I am faded denim jeans with holes in the seams,

Turning so soft that they fall apart –

And that is like me too.

I am six hours on a lazy Sunday in August,

Elbows deep in words that cannot be taken back, that can never leave.

I am ink on paper,

The reminder that comes each and every time that you begin to forget –

Abundant, infinite, empty.

Drinking moonshine from plastic cups at noon,

Champagne in teacups,

And sunglasses at midnight because sometimes I fade to nothing under the moon;

How that is something that can never be understood,

How they call that feeling by my name.

Either you feel it or you don't, too much or not at all.

Marijuana on the tongue, I burn myself and cough.

Tell myself that it is never on purpose and then wish that I had cancer instead of this –

Anything instead of this.

I am shame again,

Each time both before and after.

Push my sleeves up to the elbow,

Turn my hands sticky-sweet with the want of others and then forget how to wash them:

A constant reminder that a lifetime rests between us.

Their laughter is a warble,

Static on the radio,

A crossed telephone wire.

Perhaps I will always just be breathing underwater,

Perhaps they will never hear me through all this weight.

I am standing alone at the end of the bar,

Unbrushed hair and cold hands in July.

After everyone has left,

I mop ghosts into the corners and leave them there to rest when I turn out the light.

I am the girl that cannot let anything go,

Even when it is killing me, and especially not when it hurts.

I am the empty parking lot,

The impossible things that take up the spaces around me as I walk alone to my car,

Pub key turned blade in the dark, always just in case.

I get high on the drive home,

I turn up the heat and roll down the windows.

Beneath my sweaters I am all bare skin and indifference,

Something that I never want to see.

Sometimes I do not get undressed before I step into the shower,

I do not know what it means to be comfortable naked,

Not even when the room is empty.

I am psilocybin on the tongue at three a.m.,

A mouth that has forgotten how to taste – or want to.

Painting my dreams on concrete to reflect the sky,

Onto a sidewalk that is not mine and onto legs that are.

Splatter,

Sew them shut and hope that they cannot be seen for what they are:

Softness, vulnerability.

I am lying with a woman my mother's age when she loses her head,

When she asks for more please and I am the hand that cannot stop giving,

Not until the jar is empty.

Naked and sobbing and shivering,

All that she can talk about are the men that live inside her head

And all I can think is 'me too.'

This is me in the places that people do not know how to look:

Staring at the velvet sky,

Turning it like silk between my fingers,

Weaving it around the crescent moon.

I am swallowed again and again by the early days of summer,

A rearing wave of cicadas and half-there people.

I watch as they pass the drink, the blow, the tiny white pills with their faces scratched clean.

I pull the string of our difference and watch them unravel through my smoke.

Falling with the stars, backwards onto wet grass,

Down into the grave,

My arms outstretched towards the sky as I beg it to swallow me whole.

Cutting silver against silver and gritting my teeth;

Sliced open,

There is no one to tell about what my fingers are doing in the dark.

Tilt my face to the window:

Cracked open, wide as a yawning mouth

I let the night slip quietly in,

I have forgotten how to be frightened of anything outside of myself.