sada abe

she shuts the door and
kneels over you to question
demanding answers
with obi-dience

the knife between her teeth
driving her points home on your skin
sharp singing silver against
the pink in her cheeks
fuel for another hour

the fast of her grip
all fabric and thighs
rescuing you from
bleak inspiration

blaming your throat
for the loss of her head
separating yours from your neck
in a cinch
until you forget all but her sigh

and when you can't sate
the insatiable
she'll refuse to exit this ride
when you're drifting sore after a savage
nick of time

tighter, harder
belt, sash, tie
she'll deliver you
gift wrapped to the other side

apple white

i'm on top and you're on bottom
of this bunk bed we've been assigned
and i've stilled my hand
to keep from starting over at square one
i don't admit that i imagine climbing
down to slide your purple shroud
ever so slowly to the side
to encompass you before the brink;
to Just Do It

hailing a different ride,
we ate the applesauce of knowledge
serial eyeglasses wrapped snug in their lanyards
just within our reach
as if this were a procedure we'd wake from,
grasping for clarity

that i've got
somehow in the denied human itch to crawl;
suspended, swimming amniotic
and exit bags prove further blurs but
i'm running while lying perfectly still

you know me by a new name
member of the Away Team
in my Nike Decades
these leagues and leagues

behind me
reporting fresh faced for duty
with a toll of five and change
catching a comet by its tail
under my lashes will be reported on the evening news
as stay tuned white
while my last breaths bloomed violet here
imagining unwrapping sort of sleepily
your present form
beneath me from
its cloak of anonymity

choke

when i was nine we played the game first at the far end of the field, out of sight of the nuns with the whistles nestled between their shapeless breasts (best for bouncing silver shrill drill calls and stopits, "hey you, line ups"), the group of us positioned closest to the park with our backs turned to the lesson plans contained within the books on teachers' desks, not so much imagined but taken from some other, bigger book of "you need to know because we said so", facing the toys that spun you dizzy and gave you butterflies, those a little outgrown. (i'd sit at the top of the slide with new long legs and go nowhere. it was a such a short drop to the bottom, even if i managed to scoot past the edge).

we stood positioned between scientific experiments and the playground with our own questions not answered in any textbook. today's query: what's on the other side of breathing?

polly went down first and came back hours later though mere seconds had passed. one of the girls timed it on her swatch, stopped counting when she stirred. a flutter of eyelash, then sitting up and picking dead leaves from her uniform jumper. watching her daze and normalize in color, we grew bolder. she'd gone where none of us had been before, though she didn't believe time anymore, or at least the time keeper. dahlia went next, but we had to help press, extinguish breath as she lay supine with her hands crossed over her still, narrow little chest like a corpse, looking as proper as the day of her first communion sans gloves, and those white satin dresses we donned that even then reminded me of coffin linings.

every vision brought back from the other side seemed important except to anyone who hadn't had it themselves. hyper narrative, lucid little dreams, petite second-long death hallucinations that didn't seem profound to anyone but those who'd lain momentarily dying.

my turn. i wrapped my own fingers around my throat. this wasn't hard. how many times had i thought i might be better off, that this world was a bad fit? maybe even a mistake? the broken glasses, the rosaries, peripherally recognized, and maybe even to jesus. daydreaming the inappropriate at mass, always halfway between knowledge and devotion, wondering if he saw the dedication or if the purity and whisperings of his name were wasted, the kiss at the foot of the cross, the ashes marking my forehead. the serpent becoming preferable to ignorance and thoughtless ceremony, lessons feeling more and more like neglected bosoms and textbooks that taught nothing of use. maybe i'd get some insight on the other side. the snake liked my language back. it tightened through my own hands, strengthening my own will, my crucifix hitting my sternum on the way down. down to the grass making way for my skull, the dirt refusing. a longer free fall than the playground could offer anymore. i came back quietly with no stories to tell except of black stars and tingling lips. a bruised tailbone. i wrote about it in my pink locked diary and forgot.

i saw the same thing every time years after, though. every time those fingers made their way to my throat and held me suspended with one strong hand between two decisions, literally every ounce of trust that you'd let me watch flowers unfurl against black like they did at recess while you watched them bloom on my cheeks, stay long enough to visit saints, peer through stained glass, and bring me back just as speechless as the first time, learning nothing but dreaming new and faceless gods.

you waited in that garden, knew the proper names of all the flowers exploding while i smiled, whispering to them with forked tongue. and i knew them just as well but i liked to hear the way you pronounced them, so i listened to you define them and tell me what made each one grow, as if i didn't know.

