“I didn’t do anything. You don’t have to shoot me.” I repeated it over and over again, a mantra that I had learned along with nursery rhymes as a child. The boy looked nervous, and I knew that he just had to flinch, and I would never see my parents again. Somebody would lie and say I tried to run or had a gun and my story would be over right there.

His sacrum served as my home’s foundation

clavicle and cranium: my adoration

You like a boy. You met him by chance in November, and he makes you nervous. You like a boy, you may even love him, but you’re too young and too inexperienced to say for sure.

On the midnight drive back to Georgetown from the Waco hospital, my sister slept in the passenger seat. Our mom was days away from her final ones and we made the trek each day, an hour each direction, just to visit her bloated, jaundiced body.

I thought if I held onto you tight enough maybe you wouldn't go. Yet here I am white knuckles and cramping palms, feeling you start to fade

Only after the candles have been blown out, the presents are opened, and Jake is sleeping happily in his bed, will I allow myself to fall apart, to be sad about the other little boy who should be celebrating with us.

she ignores it for now / they do, too / she did the same thing with her own mother /parsing out time / allowing space before eliminating

The woman stiffened. Her eyes settled on mine and as they did, I shivered. She spoke. “They’re tricking me,” she said. “Every one of them. They’re tricking me.”

I covered my body with a shell impenetrable to the stares of men impervious to the arrows slung by friend and foe alike.

When Fat Best Friend comes on screen, I hold myself still and quiet. I look at the faces of girls around me—the bodies of girls around me. Their vanilla stick arms, the hollows of their throats. All negative space and shadow where I droop and swell.

I won't be defeated as I know I am right to want the same treatment as a man without debate &I find it absurd that when I utter one word about the issues they face, you say you don't see a trace

She was barely out of her teens when I was born into the role of constant companion – a companion that provided relief from a new and ever-present loneliness.

Ancestral roots shining above the sea resurfacing the memories so one day we could meet at least that’s what friendship means to me

The sound tunnels through my ears into some secret recess in my subconscious. Colors begin to seep out of this place. Yellow grows like a puddle of watercolor paint on the periphery of something in the distance, something to mentally move toward.

I kissed you at twenty-two. I’ll wait to do the same at fifty-two, if I have to.

Hiking through the wilderness saved me. It didn't cure me. It didn’t erase the dark thoughts that had been taunting me. Rather, it empowered me to honestly confront them and showed me that I had something to live for, that I was part of something bigger than myself.

My parents are still stuck in a pattern that is comfortable to them. A pattern where I am a child, still. I have more understanding of that now than I did in my twenties. They still see me as this visually impaired, clumsy little girl, even though I’m an independent adult who lives on her own.

At your burial I was alone, as I always was, you know / I dream to have what you have, you'd say, I...envy you /I have today what you had then: a woman to love, a plan

Fender benders, detonated friendships, roommates furious with my lack of cleanliness, drunken declarations of love to undeserving boys. But more difficult than all of this was the sense underneath it all that I didn’t quite fit anywhere, that maybe I was irreversibly and fundamentally broken. 

If I gave you flowers, I would give you a bouquet of daisies, to remind you of when you cultivated me and brought me into the world.