grace
just restrained by the weight of misery-to-be)

i guess i'm in this here mess because i like striking matches and watching them almost,
but not quite burn my fingers, in the same way i like kissing girls whose last names
i don't need to know.
some people say that's a waste of matches and youth, but i'm eighteen
and there's arsenic in the water these days.

finally
stumbling down telegraph avenue, he tells me
angels are only good because they aren't buffeted by free will
and we'd all be so good, if we couldn't choose.

starting to scare myself.

The Plague Years

So. I believe in a lot of things. I believe in a really old school God, with sin and grace and all that. I believe in my family. I believe in my legs' ability to do anything I tell them to do, thirteen miles or two thousand meters. And I believe in poetry.

Look. I know there's hella feelings out there, and that people go through bad shit, but I believe that if you really want to say anything, you and your poetry have got to juggle two balls at a minimum (and I'm not even sure that's called juggling, I think it's called throwing two balls in the air). You've got to do beautiful, and you've got to do angry. Personal and wondering. Erotic and political.

Poetry exists to do something. Poetry shouldn't exist to befuddle or show off. If you haven't made your reader more alive by the end of the poem, fail on you. And poetry exists in community. No one I've met writes so well that there's nothing you can critique. No poem is sancrosanct.

These poems don't exist as a chapbook. If you really want one, let me know and I will make you some sweet sweet chapbook magic. But you've gotta let me know. I'm not detached enough to hand off my poetry to people who may or may not care and I don't think I'm hot enough shit that everyone should care about what I write. And, if I handed you a chapbook, there's no real way for you to tell me "hey, that verse makes as much sense as whale jewelry" or " that line makes me wish my mother was here." I write best for and with others.

So. This is a collection of poems around the idea of epidemics. Most of them are centered around real diseases, real biological things that happened. But when you are talking about epidemics, you have to look at the social aspect of them, and how all things connect, and interact.

So.

"At the beginning of a plague, and at the end, there's always a propensity for rhetoric. In the first case, habits have not been yet lost; in the second, they're returning. It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth- in other words, to silence."
Albert Camus, The Plague, Part 2, pg.116

Twenty

How It Starts

Unwashed new jeans
Wild rabbit sausage
Tomatoes from graft
A pig from New Jersey

Swimming in the Nile
Sodium nitrite
A dog or a cat or a fox or a bat
Shipments of coal

A classroom parakeet
Shipments of coal
Super absorbent tampons
Carrots

Sex, with or without condoms
Pesticides sprayed by a playground
Felt, goat hair or otherwise
A dripping faucet in a nursery

Mexican style soft cheese
Apple danishes
Copper IUDs
The forest, Zaire or Connecticut

Nineteen

1972- They Tell Us It Is Gone

and that we shouldn't be afraid.
The danger is sealed away in bunkers in Soviet Russia,
and that's who we should really be afraid of. The Soviets.

They are angered by our ambivalence.
A little miffed that we are not hailing them as conquering heroes in spectacles.
Rejoice! proclaim the press releases. Our children will live.
The price of plastic goods will fall. And tourism will become viable in Somalia.
We have made the world smaller!

We are not so sure.
The fear of the pox has been bred into us, same as wolves.
(children don't wake up crying over car crashes)
We got this far on our ancestor's antibodies.
Tardition moves through our veins like T-cells.

Extinction is nothing to be ashamed of, they announce from the podium.
However
from our perspective in the audience, things blur.
In the glare, their white jackets glint like Mantilla armor.
Fifteen million is a big number.
Somewhere in the tangled strings of our systems,
we remember.


Mostly inspired by this photo here

Eighteen

1979- Untitled (Testimonies)

"Of all the mysteries posed by AIDS, perhaps the deepest and most damaging is this:
why have we failed so utterly to prevent it's transmission?"
-New York Times November 17, 2009

Because the needle the dealer gave me wasn't clean.
Because I only ever had sex with two partners and the second one was infected.
Because my second husband told me his wife had died of it, but I didn't understand what that meant.
Because I was born this way.
Because I couldn't ask my husband if he'd been faithful. He paid for everything.

Because the prostitute didn't have a condom.
Because they pay more for sex without a condom and I need the money.
Because the condom broke.
Because sex doesn't feel the same with condoms.
Because I forgot, once.

