If they ask - & they will
tell them this is how I loved you:
into unabashed revision, in full riot gear,
that I lifted my pen out of spite.

There we were: a failed audition story.
So we brined our tongues, scrubbed suds into our country
of dirt, that old stubborn scalp. Tucked our horns away for fish-scraps
of screen time. I was grateful; was taught to clean my plate,
fisting the seconds & running as fast as I could, into a better
page, like a brown Prometheus, exploding ink where it gleamed,
white as wishbone, a story we broke between us:

  the good version   the bad
  As if somewhere we exist     unsoured by survival
  As if somewhere your laugh fails     to make light leaks
  out of me. I was afraid     if I kissed you they'd cross kiss
  replace it with some     gentrified idea of love
  The kind that came out of cans     or photobooths
  all airbrushed & without the pulp     In our application
  I wrote     i promise our bodies can bottle light too
  Now they want to watch     how we shit the seeds out
  out of every hole     prove it / what you call divinity
  What if I'm just an animal     trying not to be seen?
  So I ran     stitched our mouths into a myth
  large enough for two children     to live inside it
  In this version     we grow roots deep enough
  to touch motherland     Nothing that moves here will bite
  I braid our endings     into brilliant beginnings
  & the earth yields us her treasures:     my hands / a house
  before flowers / land so luminous     like nothing has yet
  died in it & no one will ever say     too much;
  you can want     but only up to here ]

  Oh to be named     like any other
  in the archive     that remembers

cw: animal death

From the outside looking in:
The piano, still sealed behind the chapel
doors. Unseen, the hamster growing cold
in the skirt pocket of the girl I'd been.

I'm thinking: I did it; I survived you.
So much of my girlhood still runs
away from me. I don't recall that piano
ever making a sound.

Didn't you sneak me in
so I could prove a point? Water-logged
the chord pitched under my hand like a question.

And our ankle-length skirts, didn't they droop
with only seconds of rainwater. How they clung
like someone else's skin.

Stuffing our wet socks between the AC's teeth,
our laughter skidding across the tiles,
I thought us freer than anyone.

Our upperclassmen floated through the puddles
with a practiced uncold. I didn't care
for their pink lips, the latest technology
of waterproof youth. I didn't want to disappear
like that. But who was to say we weren't, already?

Standing in the warpath of a bright red swing,
the seat sickled high in the sky
to blot out the sun: how easy to vanish.

What I believe to be true: the hot burst of metal
against my cheek, boys who'll fold me
into corners, first blood, apologies from the dean.
They stripped the swing-set of its swings.
Sealed the rift tight as if the water
had not already breached this room too.

In my pocket, my friend turned to stone.
I thought maybe God could return the years to me,
dripping on the pew, no place for a girl's grief.

Instead, I trapped him in a bottle filled with tap water.
There, floating strangely, he was alive forever—
until later, the sweet-sick stench hemmed
us to our seats in Sex Ed class.

I buried him in the sandbox.
I don't remember if this really happened.

Most days I still doubt what I'd witnessed:
the sandbox empty of sand, phantom pianos
with ants crawling over the keys, the mind riddled
with exit wounds, holes everywhere.