Nothing is more repulsive than a furtively prurient spirituality; it is just as unsavory as gross sensuality.

                            -Carl Jung

Mint.

-We should grab coffee, a movie, I should introduce you to my roommates, write you poetry, jewelry.
-I think you misunderstood, honestly, I'm not available.
-I can see that, but still you should consider the contents of my pockets. I have your favorite flavor of gum, a coin with a sentimental story, an inkwell pen...
-I need to leave.
-A sparrow, thumbtacks, candle wax.
-Why are you telling me this?
-A glass eye, shoelaces, beach sand.
- ....
- What do they usually offer you?
- Anything. Everything. Youth mostly.
- Then I'm not the first?
- Imaginary boyfriend? Hardly.
- I hope he gives you orange juice, blush, and apologies.
- I'm settling for growth.
- I'm sorry.
- ....Second thought, I think I will take that coffee.

Genesis

In the same way that you can recognize how the cartilage cockles in your own ears, or the specifics in the grooves of your own fingerprints, and the way your tongue is so familiar with the roof of your own mouth, it is that vivid. It is so vivid because it refuses to leave you, in the way that a birthmark will not pale even after your skin is raw and burning and smelling like cucumber melon from soap that stings. It will not dull. It will not mute. This memory stays, abiding and absorbing you, even now, as you watch your wife quaff her coffee, making that babbling sound in the hollow of her throat.

                As you sit in your kitchen, finding yourself in that surreal disposition, you begin to feel the familiar onset of the panic attacks that have become so frequent they have begun to identify you. You, the neighbor who sits in his car for 30 minutes at a time, breathing heavy with a more than dead expression on your face.  You, the man who has been caught in the office bathrooms hyperventilating more than once.   You, always exhausted because several nights a week you exchange sleep for hours spent gripping cotton sheets, and keeping your wife awake so that she consumes cups and cups of coffee the following morning.

Staring at the back of your hands you begin thinking that all you are is perception; and all that anything is, is perception. How much you wish you were the type of person who believed in God and not that life is a glitch in so much unknown, and the only thing you can really feel, that is tangible, is a memory from when you were 5 years old. Your wife asks about your job without taking her eyes off the newspaper, scrolling black print, looking for something indefinite. And you feel sad because she is so unaware of how unreal all of this is.

                You run your hand through your hair and touch the back of your neck, squeezing the muscles insulating your spine, hiding under skin, which in your opinion is much too thin to be the only defense against all the elements in the world that could decapitate you. The anxiety, now hot in your gut, holds your breath. Surrendering yourself to the apprehension that is your life, you close your eyes and clench the only part of you that is real.

                And now, you’re back to being 5 years old. You and your younger brother David are tired in a way that children never are. You’re staring out the side window of the house you grew up in, watching the cars pass, and thinking of how they look like animals that are hungry and impatient. Your mother has locked herself in her room and refuses to react to your knocking, or David’s crying, or the mounting volume from the television you keep turning up, in hopes that she’ll scream at you to turn that shit off.

                You watch the cars and wonder where your father has gone. Thinking of his suitcase, the corners worn smooth, being filled this morning when you were supposed to be sleeping but instead were kept awake by the roar of your mother, and the crash of something glass against their bedroom wall. You tell David, now sleeping on the couch, not to worry because you’re keeping an eye out for your father to return home.

                And then there’s the knock, which is hard and brief. You turn your eyes toward the hall that leads to your mother’s bedroom door, and wait for footsteps that never come. So, you walk to the front entry and turn the knob with both hands and open it to a man in a suit and briefcase. You look up at him, but the white sun eclipses his face, so you can never make out the features in his semblance. Instead you look at his knuckles that wrap the briefcase and think to yourself how dry they are.

                He calls you Sonny and asks if your father or your mother is home. Because he is a grown up, you nod yes, still staring at his ashy knuckles, then turn and run to your mother’s bedroom door. You yell that someone is here, someone has come and he needs you, your plea restricted by the limits of your 5 year old vocabulary. You knock the wood with your small fist, and wait.