Because back in the day, they didn't test the blood supply.
Because I was afraid to get tested, because if it came back positive that meant it was it, it's over.
Because she never told me.
Because I thought you could tell who was sick by looking at them, and he had a six-pack.
Because I thought you couldn't get it from oral.

Because I thought lesbians didn't get it.
Because I thought people my age didn't get it.
Because I thought married people didn't get it.
Because I thought I wouldn't get it.

Seventeen

1997: New Mexico- Sentimental Appeal

They were very young.

She was beautiful and Navajo and angry about all the right things.

She had a scholarship, she was going to be a doctor, she loved children.

He was his mother's only son, and they were poor, but stubborn about it.

He ran barefoot at first, but after the scouts spotted him, he ran in off-brand New Balances.

He first developed symptoms on the way to her funeral.

Sixteen

1492- Fucking Europeans

what seems to have been the case
was that yaws
spread among Taino boys and girls
while they were playing.

years later,
some of those little girls grew into women
who still carried the pathogen.
then they were raped.

while the rape was in progress
the unwashed skin of the Spaniards,
chest, belly, penises,
was broached by the yaws causal agent.

this is what we think happened.

Fifteen

1975: Lyme Connecticut- Something Is Wrong Here

Arthritic oaks in the suburbs of Connecticut
-like walking on marbles, that fall in the forest-
and the deer have come.

We watch them from behind the windows of the family hatchback.
On the neighbor's lawn, they sway like statues on the verge of something.
Glassed over brown eyes, and father buries the body behind the woodpile.

The newspapers tell us that we are both in the glorious endtimes
and that we are divorced from all animate things.
That we know. Mother's on her second marriage. We don't talk about it.

We are caught in surges of Saudi oil,
gobalization sings cheerful company anthems,
our president seems nice, and we're out of Vietnam.

But, still.
Last night, a deer stood on the double yellow lines of Park Street.
Florescent streetlights watched impartially as her legs buckled
and finally collasped;
lay in the road, gasping.

Fourteen, for truth

Cascades of Acorns and The Woods in Zaire

What I need you to know is that all things are connected.
It's all umbilical cords and atoms that sing ambiguous pronoun love songs
across transatlantic cable lines.

(sometimes, when I think about meeting the Designer of all this breakdown
I think about asking Him if He underestimated Disease, and Desire)

Because I believe in the glorious Maker&Breaker because the watch cogs are strewn
across field hospitals in Tanzania and Palestine.
I believe in revenge as a way of life
because The Shape Of All Things and The Ambiguity Around The Edges,
He saw that.

He saw us as we ate the roast thigh of the endangered golden tamarin
saw us shit in the water
saw the virgin baobab fall
(and it is always us, isn't it? anything you do, i do my dear/
and whatever is done only by me is your doing my darling)

And we are all feeling the whiplash snapback from the slow motion car crash
- filmed in California, index case in Kuala Lampur, and the death toll mounts in Berlin,
tonight at ten-

It used to be rickets,
bones bowed, and baby was too blissed out on opium to cry,
and we're all gonna die young, I promise, so who cares?
If some of us do it with insulin and some of us do it with girls&boys our mothers wouldn't like

And I need you to listen, alright?
The only thing left that really scares me is Ebola and that scares me.
Compassion fatigue doesn't have a CDC approved treatment, not yet, not ever.

We need to get out of here before the viruses have us by the throats,
but there's no place left to go.

Twist your hand in mine, take the vaccine.
We're gonna make it out alive, promise.

Thirteen, what luck to have made it this far

Sooooo, guys. This is my like, show -offy poem for poets. This is about the Arawak people (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arawak) that Colombus encountered when he first landed. It's written from their perspective, because so little of their culture has survived due to their lack of a written language. It uses the Fibonnacci sequence, (0, 1,1,2,3,5,8 and so on) and every line that's a Fibonnacci number is a lie.

We Are Happy to Have You Here

There is plenty of of gold, bleeding from the mountain like gods' blood. Yes. We will fill the hawk's bell for you and we can do it until the stars unspiral.

(we find your ships impressive.
even now we are speaking of your swords in hushed tones, in caves.)

You were right, senor. We will make fine servants for your queen,
dressed in emeralds and moors-cloth. That is
if we don't sweat to death, bleed out in ways the court doesn't talk about.

The land here is good. You do not like the way we throw the seeds on the earth
trustinng that the arc of the universe bends towards justice and life.
Our games are complex. You will not bother to write down the rules.

