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ONE
my body is terrifying,
idaho is a giant shithole,
and other wholesome stories
How I Learned to Love
When I was fifteen, I hated everything except for Weezer
and maybe like two people. And cereal.
One time a boy grabbed me in the music room
and kissed my neck in front of everybody.
I did not want to be kissed, but I thought I was supposed
to want to be kissed. I did not know what to do.
And so I laughed.
I knew you were supposed to laugh after things like that
The world had taught me to dress up my trauma
in short skirts and secret bathroom crying,
to protect the fragility of boys at all costs
When I was five, my father molested me
you become a strange human that way
You cannot whip yourself awake as a child
I should have been born a bird
When I turned six,
I stopped talking.
When I was twenty-five and my name was on the radio,
I asked people to write poems and send them to me
Maybe because I was starved of honest humanity
Half of the poems were about slit wrists
I do not want to know any more
about this brand of humanity.
All I know of love is hunger.
When I met you,
I planted my heart into the heavy
earth. I was scared,
But you smiled back.
Thank God I was not born a bird.
Evelyn Is Made Up
The little girl is a theater of shame and laughter.
She is eating lunch in the library again,
she tucks the desk into her ribs to feel smaller.
The hurt is ricocheting from her mother’s thighs
into the girl’s thighs. The mother’s hips are “too big”
the mother says. The silver hope can of slimfast sits
in the fridge, waits. The boys are cruel and
predictable. The girl renames herself Evelyn.
Evelyn does not cry at school, wears a ruby
cardigan, is the star. Evelyn can run so fast, she has
beautiful ribboned braids. She buys hot lunch
effortlessly—not even reduced, she pays full price.
Evelyn is made up. The girl knows this. Nothing is
real since the incest. The girl can’t breathe through
her nose because of the mold. The girl breathes
loudly, it is a good joke for everyone.
//
I am hurting so much this winter.
I am fucking everyone and nothing
matters, I wore braids to an award show, I started
wearing dark lipstick and crying in the shower
My sheets are beautiful, I kiss everyone I meet
The end of the world fits inside of my cocktail
I never fixed myself, I am my own arduous endeavor
I light myself on fire for everyone
I am the arsonist and the lover
All choked into one great sex bouquet
And Evelyn is here inside me, she is magnificent
and ordering room service like a pro
my mother still makes me cry from her love
& her sweet eyes & sugared compassion
the only parts I remember of my childhood
are lies I told myself to feel better
Epidemic
for Belltown
The girl with purple hair is sitting at my bar again.
I think she is beautiful.
But not in a way that I want to have awesome sex with her but in a way that I want to drink chocolate martinis together and go shopping for christmas vests that have tinkly bells and even maybe polar bears with hats on them.
She is having a full-body cry.
I am the worst bartender, simply because I don’t know how to counsel people without crying back at them.
She is crying about the state of women.
I know that we come from the same rotting wood, so all I do is nod.
Rape is not a man behind a bush with a knife, she laughs,
It’s kissing you on the mouth like whiskey at a nice bar.
The girl with purple hair and I are holding hands now
I only wanted an apology. An acknowledgement of what occurred.
Grappling as artists, as girls, as ships in bottles,
how do we change any of it?
I tell her I am going to write a poem.
She says no one wants to hear a rape poem, mary
Rape Poem
Have you ever seen a stampede of horses?
Do you wonder what the hooves
look like from underneath?
Have you tasted the blood from biting
your own lips because you
couldn’t say no loud enough?
I never fought back. I didn’t punch him. I kept my
thighs tight and closed, but once he’s inside you,
you wish you were a streetlamp.
A seat belt.
A box of nails, of rust, something hard and ruined.
You’ll wish you were a wild pony, a slick fish on a line,
anything but a woman.
Once he’s inside you, you just kind of give up
and your eyes glaze over.
They stay that way for years.
Tips for Fat Girls
you are the ugly best friend.
you are the misguided, the chubby comical relief,
you are the sweet girl with “inner beauty”
and you will always be second best.
the summer I turned nine, I gained fifty pounds.
it was the first time I ate an entire box of oreo cookies
the first time my reflection was foreign from weight
the first time I cradled my stomach like a child,
it was the first time I said, “mama. I hate my body.
I want to slice off these parts right here.”
but I know better now.
I know girls like me have to grow a tough skin
always be ready for rejection
always be prepared to be left for the thin ones, yes
they will always leave you for the thin ones
be funny; laugh at yourself
you cannot afford to be quiet and sad
learn how to drink heavily
learn how to hide your vulnerability
become obsessed with your art
always turn the light off before fucking
always lay on your stomach
always be on a diet
always be generous
and when they take away the most beautiful,
sacred pieces of you that you have to offe
r, always smile
(you might at least have a cute face)
learn how to give head. be eager, be easy, be agreeable.
call the shit covering your bones something creative,
something like “curvy,” or “a little extra”
stop calling them thunder thighs
(it only feels like earthquakes when you walk)
tell yourself that the aching will end,
that the tugging at your shirt
is because of the apron of your belly, hide it.
hide your roundness at all costs.
be molding clay.
be an anchor.
be dependable, be a model wearing heels.
yell at the scale, call her the devil’s hooves
stop taking baths.
your body does not fit the way you want it to.
the water does not cover your awful.
throw up.
split yourself into two halves, call one half Your Mother.
tell her your diet is working, call the other half dove—no.
call the other half “shut up and smile”
call her Persephone, call her That Bitch
don’t be a bitch! don’t be a fat bitch, be nice,
be a work in progress, have an ego, be a Fierce Femme™!
wear makeup as if you can’t stand to look at your own face
because femininity is the only thing they’ve left you with
you cannot afford to be without bronzer,
without teeth that sparkle,
hoopskirts, hair that curls, hair that “frames the face,”
talk about renaissance painters,
never let them know how lonely it is
to have a body that is a joke,
the punch line in comedies, the “before” picture
never let them know you want to be something
other than the ugly best friend.
never let them know that the next person
to reach their hands into your chest
may look at you in awe,
at how surprisingly breakable you are,
how you have survived this long.