                You can hear her curse, and you can hear the bottles, and a sigh from your mother that settles in your ears, similar to how cough syrup settles in your stomach. The metal knob moves, and finally she emerges in a blush silk bathrobe, like a pale rose phoenix, looking down at you with a lamentation that looks so furious it could break your spine. And you want to say you’re sorry but before your tongue can flick out the words her hand strikes the side of your face. Your eyes feel caustic, hot. The corners of your mouth crook. Your throat feels like a pregnant knot. And suddenly you are eating the air.

                Your mother is very pretty. You know this, even now, at the age of 5. You know because of the way people seem to hang suspended around her, as if she is the only thing that is grounded. She wraps the robe tighter to her waist and tells you to be quiet. Trying to re-pin her hair, she licks her fingers and rubs them under her eyes, refining black mascara. Takes a swallow of vodka and pushes it back and forth between her cheeks, her face sour when it goes down. She sways out of the bedroom, leaving you burning with ache in the hallway, as you do your best to stay quiet.

                It’s a while before you venture back into the living room, where you can hear the man with dry knuckles and your mother, drinking coffee, and him trying to give his sale’s pitch but is continuously being distracted by the way she crosses and uncrosses her legs, and laughs, and how she touches her clavicle when amused. His voice is hearty and he swallows his coffee copiously. Everyone is nervous around your mother.

                And it’s an even longer while before you watch them both get up and head toward the hallway. She turns on the television as they pass by it. You see his dry-knuckled hand lift and squeeze your mother’s side. You hear her voice coast down the hall in a placid whisper something cryptic, and adult, and sharp in your ears. You wait in the living room with David, who is still sleeping. You wait, scrunching your toes in the shag carpet. You wait, held in the noise of black and white cartoons, trying to find a distraction from your mother’s bedroom. But you can’t.

                You stand in front of your mother’s bedroom door, with a wonder that is solely reserved for 5 year old boys. And you hear her short gasps interrupting drawn out moans, and a wheezing from her mattress. You hear the man with dry knuckle’s deep voice, groaning. You hear him hurting her. You see your small fists pound the door and you feel a scream erupt from your gut. And you cry to her, because you know you’re too weak to save her. You reach the metal knob and turn it with your delicate fingers. The door, unlocked, pushes through, and this is the last moment you were anything but perception.

Glass

I wondered what the first would be like while inducing the last kiss. I leaned in toward you, taking lips and tongue, and thinking of soft translucent pink shells belonging to very pretty girls, who were going to hear your name for the first time.

When you pulled back, when you pulled out of my driveway, I felt this pull from pose and a –push- that broke both collarbones.

Now, there was no longer significance to the fearlessness I conjured when agreeing to jump with you. The cessation of falling interpreted to me what it really was to crush.

I thought about the first while I strolled alleys and felt an enigmatic frostbite on my hands in the gentle lukewarm autumn. The streetlights melted into the asphalt and my hair. I thought of boys who touched my locks and how many haircuts I had given myself. I thought of lighters, caricatures of small bombs, and I waited, back bleeding, palms bleeding, knees bleeding, for the first.

I waited in movie theaters. I paid for two tickets to sit and ignite the snowflakes that had annexed themselves to my hands. My fingers melting like wax, I watched curiously as they pooled into my skirt.

All my pillowcases ruined with sloe eyelash prints, I waited in bed. In the wake of splintered glass and fiberglass and the weakened looking glass, I waited.

All my invitations ruined, folded into paper airplanes and taken flight in every wrong direction.

All my skirts ruined, I waited in long lines and found everything I needed to say blown into brown paper bags.

There were evenings in which I spent years raking through cant, trying to find your accent. And there were days, I rived through pearl necklaces and hot irons. I split the breadths of awkward between drugstore Romeos and Juliets, bisected zygote liaisons, as if I needed the world aborted of love. Lighters were hurled toward the feet of the prettiest girls I had seen.

