Author: poetryfest

My room is full of dusty air
I breathe it in, through my nose, down into my lungs.
The cloud of dust blackens my body one molecule at a time
It dances through my blood stream
Engulfs my limbs, my heart, and my brain.
My room forces me to think
My gruesome thoughts
They don’t halt or pause, constantly moving.
I often imagine the inner workings of my body
Just how rotten the dust has made me
What kind of life threatening disease
My room has left me.
My lover sometimes knocks on the door to my room
And when I don’t get up to answer they slip a note through the cracks
An open invitation to join them for a meal.
I peel my legs off of the ground, they’re too heavy to move on their own
And I question what uncertainties lie behind my door.
My room is comforting, familiar, even if it’s slowly killing me.
Your shadow peaks from under the door, the only version of you I can face
The light you radiate terrifies me.
Instead I slip a letter back to you under the door.
I tell you the dark is so vast it has taken comfort in my heart and made home in my brain.
Yet when you tell me you miss me
Miss my laughter, my smile, the way I used to sign off my post-it note letters with x’s and o’s
I can feel your light unclogging my lungs.
The door opens on its own, your eyes zoning in on mine before you engulf me in your light and
for the first time in months I breathe in clean air.

You hold me in your arm in this makeshift heaven

and I’m counting your breaths. Trying to make it to three sounds easy until I’m cocooning myself against your voice, and I feel you hum into my throat, like a drum with the beat of two lovers lost in each other’s orbit.

There’s this softness in the way you lap up my laugh and the whole world shifts its focus to us. You give me the freedom to live between your Adam’s apple and your carotid, and I am nothing short of a bee on the Lilypad of your never-ending freckles caught in-between.

You make it look so easy, trying to tame the unbridled heart of a woman hellbent on crawling in your chest and making a home inside yours.

They say we’re mostly water,
Which is odd, to me, because
When I was little,
I would run headfirst into the pounding thunder,
Head thrown back into the gusty wind,
And feel the water caress my sopping hair.
And that water, it was thoughtless,
Pure in every sense of the word,
It cared not where it went,
Or how it fell.
But I can barely look myself in the eye,
Though we’re mostly water.
And I pray, one day,
When I’m dead and gone,
That my spirit will rise with the rain
And the water will be free from my body,
Unburdened by my judgement,
And seep shamelessly through the soil.

The taste buds have accumulated.
Of all the things to enter my mouth—
All my wants and my doubts
Are ideas and promises that I’ve debated.
Please listen to the creaking walls of this house
I suffer in the silence in my mother’s nightgown
She passed it to me when it wore off its beauty
Tattered and faded are these flowers and ruffles
Cast away to someone like me; I’m such a darling
Or maybe a vindictive villain who leaves in cuffs
Never has she ever known how to love-touch;
My taste buds have acquired a love.
The blood of my misfortunes
The long nights that torment
My pillows turned yellow from
My acidic tears
I bleed, I weep, I beg, and I plead
For mercy,
Mercy please, because I’ve been earning—
Love, just to have enough
Never more than I deserve
Nothing more than I’ve earned
Tasting my own tears running in parallel streaks
Games that play and seek
I’ve acquired a taste for deceit
Lying to those close to me
If only to save face for another day.
I’ve been ashamed
My love, my unwanted affections, my impositions
Never can I be less,
Cups so full to the brim when I enter the room
The loves of my life sitting a few feet away
So close but never can I touch
Or caress the cheeks I so admire
And all these writes become about him
He is the undercurrent
Something so reoccurring
Lightning blue eyes
Stunning and wicked displays
Enticing in all the right ways
Eyes I could beg to examine each and every part of me
A body so full and soft
I love to watch you walk away
The shapes, the curves, the round sway of hips
Back and forth.
I smell you in the elevator
Despite your previous exit
I want to hug you
Cherish, touch, and tongue you
But you don’t see me
Said it yourself
I’m just too young
Which translates to me
That I’m not desirable enough even to fuck
Never tempted you or was enough
But perhaps this lesson I’ve learned
About taste and touch and memory
Is how gently eyes can hold someone;
And while we’ve never touched with fervor
I still remember the feeling of your curls
As I braided your hair
Hands shaking with hypersensitivity
Wishing I could capture the moment infinitely
A picture, a smile and a laugh
A photo to press to my chest
I’ve learned that I can choose to be alone
I can find a home within myself
If I sit down and build it
Building my affections upon another
Was never sustainable
And I would hope
To continue to learn
That beauty tastes good
If only I’d let it
And discover it.
Taste is consent
Taste is an incredible testament
I am real in these moments
I hunger, I hunger
Please replace my apathy with something stronger
I seek, I seek
To be free from love’s infliction on me
Is it freewill or a godsdamned choice?
Taste me and see me
I ache to be tangible
Feel me
I’m soft and warm
I would weather all the storms
My shoulders are free to lean on
I want to taste you, though I wonder,
Could you ever want to taste me too?

