I am a poem
I am a beast
These words are my skin
These vowels my teeth

I am a poem
I am a beast
These words are my skin
These vowels my teeth

I am a poem
I am a beast
These words are my skin
These vowels my teeth

I am a poem
I am a beast
These words are my skin
These vowels my teeth

words like hands smooth down and over skin, finger-dip the shallow scoop of belly-button (windblown sand: warm stars, hot land) words this ribbon (silk and black) circle lips inside the wrist, dark with shine I’m theirs, they’re mine: Bound, never going back.

Go ask Alice, she’s got a tale to tell you can find her in the back shelf in the dark. Take her home, her covers seeping into your hands, and in secret, hold your breath and read. But with the opening cover, an opening world one which can never be shut again— you can burn [...]

You slip like a fish silver-darting in that circular cyclone of minnow-eat-minnow. If I touched you, I think you would peel like scales (green and grey), and they would grow into a mountain under my shaking fingers. I would climb you, sticking my pinky between your papery fish-bones, and pry my way up and up [...]

she was a lover, my isla. I fed her my dreams, and we together drank shadows. we were fairy light and pixie dust, we were lighter than air. I don’t write her name with a capital letter (not ever) because I know she wouldn’t want me to. Capitals are too big and broad for her [...]

The air licks my legs like popsicles, and, peach and lime, I freeze outward in.

She’s stayed close by, mole-girl, digging tunnels in the way she’s been carefully shown. Light-blind, she reaches out scoop-hand by scoop-hand tracing home routes anew from below. I come home above ground, shadow-cheeked and dirt-poor, with one notebook and a string in my hand. Fumbling, I reach for the switch in the dark, untuck the [...]