rchelsea2005

I am praying. Money is your god and my God is mine. Papa asks for more and I am on another train. Your schooling won’t pay for itself, and Papa won’t let me forget this time. I beg Mr. M—— for an advance and he calls me “Ungrateful Samsa." I ride the train all night and wake up sick. My head hurts and I am late for an appointment across town and and and Mr. M—— will never forgive me and Papa will say unspeakable things and question my affections and I will have to say "I take my worthlessness to my grave." I wake up on another train and can’t remember how I got there. I dream of flight&md

I beg. I watch you talk to yourself. I consider how many cases of mental illness go undiagnosed each year. I convince myself of your brilliance with your own illumination of it so dim. I beg. There is a tiny point in my left temple that aches and I think, ‘clot,’ and you cry and I cry and there are many crosses we could go around bearing, but this one is not nearly bright enough. At night, I picture you with wings. I collapse. They are translucent and cut my hands and you go on crawling—Gregor, what on earth has happened? Father puts on his black coat and you, you put on yours. Your skin is soft. I beg. Your skin

the land was beautiful; open valley, touch mountain and the ranges were open like the spaces in your heart and I was heading west with you, in spirit, where the fault lines widen climbing rocks inside your mind, each foothold before me without thought and I was beautiful and you were beautiful -- driving down highways mapped by flowers in bright red and yellow, like the sun, but softer, and you crumbled with my memory inside you -- a reminder of every good thing spoiled. in my mind, you are whole and incredible, a bright star burning itself dark in the universe, like me, with galaxies blooming inside your arteries like watermelon seeds; chew

I am helpless to resist the ways in which you bring me back -- roots, brown! brown! bring me back from cold wanderings. I want warmth and skin and a universe decentered by glory. magnificence, bring me home to cinnamon crests and pine needle tides. there is beauty here, under my fingernails, and I will find it. body, hold me close and tell me what it's like to love in yellow and familiar strains on the radio; tell me what it's like when a window closes, when a splinter sticks. we offer threads of hope and cash from back pockets with pick-pocketed ten cent words, but I am here -- here and I cannot escape it. the skies blue and the

There's cheap birch paneling under her feet. The floor is cold, and every breath she takes is a quiet loss. She closes her eyes and thinks about daisies. Halfway across the world is the dream of an elephant and a distant, foreign way of loving everything and nothing all at once. Her breasts hurt. Her back hurts, her eyes hurt, and everything inside is just trying to crawl its way out. She thinks about floating face-up in the ocean, face hot, and dreams of disconnection. When she opens her eyes, she's still in the same place. Nothing has changed and she wants to write a letter to every person she's ever loved, but there'll never be enough tim

your arms are warm and open and, like summer, your heart burns hot toward its own end. your eyes fill, and there is no sympathy. saturday mornings are lonely and quiet; you start counting up so many small, old pains that you lose track and can't run away from losing days to fear. your hands are cold and your fingers ache. this is your life, but it is not yours. asleep, you dream of gardens and noise, visions of men without ambition. you love deeply, but you can't love forever. your children lose recognition, and here, please, just let your eyes go weak and your fingers clench; it is safer. you want every place in the world, f

You dreamed of waking. You dreamed of the way a name sounds when leaving lips. You dreamed of why why why and the way peculiar things pile onto each other like cells. And, like a tumor or a loss, your hands are not yours. And like a reed you bend but do not break. There's a dead dog on your porch, and your eyes go bright and empty when the wound stretches and tears, rendering itself undone and nameless. Your body is a curse, and the flies begin to come. You are sliding down banisters with your flushed skin -- shame building to break through the new tissue, your black sun. Your clothes are too big. You swim and you s

green smothered over stitches and fingertips, there is something to be had here. questions are open-ended, and I am blocked in by the resonance of mortality. over the chipped cement, cracked sidewalk of cul-de-sac life, I traced your footpaths and went forward, dizzy dreamer-style down through days lit up like forgotten porch lights and summer sun. I was there, and every smile on your face meant something new to be loved----another lost strand of hair, another found way of fitting fingers together. now there is making sense of loss and the way hope looks scattered across pavement, all eggshells. loneliness becomes a virtue, and