Why I Slept with Makeup on for Five Years
for kelsey lauch, amanda redwood, and angela tislow
when i am sleeping,
i want to be a movie girl.
i want my hair to be cascading around my shoulders
lips still bright & eyelashes deep
want my monster to shine with a sephora glow
want you to see the pretty parts of me, even
angle my face to seem thinner in the dark
i am afraid
of my exposed naked, mostly my ugly—
this is my body
and i am terrified
of the things it can & cannot do
i wonder how many women
are painting themselves into movie girls
while they sleep
angling their faces alien
to themselves, an unnecessary surrender
to things that kill them,
to things that are not real
I tell myself in the mirror,
applying the second coat of mascara:
these things are not real
You Can’t Save Your Family
for the chalk poems on capitol hill in 2010 and to anyone who read them
melissa and i are newly twenty-one
and drinking port in her apartment.
something about bach playing on the balcony
makes me feel older
sitting next to her, pools
of gray mascara shooting down her cheeks.
we are talking about Sad Feelings
she cares too much about people i think—
girls like us are barbed wire,
who’ve learned to tease without puncturing,
pretending fire doesn’t burn calluses
scaling the wick with our small hands
because no one will hear you if you never tell them
that you are being fucked without permission—
fascinating how the tiny whimpers of a trespassed voice
chameleons itself into a small phrase the next day
the loaded chorus of: i am okay
i am okay i am okay i am okay
well
I suppose
everyone is okay, depending on what your
calibration of pain is
so you can remember that
when he is high on heroin
and you are detached
and he moves into you without consent
it could always be worse, right?
oh my beautiful friend,
you cannot save your family
or the boy who is in your bed
you can only save yourself
summer is coming with the promise of friendship
there will be wine on all the tables we sit at
i will keep a record playing for you
on the balcony of Denny and Summit
remind you that you are the god of your own beginning
if ever you falter or sink,
i will find a room of mirrors
it will be an endless room of gods, of you,
of choosing to live on purpose
I Will Fill a Tub with Iceberg Lettuce
if i told you about the bathtubs i wish i owned
just to kill myself artfully
you’d probably say hey,
this girl is fucking nuts.
maybe just two—one for utility, for the nightmare thing
and a second clawfoot to fill with iceberg lettuce—
not soggy, sad lettuce but crisp and happy,
after i’ve drowned myself, you can
put me on a bed of leaves
and it won’t be figurative either!
like actually put me on top of the lettuce
like a christmas pig or roast beef
let the vultures come to me, i just—i mean to say,
gosh i still feel like dying these days
the meds are pretty good about
shutting up the choir of crazy
but when you have an obsession
with the glory of your own death
they don’t tell you about the swarms of bees
that race out of your mouth when you talk about
your own incest i mean insects
do you know there are stingers
in your stomach lining waiting for you to speak
just so they can nudge you?
do you remember when the doctor put me on tranquilizers?
they were so scared i was really going to kill myself
i was sort of scared too and
i was asleep all the time and i fell asleep in
class and my teacher sent me to
detention and the detention teacher told
me i didn’t belong there and sent me to the nurse
and i slept there and learned that
you’ll eventually end up where you’re supposed to be
whether it’s the nurse’s office or in college
or in an office typing away
thinking about the first time
you saw a girl by a water fountain
while i was in detention, i drew a bathtub
that had huge leaves of iceberg
lettuce sitting in it, and i thought i was being clever.
i mean sure i haven’t
sliced open my breasts with a rusty piece of glass
for a couple years now
but the important thing you should know is that
i saved the piece of glass.
It’s in a box in the garage
and we have a lot of lettuce
in the fridge.
I Know Girls (Bodylove)
for anyone who has ever felt their body is incorrect
i know
girls who are trying to fit into the social norm
like squeezing into last year’s prom dress
i know girls who are low rise, mac eyeshadow,
and binge drinking
i know girls who wonder if they’re disaster
and sexy enough to fit in
i know girls who are playing russian roulette
with death it’s never easy to accept
that our bodies are fallible and flawed
but when do we draw the line? when the knife hits the skin?
because we’re so obsessed with death—
some women just have more guts than others
the funny thing is women like us will never shoot.
we swallow pills,
still wanting to be beautiful at the morgue.
still proceeding to put on makeup
still hoping the mortician finds us fuckable
we might as well be buried with our shoes. and scarves.
and handbags.
we flirt with death every time we etch
a new tally-mark into our skin
i know how to split my wrists to reveal battlefields too,
but the time has come for us to reclaim our bodies.
Our bodies deserve more than to be
war-torn and collateral, offering this
fuckdom as a pathetic means to say:
i only know how to exist when i’m wanted
girls like us are hardly ever wanted, you know
we’re used up. and sad. and drunk.
and perpetually waiting by the phone for someone to pick up
and say “you did good.”
well, you did good.
try this:
take your hands over your bumpy lovebody naked
and remember the first time you touched someone
with the sole purpose of learning all of them,
touched them because the light was pretty on them
and the dust in the sunlight danced the way your heart did.
touch yourself with a purpose,
your body is the most beautiful royal