When the dogs come, we will not run. Even as they eat
our children, we will lift our face to you, still trusting
your book, your greatness.

We did not go naked to offend you. The air is so warm
and the warmth hums around our bodies. We wish you would join us.

Your god sounds frightening. We will trust in the spirits
who speak to us without incense. Our spirits sound
like our dead sisters, yours sound like smallpox.

We do not regret welcoming you. It was a good decision.
We continue to prosper.

12, and so many to go

The Conversation Redirects Itself

Let’s not talk of love or chains or things we can’t untie.

Let’s talk instead about the world as a place to fall asleep

and link pinkies and promise to do nothing to disturb the sleep

of a woman about to give birth.

And talk sideways, about the diorama in the Museum of Natural Science

of a boy who died of pulmonary tuberculosis two thousand years ago

and how they discovered him with the bison hide still tucked around

his wasted body.

(let’s not talk about who tucked it, and if his mother was inconsolable)

Why don’t we talk about Norma Jean, and shooting stars

and how you can tell some things are going to crash and burn,

you just don’t know how.

We used to talk about dugongs and Falkland foxes and passenger pigeons,

we don’t anymore.

Instead, we talk about the Violent Femme and

take ten for everything, everything, everything

and the hitch of hope in your chest that feels like kickdrum and bass,

in the best way.

Let’s talk about those uncivil and unstable creatures

who are permanently banned from the zoo,

the bad influence girls who need their warmth a little less metaphorical

(duvets and hot water bottles, even in California).

The conversation redirects itself.

The things we don’t discuss are as powerful as the things we do,

There is so little left to be afraid of.

The city’s asleep and the world is ours. Come, see and be conquered.

Week 11

How My Mothers Talk To Me

I'm not terribly pleased with this, but I'm trying.

1.

Dear Niece,

Please stay in college

so you don’t have to get as exciting a job as mine.

Today a DLOM, a dear little old man, for those of you not in the know,

called my desk and wanted me to read off the baseball listings from the newspaper.

And he’s not even a subscriber.

2.

Colleen. Please get off the table.

You and I both know the administration does not hold with that.

Yes. You really can write.

Yes. I believe in you.

No. That should not go in your mouth.

Yes. If you were orphaned in a tragic car wreck,

I would adopt you.

(you could milk my goats and write me poems)

3.

I Just Want You TO Know That I LOVE YOU REGARDLESS OF WHAT YOU DO

and JESUS LOVES you TOO.

Pray for the Second Coming OF CHRIST And Another Republican President.

I’ll send you some cookies I baked next week.

4.

Please shower more. And brush your hair more than once a week.

Are you taking the Vitamin D?

Be sure to send in the promissory note, it’s very important.

Are you sleeping enough?

Martha’s been watching me a lot.

Your furry Dad is off in the mountains somewhere.

Your sister’s off with the boyfriend.

I miss you.

Missed my first week

DAMN. I'll post two to make up for it, I promise. I was too bust having shenangins in San Francisco to retype the poem I wrote.

Nine

Ugh. Midterms. I should be doing them instead of posting this.


Cash Out and Get Out

Because sometimes I can hear the creek, but mostly I hear the freeway
Because my small and private pleasure are being marketed to focus groups
(and they aren’t testing well)-

I am cancelling the electricity, I am letting the dog run feral.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but I’m not saving you.
You know this, the poet rescues nothing

All poets feed on forests. We grow bloated
on the exact light of midmorning, the sensation of preemptive grief,
love’s tangled footpaths through the heart.

If you want much of anything, cut the oaks down,
cut your mother and St. Sebastian and the house down.
Mulch it into the pen and paper that will give you permission to say this:

i’ve always felt like that treasured childhood memory
could’ve used a little extra poignancy, a touch
of extra melancholy. let me add some.

Verse eat, verse lies.
For every Grecian vase, a grandmother,
for every Howl, a child

The Hebrews thought seven was holy, I don't know why

Some people you miss more than others. Goodbye Bill Kalenius, you did better than most.
http://www.columbian.com/article/20090929/SPORTS02/709299935/COMMUNITY+SPORTS++VLC+founder+made+a+lasting+impression

Dead Rower Villanelle

I don’t understand why after you, things just didn’t stop.
Nothing has to be like this, stroke
after stroke after deathless stroke. Things
were sharper with you
around. Now? Even air feels like water

without you.
All those early morning lessons, and all I can remember are your instructions on the water;
to not fight it, how to move it, that the wanting will come in waves, about ripples and patterns. Stop
this, please. This feels too much like your elegy and I wanted to remember you for your stroke. Before all this breakdown, I’d ask how you did it. You’d sigh. There are more important things.