i wanted to wear you, tensing present around my neck. broken hyoid, that secret crush reserved for you alone. the one closest to the only place roses climb in the dark; the cherry of my throat. to bring blood to my eyes to fill the hearts they contained, to stipple the landscape between my freckles with tiny red dianthus barbatus. more of me fighting to be yours.
the beauty of it is that your first is your last. some things can't be broken twice. i only wanted to marry once. i was going to create the eighth sacrament, somewhere after taking in the holy body and saying goodbye to your own. deeper than matrimony. past rotted satin.
i thought, in your grip and you in mine, of how many other ways i could tell you "violently" than with a broken voice.
and i did.
and i did.
and you did.

karen

hunger is her best friend. her confidante. her constant companion. she knows what lies next to bones intimately. she dreams about peeling this layer off in long razor straight strips and throwing it over her shoulder as one would discard a garter in a slow tease. the cushion gone. nothing left between her and the one she wants. the friction of sculpted calcium, the cringe and twinge of uncomfortable skin running the length of yours. "my costume is itchy," she whispers, and your hips bruise from getting personal with hers, that twin set of knives holding you hostage, "help me take it off."

you search for hidden zippers but take your time in the endeavor. after all, once you help her transform, this particular vessel will no longer respond to you. you'll be holding a pile of protein. a mess of muscles and mass. a meal rapidly speeding towards room temperature. one she would pass on.

that's why she starves. she's above it, the ugly need for the tangible. she's been craving the inedible. licking ghosts off of dream forks. she's collapsing into herself like a star.

she wants you to watch her implode.

you undress her and your hands have never been further from fumbling. a slip of material slides off her shoulder like curtains parting, the preview before the show. you pull this second layer over her head and drop it onto the floor, reaching around to the back of her, feeling the famine of her frail frame underneath your fingertips, the outcome of strictest self discipline evident in her sharp scapulas, reduction the result of reaching. her breath catches between her teeth, a little too big. her eyes sick and gazing sweetly and making more sense than scripture. you run a finger down her spine and find it, and tooth by slow tortuous tooth you part her trappings, opening her reverently like a favorite book you haven't read in ages. the urge to skin her, to violently skip ahead to the end stills your hand.

"please,"

the void brightens backwards. the dot her map has led her to is inverting, whispering the secret psalms of pitch black obscuring rainbows. every color shimmying into one as you rip her reality wider. she steps out of her skin as something else entirely, having become next to nothing, a student of lack so she can explode outwards. her ravenous heart stops wanting. forever changed, a few inked feathers fall.

richard chase alliteration

crazed and cadaverous, chase curbed his cannibalistic cravings by concocting curious cocktails composed of craftily captured creatures and coca-cola, constantly combating the continual crumbling of his coronaries and capillaries. 

highway 90 (mansfield pt. 2)

2 AM
and cherry brake lights you follow
hide in layers of white spectral haze
a foretelling of the next ground
you'll stand on
negotiate it, driver, and punch it
when you saw it flash danger too late
did broken light shear through your fingers
in flickering bands?
did you have time to fling your own
curse?
heart, a violent and sudden strawberry ghost
filters a cracked lollipop collide-a-scope
bitter candy shards splinter
twisted metal becoming a cupid's bow
that aims and lets you go

tumbling upwards past the shatter,
alice through the windshield glass
you became so much poetry that it took off
with the top of your head
spilling five languages and
numbers having nothing to do with
the tailor's tape or the bank roll
singing blue silver, singing better than you
a song of swift ribbons

"a spray of stars hit the screen", sweet jayne
mocking your collection of bruises
and even still the moon settles into those boasting
curves, tonight it's only interested in
those of your sclera
shining through your half open windows
beaming at you in the gravel
of one belonging to a dead man
whose coroner's modest cover finally exposed
only a little black boot
a striptease in reverse

it's too late to retract this hex
or crawl out of your problems and into
a dress
and slip into pink and a drink
no matter now how many
coats of fresh paint are
layered on the walls of your palace
that garish haunty hue still seeps through

first memory

first, the razor
a rite of passage
cut into my memory
fitting because its purpose was 
to give me shape
whisper that secret
my sisters hide behind closed doors
give me white lace not sewn as trim
on dresses for little dolls
i heard the cost is
some amount of blood

i know blood attracts teeth
and i get pinches on my cheeks

so i imitate those strokes
i'd glimpsed that smoothed their legs
and christ, did my shins spill scarlet
next to the cabinet of female curiosities
creating red polka dotted
snow white linoleum sharp
against the black grout i was
making fairy tales

she, wide hipped, sundressed,
laughing from the hall
her smile demoting me again to doll
silly girl, we'll need
a whole box of bandaids
crouching eye level to question
hum and staunch
and take the blade from my
chubby hand
eyes unreadable behind the giant
rose colored lenses of the decade

i don't know why, iris.
i blink and bleed
through the bandages