Away for a while,
from the basic house I built
on the edge of a rolling valley,
a friend of mine, a poet,
asked to stay there
to write.

On a small table by the corner window,
I left a poem I’d been working on
about a man starting out in a new place.
In the final stanza,
he asks a local
what winters are like.

When I returned,
a note from Thomas was on the same table.
“Regarding that final stanza:
Everyone knows what winters are like.
What that man wants to know
is what winters there
are like.”

I see you, peacock.
Your crest enlivened
by nature’s rarest hand.
You strut by me, stalked
by a cape of endless blue eyes
you sashay to her, a peahen
grazing grass for ants.
Your obsidian pupils lock
on her, cape reaches for sky,
endless blue eyes
shimmer, shake, vibrate
with wind. You dance
despite never knowing
how, despite never being taught
you dance for her.

Do you mind, peacock,
if I sneak behind you, pluck
one quill from your train?
Take feather take ink,
take paper, hope I
take peacock courage.
Write words that reach
for sky, words to make
her eyes shimmer,
shake, vibrate
when our pupils lock.

Teach me, peacock,
how to dance.

Loving you was one of the easiest things I’ve ever done
I guess that’s why letting you go hurts so bad
Like I’m being forced to get rid of my better half
A half I never even knew existed before we met

What would they say 16 in love?
No, you’re crazy too young to even live a little
What would you know of love?
To have someone hold your hand and be aware that their fingers were crafted to fit perfectly in
yours
To completely light up at just the sound of their name
To be so lost in them and forget that time moves on for everyone while in the moment all comes
to a stop
To know that sometimes the best thing you can do for them is let them go…

I hate that this is what it comes to but with all honesty we both knew
We knew we wouldn’t last and I’d hate to say we were just a phase
But we watched each other suffocate under the other person’s grasp
Knowing the danger and yet we pressed on thinking things would be different

Every couple believes that they can outrun the timer that starts on their relationship
Romeo and Juliet did it and so can we
Such optimism
Such hope
Those dreamers don’t last long

Their hearts broken
Put everything on the line and now they’re left wide open
With a rich man’s handful of shoulda, coulda, woulda’s

So I ask you now please
Don’t ever say I didn’t love you because I walked away
I knew doing it would help you thrive
I wanted you to do more than just barely survive
I part with you with just one wish
The next girl you find you owe her this: don’t let her go

If I join arms, am I a criminal?
I stand with those who fight for dreams,
for what they believe is right.

My mother’s tears fall as I leave her side.
With trembling hands, my father whispers, ‘Live on.’
My country wishes for my victory;
I wish to see a new dawn, to see my parents once more

If I fight for my family, am I a soldier?
I belong to no one but my own—
My ancestral home.
I am not a pawn, as many see me;
I fight for my people, not the regime.

If I lift my brother up when he is down, am I cruel?
My brothers in arms,
who stood with me when the grenade flew,
when we crawled through the trenches,
praying to all the Gods we knew,
when we cried and bided our time,
waiting for this godforsaken war to end.

– A Star
– Oh. No, thank you.
– But I made it myself.
– That doesn’t mean that I want it.
– But… I made it…
– I don’t like the way you make stars, I can make them myself.

He was holding the lock in his hand
My little brother only three years old
Grasping the obtuse metallic object
In his cold clammy fingers, raptor like

At the bottom of the living room stairs
I watched over him that weeknight
While my mother worked in the factory
Leaving me alone to take care of him

I knew it was past his bedtime, so dark
But I still needed to finish homework
Math problems swirling in my head
Stooped under the lamp with a pencil

I looked up suddenly, sensing his milky smell
There he was smiling and giggling, coming closer
My baby brother’s voice an ascending arpeggio
Mumbling gibberish sounds in broken chords

What happened next was a visceral appeal
For attention I suppose and for being possessed
My baby brother’s episodes of controlled chaos
His inner child devolving into murk at midnight

My disbelieving eyes relive the terror of that night
As my imp brother hurls the metal lock at my face
Crushing my bottom teeth and opening a wound
At the bottom of my chin, blood running all over

My shrill cries, heaving sonorities into our house
Ignored by my father hammering away heavy snores
Alarmed I run into the kitchen to grab a clean towel
Pressing it hard against the newfound cave in my chin

There was a numinous quality to the cuts on my face
Peering into the cavity of my mouth, I see the missing teeth
The mountainous looking mouth now had lost its peaks
As if appearing without my intentionality, an apt symbol

My baby brother, the improviser, does not register
The precision of the wound, like a marked Christ
Our overlapping cries assembling into one ragged line
A mini-opera with piercing sounds of dissonance, manifested

And the result is disconcerting–a rough-edged gash erupting
On my face, still today–the hangar like space of my mouth now closed in
The margins shrinking, a visual reminder of my youth, an analogue
Fueled by a memory of my adolescent self, of forced womanhood

An inferiority complex induced by a childhood accident
My brother my gemini twin and I torn but stitched back
Together, bloodshed as balm for a life of poverty
An absent working mother and a complicit fallen father