Let’s talk about your stroke,
the catch is still late. Damn memory, and the awful things
we hold on to. I keep remembering the water
and how you never really understood that storms could hurt even imperious you.
Please stop.

You taught me well. Some things
break down. You?
Never. Sure as the water
that stopped
you breathless every day, sure as your stroke.

I miss your broke down baseball cap, the lake’s water
at six in the morning, how you never stop-
stopped, I mean. I keep coming back to the wrong things.
Tenses will trip you,
like a stutter in your stroke.

After you leave, little things will break me. Fragments of things; your healthy hand and your licorice, you and your licorice, your smooth stroke over the water in holy cycles, ripples and patterns.

Six geese a laying, out of season

This is my take on the anatomically correct trend that swept lit arts last year. Mostly for Nikki.



The Anatomically Correct Love Poem

And you tell me that my heart will beat two billion times in my life
each beat an event as surely as the day
that the first amphibian looked at land with some kind of hopeful aspiration
is a red letter day on some god’s calendar.
Think about it, you tell me.

lub
Your first breath is demarcated by the right atrium gasping for oxygen depleted blood.
Your mother cries with relief

dub
Your nineteenth custard that summer on the boardwalk in Atlanta, before it burned down.
The right ventricle exhales drowned blood into your lungs and you learned how to smoke
that summer.

lub
Your first cliff dive. The Illinois river. Your toes, the edge. The light, the blue.
Your surrender. The left atrium swallows blood.

dub
Your failure, the last time you try to remember your son’s name. Your synapses struggle
valiantly, like an old Lab struggling to stand. Your left ventricle releases blood, still hopeful.


Everything moves in cycles and systems, you tell me.
The smoking instructor made your son,
the blood that began in your bones moves your legs to break them.


The heart is a muscle the size of a fist, you tell me.
Keep on loving, keep on fighting.

Fivers

Wow, the clever numbered titles are starting to fail me. I can't wait till I get to like, 34. These were for a prompt about writing a political poem and a non-political poem. I like my political poems to be subtle, which I think is an underrated trait in writing.


Sometimes I Hear the Creek, But Mostly I Hear The Freeway
from my window, in the night.
They sing
and mutter
though I can never quite translate.
I wonder what this language sounded like one hundred years ago,
they told me there were salmon here
one hundred years ago.
　
　
My Pleasure are Small, and Private
the unbroken skin of apples. the old reds, the young greens.
the wool of the sweater of my father and how it collapses across my shoulders like a cat
the voice of the girl I nearly drowned with, her laugh
the rain on the pond. the turtle, watching reproachfully from under the lily pad.
I do not regret any of this, my world so small and shallow.
　

Four Everything

Oh, I haven't written one of these self-indulgent autobiographical poems in a while.


Poetry as Punches (More Genuine Enthusiasm, Less Sentiment)
Sugarbaby, honeydear obligated audience: here are the facts mapped as tidily as cobalt isotope tables and yellow fever charts:
I swear to Jesus, sometimes you can’t tell if they’re about to throw up or laugh
and I was never very good at telling the difference with disastrous results
and some people say I’m a series of disastrous results, but one time I caught a hummingbird and it burned in my hands like an ember and when I was younger I used to start fires outside my Presbyterian church
but now that I’m older I plan to start them on the inside
(and not to diss my home state but flannel ain’t much of an export) and
in the depths of the fullness of my heart I’m afraid I’m utterly unlovable, I used to want to be a nun
so someone would be obliged to be there when I start drooling into my Ovaltine.
You know what I’m saying?
You know what I’m saying.

Because postmodernism means getting to say here is the insides and the complications;
the pain laid out as sharp and as abstract as cubic zirconium and
all this glints like the light in the eyes of Medusa’s dead snakes.
I’m afraid but not ashamed, just afraid, because this poem goes ratatatat in all the wrong tempos and
I remember this violin recording where you could hear her breathing
but I can’t remember my mother’s mother.
Look.

