brought to you by the prefix a-

a sick fluttering of my
pulse
like
the beating of a moth
missing a wing

all day I have been throwing
myself against windows
searching for
thinking about
away,
away,
away

out.

you politicians
with your lipless mouths,
fat
lovingly folded
like laundry
around
your chinless chins

the things you will do in God's name--
sacrifice firefighters as burnt lambs
then
go to church

sit heavily in the pews
on your
milk-fed organic
rump roasts

feel righteous

tell the public you
cannot do your
job-
it's Christmas

whenever I open a newspaper
I become Lee Harvey Oswald

paraplegics have more nerve than you,
you and your spineless
spines

scrambled eggs

the last time I saw her before she died,
my grandma dropped an egg on the floor
she told me to hold the frying pan
just like
that,
wrist loose and a nice grip
like I would a tennis racket

I've always been terrible at sports

I kept my wrists rigid like
branches
she dropped the egg on
the floor
and there was something
pretty
about the way it crumbled
into itself

like ashes
from a crematorium

every time
I see an egg I imagine
my grandmother inside
red lipstick
reborn from
the fireplace

people are always telling me you're toxic

you are a little puppeteer
everything in the room
connected to your hands
by invisible lines

bring the beer in your
hand to your lips,
and
someone jerks their head
drawn to you like curtains

shift your weight
and the weight of the world
rests with you
the gravity of being the center
of the universe heavily sits
on your right hip

your eyelids must be so heavy
some mornings
how do you lift them?
how do you get out of bed with
so many strings attached?

above your bedroom door
all those lines knit themselves
into a Charlotte-worthy spiderweb

it says
SOME PIG

it's like I'm Betamax and you're VCR
and somehow
you have pushed me
out of the infinite loop.

damn,
wish I could upgrade
to DVD or something.

because I am constantly vying for the computer

in my house, I will only be writing my poem a day on the blog at novicember.
Sorry for being lazy, sort of.

a rounded edge

Western civilization is all about squares

square house,
square rooms,
square painting
behind which is a safe with
a round lock
where I keep my fears

all these squares--
I forget sometimes
the world is circular

ode to processed food

radiation is cool
--buffalo wings, five minutes
I like microwaves

teeth on the edge of my lip
like small white almonds

eat me

ghost sheets

half-moons
in their nail beds
remind me

my period is coming

stains
so womanly
like nail polish
painted on my sheets

college essay

The Compensation Vectors of Fish Swimming Against a Sideways Current

Anorexia is a brittle word, often mistaken for a brittle disease. It is not. Rather, it is an invisible current, an undertow that pulled my junior year beneath water as I watched one of my best friends drown.
“This kind of sadness is normal for children your age,” my mother advised.
“Hormones,” my brother suggested.
“Female… problems?” my father tentatively put forward.
Isolation claimed me. I found myself torn between my health and that of my friend's. Her parents went so far as to pretend I invented her problems when I came to them for help.
“Your whole family is on anti-depressants,” her stepmother said vindictively. “You don’t know anything.” Meanwhile, I would sit with her at lunch, frozen with a horrible
fascination, watching her pinch what was left of her thigh obsessively. The worst came in October, when she was 95 pounds. “I think my hair is falling out,” she told me. “Why is my hair falling out?”
Later that night, I realized I hadn’t read a book since school had started; I used to
read one a night. My life had reconfigured itself into a tight orbit around my friend’s
rapidly deteriorating mental health.
And yet, strangely, this obsession was destructive for both of us. As she fell apart, so did our friendship. Despite the horrors she must have been experiencing, I ceased to be a nurturing and supportive friend. I refused to touch her. The fragile and breakable about her was repulsive to me. I would look at her and see death where I used to see our shared childhoods; bones where there used to be beauty. Excuses became my dialogue, both to her and about her. When she called, I would not answer, but perversely, I would do little in my free time other than wait for her to call me.
Luckily for the both of us, a brigade of teachers armed with boxes of Kleenex and maternal instinct took command. “Read Man’s Search for Meaning,” my psychology teacher
recommended. “You write about this,” my English teacher commanded. My biggest
revelation came to me during math class, when after opening my book I was confronted
with a very relevant word problem:

1a. Calculate the compensation vectors of fish swimming in a sideways current.