And then, in the current of an unexpected blue night, we found ourselves leaning against incongruent corners, paint chipping, cement dichotomizing, and the two of us holding hands like we were the only thing still held together in bedlam.

Our backs scabbed, bodies lush with claret rinds, and anemic legs wanting to give. You cried, telling me you found me prettier without fingers. Akin to being chemically burned and deciding to swim through salt, it was the very definition of insanity.

But you grabbed tweezers and culled the glass out of my feet. In exchange, I told you secrets in black out hoping they’d moor behind your eyelids. You knew me better in your sleep.

Then, the first hit hard. Avid dread settled in the gears of my clocks. I waited for angry dogs at my front door and malignant angels to claw out from under my bed. I waited to hear the weeping of lovers. I waited for the crux of my hands to feel nothing but pique and appetite.

But when my eyes shut, I saw your arcane blueprint, past lives cocooned in blood vessels, our life trussed in remote mystery. I saw myself in a sea glass wedding dress and the broken lighter ataxia on the altar.

I wanted to tell you it wasn’t the height that made me brave. It was trusting I’d never need to abhor the New Year.

Fill in the blank. You're so good at that.

"You find soullessness in everything you can. Where as I......"
You never finished the sentence. You passed out before completing the most hurtful thing ever said to me.

Incomplete.
Isn't that just my existence.

I want to show you how much soul I find in every waking conscious thought I have.
I just wish you were sober enough to recognize when I do.

I'm going to stop relying on you to take care of me.
I don't need it.
I don't need anything.

[I just want you to stop being so mean to me.]

We'd have this conversation now but you're passed out on my bed, in a fetal ball, in all your clothes. I'm going to undress you and call you "baby" cause you respond to that when you're at this point.

I'm going to do this one more time.

Don't ever accuse me of not being passionate about life.
I am not apathetic.
I am realistic.
I am [          ].

Tantamount

Two small girls faced each other in their bed and told secrets in cryptophasia, each looking at their own executioner, smiling at God’s wit. I imagine God herself took cuticle scissors and cut DNA up along the double helix, dividing the zygote, so that 29 years later she’d have something to read about over coffee. Like the most impractical joke.

And I wonder what that kind of passion for unification feels like. What it is to share so much of yourself with another person, down to a cellular level. And I think of God being so cheap for only giving them one soul.

So maybe that’s the reason, as women, they found themselves with a weight in their palms in exchange from their shoulders. And a countdown, because timing is everything. I imagine they started at ten...nine...eight…

Then through chambers bloomed lead and a simultaneous “pop” that absconded in infinite directions throughout Colorado, propelling itself through November’s brittle air, striking God’s eardrums like an egg timer. I wonder which sister kept the mutual soul, and which had really died.

One twin dead , one twin the suicide note, and never being asked again “Which one are you?”. 

Sea Salt

He promises
to bring me a cheeseburger
at 10:34 p.m.
My gut aches,
I haven’t eaten anything
since earlier this afternoon.
So I start putting away my books,
and taking coffee cups into the kitchen sink.
I shake out my bedding,
brush my teeth.

An hour later
I’m still waiting.
Changed my pajamas three times.
My toes are freezing.
My neighbors keep hitting the wall
we share
and with each knock
my ears perk up in this
really pathetic way.

Christ I’m fucking hungry.

One hour thirty minutes.
There’s this comfort I find
in really awful television,
but when I roll over
and watch it on my side,
an image of my pureed brain leaking
onto my pillow
starts to distract me.

I’m that kind of girl
who puts makeup on
to lie in bed all day.
I color coordinate my pajamas.
I run up the electricity bill
by leaving on the lights in my apartment,
so he won’t have to search
for the switch
when he gets here.

Two hours.
I have class in the morning.

Fuck,
I’m on a diet anyway.