I want the revolution but I also want things like modern dentistry and rubberized hair ties..
I don’t really like feminism. Does that make me a bad feminist?
I didn’t start liking music until Joe Strummer muttered to me that hardcore could use more handclaps and less handholding.
I don’t think that just because you’ve started cupping cigarettes in the curve of your hands and acting awful tough lately makes you a real adult.
I didn’t do any of those things they tell you I did, it’s all dirty lies, I’m respectable now.
I don’t wish harm on any of you, really. I just want what I want more than magnets want iron and more than the body desires resurrection, even from six feet under.
I didn’t use to believe in the Holy Spirit, until I felt her breath on my shoulders. It’s like four again, and August again.
I don’t regret coating the glass walls with love poems scotch taped up for you, you, you; only that you never bothered to read them.
I didn’t read the rest, but that didn’t stop Leaves of Grass from pissing me off for two weeks.
I don’t get me wrong. I believe in many beautiful things. I just don’t really want to talk about them. The truest things are inarticulate.
I didn’t go to the show because I didn’t want to spend eighty bucks and a Tuesday night on standing on concrete for the off chance I might touch Jon Bon Jovi’s thigh. That’s just not who I am.

Threesies

These are about the three laws of thermodynamics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics, if you're looking for the real stuff.


Nothing Goes Away
The lie will resurface eight years from now
and she will leave, howling.

The carbon from your aborted baby will resolve itself
into your second son’s wedding ring.

The energy we spend is never wasted,
the split atom’s fury powers crumbling cities.

The electrons are shared;
they travel from the continent of one atom to another unchanged.

Time spent walking the baby up and down and up the hallway
will metamorphose into that baby’s hours hovering over your deathbed.

Myths resurface like bodies,
the old flood rises and rises and we never forget
and nothing ever goes away.


Everything Gets Worse
She told me and I have to believe her. First
the rains came and the cats drowned. Their yowling
woke the baby, who didn’t scream
at first. That waited until we had nothing to eat
(that’s a lie. You can eat candles did you know that? Leather is
alright, if you boil it.) And the baby screamed until she died
and she joined the others in the black waters. That was bad
enough until the sun sank and we lived in a world
of amorphous grays and steam. It was too hard to keep track of things
that mattered and I lost her. I finally now believe
that the arc of the universe bends towards injustice
after all.


Things Fall Apart
After all things wind down, and the systems of obligation have worn out-
the rubble still stands. Its sunset there, always. Don’t worry.
We can use the old movie theater as a bunker.
We know this in our bones, which are eroding
hour by hour counted on clocks that are already winding down,
that this too won’t last.
The bunker is already breaking into stones and sand, nothing to be remarked upon.
It’s only natural.
　

It takes two to tango

I think I can, I think I can. College is hard and sometimes lonely. I wrote this when I was sitting in a courtyard, texting my best friend because no one would talk to me in real life. People are strange

The Biographies of Strangers

1.
I spent a year falling asleep in bathtubs around southern California.

2.
My mother wasn't my mother.

3.
I love my sleep. Life has a tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, y'know?

4.
The moon sings for me, but I may have hit my head on something.

5.
I have scars on my hands from touching certain people, but I made sure they had broken jaws.

6.
I'm pretty sure it's peanut butter- but oh, fuck allergies.

7.
Rehumanizing is such a long process

Theme post! Poem one!

I've gotta tell the truth here. I am a lazy, lazy writer. Which really wouldn't be a problem, except I want to be a damn good writer and when those two crossbreed, the result is like a mule - unproductive. As I head off to college the fabulous Mills, I am afraid that the inevitable distractions of college - like oh say, earning a degree- will distract me from one of my real passions in life.

So this is my challenge to myself. I am going to write a poem a week for all four years I am in college. If we take a second to do the math, thats 52 poems a year multiplied by 4 years so

52 x 4+= 208 poems.

My God, that is a lot of poems.

But that's part of the challenge. If I can stick to this, I can do just about anything. I've fallen through on a lot of things in my life. I want this blog to be a practice run on how to follow things all the way through in my life.

And with that said, here's poem numero uno.