I knew then how to escape the current. I had to calculate the extent that isolation,
for me, was self-made. I had to compute the distance necessary to separate myself from
my friend’s hands pulling at me beneath the water. I, not anyone else, was responsible for finding new meaning in my life. Viktor Frankl’s words had especial meaning for me: “Everything can be taken from a man but… the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” I began to recover, to detach. At lunch, I no longer chose to sit in silence with her, but found laughter with other friends. I began to read again, but with a hunger I had not previously experienced.
This year, she is not fully recovered. I am.
And I wonder still if the decision I made was the only one to make. Occasionally options only make themselves known in hindsight, when the glare of uncertainty has faded. Now, as I look back, I wonder if my recovery had to be at the expense of hers; I wonder if I could have been better to her; I wonder if I was obligated to do something differently. I feel shame at my behavior, shame that the word 'selfishness' applies so fully to my actions.
But I understand now that each person must find his own way to struggle against the
current; that no one is responsible for my happiness but me; and that although depressions are dangerous waters, they are also escapable.

for each seed she swallowed

Persephone remained trapped in hell for

a month.

a Greek allegory for pregnancy scares?

the lost part of the myth:

Persephone's dad chases after Hades

with a rifle and a hunting permit

cause that pimply fuckin'

jerk knocked up his daughter

and didn't even take her out

to dinner first.

chain restaurants in colorado springs

Ben: Why do they call it a Cracker Barrel?
Me: Because it's full of white people.

after the dogs get out

a lamppost flickers uncertainly
like shaky hands
in the dark

passing cars mistake
my hips for the drag of
a dog in heat
headlights
lustful and insistent

"you wanna ride?
get in the car
get in the car"

I keep my back bent into a
middle finger,

throw my head back
and howl
with laughter

these teeth are sharp enough
to cut throats

overheard conversation #1

no, I

didn't cross

the border, ese,

the border

crossed

me.

some nights

at the word

'sadness'

insects crawl across my arms

my name is not Magellan

my future points in nine directions
but
I am too frightened to take another step

a warning along the bottom of my map:
"Here there be monsters"

and yet still I stand

and wait for wind to rush
me off the edge of the
world

chrysalis

the rain reminds me of so much change

I think of pennies making suicide leaps

into fountains

thunder is the sound

of God rearranging the furniture,

scraping the couch against the

hardwood floor

this year, I hear it like

I live in the apartment beneath his

but

in the warmth of your bed,

a quiet moment

blankets us

you rest your head against

the irregular pauses of my heartbeat:

footsteps going up the stairs

on picking colleges

capitalism is weird
you are supposed to shop
for your future

tufty cat paws

my cat

folds his paws beneath him

like an origami cat

so as not to get them dirty

his nose is a drop

of rain on his face

as a small child my grandmother

asked me,

"What do you want to be when you

grow

up?"

I said, "A cat."

I still want to be a cat.

two kissing faces, now a goblet

friends

are sometimes

optical

illusions

turn picture upside down

and you are left with

a rabbit

an old woman

a lightbulb

now turn in a year-long circle

the picture has changed

you are out of it

a flowerbed

looking at my wrist in the
sunlight
arteries open like
flowers
into hands

----------------------------------------

my blankets smell of your cologne
I like the covers
how you left them:
open

my bed is a book waiting to be
finished

atonement day

"My mother she married

him and

he wasn't good

no

not good.

at school

I couldn't sit down for a week.

the teacher figured it out

all of it out. she

called home. I

regret most it

was my mother who

got that call because

she did not do

it"

I live in a world full of nesting dolls

a boy in my class keeps

lightning in his ribs
and doesn't make a sound

today he cried
and I bore witness
on my shoulders
slave to guilt

I feel ashamed for laughing once, yes
I feel ashamed for laughing
words are sharper than a steep fall

all this time I have wasted pretending

intelligence is a synonym for

complexity

"I am but mad north-northwest;"

and today the wind blows in a southerly direction

waltzing with pieces of my hair

the morning smells of smoke and cat fur

warm and animal

fingers splay against a blue sun

like leaves;
eyes rest in the shade of my branches

days like this

I wish I could dance

"Y'all bitches is bitches."
--Dante "Don T" Alighieri

phillippians 3:20

a storm of birds
above
New Mexican asphalt

cracked like the bottles
of Jose Cuervo
in the parking lot next door


here is where Christ lay on his cross
in the desert
tar and feathers for company