so we should make it simple, and remember green days when we didn’t try so hard to make it real.
so we should make it easy, and forget clean or hard sidewalks and nausea.
i’ll always remember the way you touched my neck or slid your fingers through my hair while i was cutting tomatoes and then (accidentally) my finger that one time in the country.
or even those many times in our city.
i won’t forget how i slipped inside your ribcage to hibernate for a weekend or a month -
it was warm and soft but i nearly died of suffocation.
i never met your mother but i saw her through your lungs after that one time
you swallowed her and her republican ideals and old brassy jewelry and blonde hairspray helmet hair.
i won’t forget your father trapped behind your liver
- it has since decayed; his arrival may or may not have expedited the process.
it’ll be hard to leave behind my memories.
for good luck and safe keeping i’ve pressed them to your heart.
i’m afraid they’ll fade with time because you’re almost too healthy,
but each time your waterfall blood runs over them i’ll just press again and again until you stop.

I’m leaving bad poetry in the dust for good
only it keeps following me.

I’m not leaving much else though.
I, not in the first person, look at sidewalks still
and see your lips still
and see your eyes, still.

If you listen hard enough,
you’ll hear the heat.

I lied.
I’m not really leaving bad poetry.
I’m deleting this in a day or two,
or a couple of hours.

Writers block sucks.

Technically, this could still be part of the poem
because I keep making line breaks.

It’s the smallest
most isolated
of incidents.
no gravity, all brevity.
no marilyns or madonnas,
reagans or roosevelts.

your relatives (ironically) given to sesquipedality -
only remembrance by repetition -
but they’ve paid for the fat on your bones while still more on the plate stares up at you, and pretty soon (before you know it) it’s walked itself right up and through your molars,
little masses of gelatin and mash pooling around in there.

then you’re lying on their kitchen floor
again
cold tile
again
with a sharp
spoon
to your throat.
too full to know the difference.

trying to forget the fillers,
the fillings.

—————-
a.n.
pretend this is like a person with centripetal obesity.

I want to take your minutes and burn a clean line down their middles and crack their bones separate and stretch their spines, reach in and hold their hearts and let them flutter in my palm fatty bloody I’d squeeze it maybe too hard we’ll see who calls the shots now.

I’d like to know what your moment is like when your father’s drunk again or your mother doesn’t take her medicine.

But I usually find myself in front of myself, angry that I just stepped in your space angry that you refused me angry that you think you’re right angry that you belittle me and have sapped every single breath of fresh air from my lungs sucked it out I saw it go the wrong way through the exhaust pipe of your mini-van.

It’s tiring, this self-deprecating behavior. I want to float along somewhere and cry myself unconscious, what a mediocre piece of writing. Rejection is my friend, time and time again.