***

i read stories of kingfishers when we were little, when your palms were still small and lined with worries.

did you dream yourself into existing? was it small or did you try to convince yourself you were a sea?

did you grow like mushrooms, hacking yourself into the trunk of me? when you wear the ugly blouse that keeps you warm, digging fingers into the sands under your legs and smiling for my disposable camera, you grow into the quick of me. when you tape every ticket stub and receipt to your bathroom mirror (when you apply cheap shadow with your pinkie finger) the feeling crawls like the roots of a plant too big for her pot. you tell me my marks can be kissed into disappearance and i believe you wholeheartedly, i do not cry when i found out you lied to me. The birds chirp and the light glares, but all i can do is dream you into being again and pray very, very hard.

theres always something left to say.

she is a child’s mind upon waking up, the heavy eyelashes and cocooning bed sheets, she has always been so timid. she’s like the flower of a newly hatched seedling. she dances, her arms the damp wings of a girl freed from her chrysalis, unfurling, waiting for the sun of a new world. she has always been so reluctant with him, his hands reaching out as light, touching shoulders and cheeks. oh sun, we are here, coming up from the earth. some of us will burrow and lay into the soft, kind soil for our eternal lives. some of us will leap and fly and land. our palms open to the systems we cannot see, the tiny suns inside our atoms, our circling, endless motion, star-mimicry in our skin, our hardware, our hearts.

you think you can hold a girl whose heart speaks a tongue you mock? drag your fingers down the back of someone so soft, a girl born from gunpowder and northern stars and slurs you think you have the right? is that the hubris of youth or men? she falls soft against the windowpanes, her body dewdrop raindrop drip drip drop against the glass she was never invited to 

she falls onto linoleum hard and thin, into a carpet facefirst in a place she cant remember without the curtain of a bloody mouth, the warm insides of her eyelids. she falls so softy it only shatters the pride she never knew she possesed. lighting the tall candles of a sun littered house, madre santa, quidame, again and again until her mouth hurts and bleeds 

the sky runs red and you stick your fingers into it

morning song

everyday i paint my body in a second skin to protect myself. i have to paint my eyes into my skull to see again.i have to drag the razor (lightly) so it makes me feel soft and sweet and everything i am not.

there are no stars for girls as ugly as i have been.