Barbary and Bengal

they say that gladiators fought the Barbary lion in the Coliseum
that if we flipped over cobblestones onto their bellies like beetles
we would discover dried varnishes of blood, DNA gathered by the sword.

those lions, they say, fought gladiators and pirates
(people who no longer exist except as Halloween costumes)
we don't think of it much, they way we don't think of lies
that broke down, kisses that broke lips, but tigers used to tread in Turkey.
there were lions in Italy, until we killed them.

at the death the twentieth century, the only Barbary lions and Bengal tigers
were left in private collections; Saudi Arabian oil sheiks, Russians
who ran from the collapsing empire with their pockets full.

aren't we all private collectors of one kind or another?
our memories padding the locked cages of our minds smelling of predator and fear.

The only things that survive are clawed.

The fact that I have a blog now is hysterical

Just because I take myself too seriously does not mean that you have to. For example, I read this to all the teachers at my school once and then made them do writerly things to it in a workshop.

Reasons We Make No Sense Together
(why I took my toothbrush out of your holder)

1. I’m an English major, Brit Lit. You’re dyslexic. My favorite book is Brideshead Revisited, yours is Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

2. I can’t stand Bob Marley, particularly at 3:14 in the morning when your stoner friends come over to light up in our living room.

3. Thanks to your untidy bathroom habits, I now know more about the menstruation cycle than they ever covered in eighth grade Human Growth and Development.

4. When we kiss I can tell exactly what you’re thinking by how you get distracted and start chewing on my earlobe or how your mouth goes soft and loose and happy.

5. You are really distractible.

6. One time you wanted me to join your indie-folk band that you started with your sister but the only song I could think of was, ‘'I’m Not That Into Folk Music But I Thought You Were Cute So I Bought The CDs You Recommended And Now I Like It But I Like You More’. As a working title.

7. When I try and write you poetry for your birthday or Valentines Day or any day, I just wind up with a page of cross-outs and phrases like ‘the sun and the solution and the soles of your feet’ and ‘i lovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelove you’ and neither of those scan well at all.

8. Your morning breath is atrocious.

9. You think you can sing well.

10. You enjoy trimming your toenails on the couch that you stole from your college dorm and humming happily through your nose.

11. Sometimes, you take too long in the shower when I’m late for work so I have to go in regardless and then I’m even later.

12. Your exes have a lot of metal in their faces and names like Phosphorus and Louisiana and they know how to fix bicycles and bake vegan carrot cakes.

13. You dance like some beautiful mad thing, or Iggy Pop back when he did a lot of coke (the last time I danced in public was at my Bar Mitzvah).

14. It never gets easier. You are always a trial. I am always running your labyrinth with the gold thread in hand, answering the million dollar question I didn’t study for, holding back your hair when you puke.

15. The other day I took Excedrin and as I was tweaking from the side effects I thought of you.

16. You have absolutely no concept of personal space. You sit in the laps of all my friends and talk to them about declining bee populations and installation art.

17. If you ever left me, I would have to build you again out of garbage and feathers so no one would ever touch you

18. If you ever left me, I know exactly which of your friends I would try and sleep with first
(Morgan, then Audrey).

19. Sometimes when I’m riding the city bus too late at night I call your answering machine just to listen to your voice giggling over nothing, The Misfits buzzing in the background

20. You once told me that you didn’t ever want to have a girl, because it was too hard to be a woman, even today.

21. Again, your sense of personal space is extremely underdeveloped. This can not be repeated enough.

22. If I flew away, you would not come looking for me. I know this for certain, but you would leave the windows unlocked for a year and a day.

23. Not often, but sometimes, you have unspeakably dark days spent lying face down on the carpet. On those days, your silence is a pond where drowned things live.

24. I’m allergic to peanuts, and I’m pretty sure you don’t understand that you can’t have both your mid-morning PB&J and a live me.

25. You’re afraid of spiders, but not intravenous drugs.

26. I’d like to believe you when you tell me that you’ve quit.

27. When you met my mom and dad you didn’t get around to washing your hair so you bought a grey fedora that you cocked over one eye. My eighty-one year old dad flirted with you all night and my mom got the recipe to the applesauce cake that you brought.

28. I don’t trust you with anything. You killed the ficus I left with you for the week I went to Boston. How could I ever entrust my very much alive and beating heart? You’d drop it or something; grin at me and tell me it was slippery.

29. You should rightfully be dead and are, instead, beautiful.

30. Selfish as it is, I don’t want to be around for the inevitable flameout. I’d rather remember the smell of your hair and the way you faked like you were too drunk to drive home.

31. If you were the ocean, I‘d learn to float.

That's all.