hush-lullaby

when you spill me over canvases, i am whitewashed and crying like a child for these walls are not built for broken blood vessels, only milk and cream, tea and sugar and it all spills like a flood creating faucets in tiny corners and these limbs are not meant for painting, they say dripping crimson

to stand yourself tall, as a tree- without leaves, only branches held strong to drag one foot ahead of the other racing only the thoughts you once had; it is bending down to pick up your pieces; sea glass in mosaic frames; it is learning- a foal's legs falter only for a second after which: they never stop moving

silence is an unspoken evil, one that hangs off mouths filled with cigarette smoke and licks the lips of boys with the eyes of soldiers that saw too much, too little it is what drags a tremble from my spine to the nerves inside my palms; it is the sound of night when i can't sleep, and the quiet after a speeding tunnel there are creatures of the night that will tell you, silence is the sound of freedom, but to them i ask, what if the silence is living inside of you?

when you are eighteen a crooked spine claws like teeth, itching. hearts beat soft.

we are the in-betweens- the rise and fall of poetry we misuse structure, misplace grammar's skeleton and neglect the proper magic of capitilization but we are poets because we hide in the vowels, slip in between the sharp consonants that make tongues click and teeth snap to the spaces between the actors and the supporting cast connecting words like buttons on a shirt or colliding magnets we are poets because our hearts become the page, the stage but we are always left with the blood on our hands

i don't sleep anymore. or at least i don't think i do. it's one of those things i stopped keeping track of like the number of words that make my mother cry (cancer, lists). if i'm being honest, i stopped sleeping (maybe) around the time i started thinking in a series of parentheses. because i don't sleep, my arteries demand too much air (oxygen, clean) from the space outside my window. i make my room my heart, cold. it fills with a wind only bricks can breathe, an ice only soil is willing to withstand. i am winter's soul. the world becomes a different place when you stop noticing sound (mute, black and white film) and start noticing every m

the thing about writing is that it gets lodged beneath your skin like your favorite dress caught and tangled in the thorns and all you can think about is how it itches, how it hurts how out of place, yet familiar it is amongst your skinny bones and stretched muscles the thing about writing is that you get lost in the metaphors too often and too carelessly to make much sense of the rest and everything suddenly becomes a breathing poetic device the thing about writing is that every story gets shifted to the point where it gets harder and harder to tell the difference between dreams and reality

i grew up in a house with floors that slant, a porch that rots and an attic full of glass. i watched as my father insulated the walls, my arms getting wrapped up in itchy pink material that left tiny cuts across my skin. i grew up in a family that either cared too much or didn't care enough. my father never talked and my mother only accused but never apologized. i watched their affection fade and a fog of too- high expectations rise and consume me. i grew up scared and a coward. my nails would dig trenches in my arms and my stomach had a habit of rejecting what it was given. i got used to hiding my pale limbs in swea

maybe it's about finding routes on a map not six feet underground

you always told me if i ran too far, i would run out of things to run to. and i guess in a way i did. i became a sheet of plastic sweeping through a wasteland of i-don't-knows and i-don't-cares, clinging to broken trees and drowning in mud puddles. i was running without a ribcage, without a heartbeat. i watched as the sky i've always known as blue turn gray; i watched the wolves come closer; i watched your hands slip farther and farther away. somewhere i realized that maybe it wasn't what i was running to or what i was running from that mattered, but rather the empty space in between where i felt the world break and my knees weaken. i built