haunted.

this time i did make it to the graveyard. bound in belts, that buckle tightened to the highest notch, that pull of capture singing its own strain of hallelujah as my fingers numbed with an overflow of blood, pushed to the point of escape, purple reading as black in the moonlight. you killed me wearing a bracelet fashioned from my panties (what the hell fun is rape when there’s no layers to make work of?) that you were unaware of until it dropped to your forearm, rapt as it was around your bicep rambo style. fitting, since you wielded a knife as you collected souvenirs of battle, cutting straps away with the discipline of a warrior. that purposeful face trained with untold lengths of time planning, that countenance reflecting that one chromosome you are away from destroyer. oh, but you destroyed me. i’ll never be the same. my permanent limp displaying unapologetically as i make my way through the gates with a nethercat winding around my mud hemmed ankles to warm them, threatening to trip me as i clamber to find you. the one that came when it heard me scratching at the earth to be let out. cats understand wanting always to be on the other side of a closed door.

holding the duct tape i wore, making it kiss your face with the glue that eclipsed my entire mouth, still wet from smothered screams. i track you through the window as you try to absorb your carefully catalogued collection through your senses, a smell here, a taste there. a bite. you wipe the sweat of your fever with fragmented fabric. scraps of the girl i was you cut, you tore, you kept. i’d leave ghosts of my breath on your pane if i had any, heart and lungs stilled forever under your expert hand, those teeth that did more than graze. trying to dig a tunnel to the center of me, pushing, digging until you fancied you’d  grasp your own hands on the other side, that need to burrow all the way through. crazy to claim the core, like an instinctive run to home base chased by your own desire.

tag, you’re it. once upon a time we collapsed dizzy with that chase. now i’m after you but no one’s laughing. i crawled out of the oubliette you laid me in somewhat less than lovingly, brought back with that rage indistinguishable from desire. to keep you with me always, forever and past our inscribed assigned tombstones, mud and root tangles, yawning pits of earth. just another rabbithole. my fingernails, caked with the grave, play murder ballads on the glass unheard over your current focus on my charms. i watch you breathe in layers that were closest to me when you ground the smell of my own confused longing into each thread of the fabric with a hand that practiced on your assured own for months prior, praying and plotting, then playing and prodding. i see you whispering new litanies, worshipping the material confines of that particular prize threatening to disintegrate as you stretch it to its limits as you did my flesh, the means to a release from that tangible trap.

now i’m back, and i’m taking you to the grave. your lady in white pitching in peculiar patterns across your lawn, itching to find an opening to get to you, and rap rap rapping at your chamber door. the all familiar call silenced by a slip of the lock, a swing of rusty hinges creaking on tracks like the inner map that brought me back, lips bruised blue by oxygen neglect, body twisted with misuse, a discarded ragdoll that came back to play. you reach out and pluck dead autumn leaves from my hair, lick your fingertip and wipe away dirt from my cheek, realize that this time the dried blood tunnels too deep to spit clean being that it belongs to me. and so do you. i stare out stern from a face you dared attempt to bury, close the door behind me and shove your face in what you’ve done.

pink paper pinafore.

the kiss is the beginning of cannibalism. issei sagawa cited that quote from georges bataille in an interview i read. "i feel like it stems from the same instincts of wanting to taste the other. although i guess this is just my personal opinion," he said. you're not alone, issei. in the dream i let the monster out. was so caught up in the pleasure of tasting you that i didn't realize what i was doing. i drew back, my hand flew to my mouth, eyes big. and they met yours, and they were reflecting the same sleepy delirium back at me that i'd felt moments before. they said yes, and yes, and yes.

you have an uncanny way with kisses. again my blood fell into crimson glitter. the heat seized me and threatened to make off with the top of my skull. the roof of the dollhouse carried off in a cherry wave. a delicious fever washing out reason. hanging on everything you said, entire conversations with no words, answers to every query. in turn i could listen for hours, seeking out your pulse with the palm of my hand, holding tight and following the hints you laid out in your breathing.

the whole thing started, in the dream, desperate to catch your tongue gently with my teeth so i could pull it all the way into my mouth and suck the taste off of it. pushing the back of your head. urging you ever closer, insisting compliance in lost languages.

karen carpenter's last pop tart (alliteration)

shamefully salivating and shirking sandwiches, the skeletal seventies superstar starves slowly and subsequently sings a swan song, shrugging servitude to sublunary sustenance.

overlook

Let's trade off. You would attempt to pick locks with my discarded bobby pins and I would fracture the door with an axe. We could pretend Wendy was the real killer in The Shining and I'd come at it from her angle (such angles! brunette, eyes a little too big for her face, other worldliness that shouldn't quite work, but goodness, it does for you). Except I wouldn't bludgeon you with it (or croquet mallets, for that matter), you'd just get crushed by your own inability to focus on anything else. Instead you'd write the same sentence over and over again on my tongue. All play and no work when Wendy emerges from under your writing desk, announcing her presence by way of teeth. Your typewriter topples and discarded alphabet letters clang in reverse, writing senseless poetry. I wonder what beauty the ribbon spelled out on accident when the machine hit the floor, reams of paper upset into their own blizzard. In place of mad key strokes, the marks of your intentions and the imprints of your imagination would bloom in purple and blue ink on the blank sheet of pale skin right in the places you want to see your thoughts appear, sliding the page to the indentions where you want to start whole paragraphs, repeating the idea indefinitely, ending with purposeful, sometimes prayerful punctuations.

She wouldn't be so easy to read, hiding keys (the one to the haunted room and typewriter keys.. where the fuck did my L go? You can't even start your sentence without it) and walking backwards through snowy labyrinths, kicking the fresh fall over her own dead giveaways. You'd only be allowed to enter that room when she dropped the chain into your palm that said No. 237, and spend your time confused by patterns in the shifting carpeting blocking you in, the print you push her face into suddenly turning inwards and enveloping you in parentheses as you slowly lose it, snowbound prisoner, to a fever that has nothing at all to do with cabins, but hallways you get turned around in and maybe more than a little bit of blood.

weiße hexe

I can't wait for it to snow.

I can't wait to confuse white ground with horizon, red cheeked and dizzy under dead branches whispering boreal spells that Spring, crouching in wait and listening, later crying rain and cursing thunder, possesses zero hope to decipher. To regard night sky reflecting snow with the eerie reflective glow of perpetual teasing dark a dying sun would torture a codependent planet with while the tenants scurried to think up some other source of warmth, planning virgin space flights, forced to the brink. A sky more like purple graveyard haze than any cemetery on the Eve of All Saints in history. A sky confusing the pineal glands of poets. Cold lit expanse and a language few speak, winter scarring with its big empty, assuring no one leaves their houses so you can stand in the middle of the street, reclaiming it from cars that would on any other day swerve to avoid greeting you. You can pretend it's the apocalypse while your ears get filled with the ice age.

Exactly the quiet i'm always chasing.

all ears

Everything that she speaks comes out jewels and flowers. Keep fucking talking, I say. Her eyes grow wide at the profanity. We giggle as she recites prose and rubies clatter into corners, utters nonsense that turn into pearls. Tries her tongue at french and awkwardly annunciates diamonds. Recipe cards turn into violets. Passages from the classics into roses, articles of erotica into orchids, beatnik poetry into daisies, spell book selections become black poppies. She giggles gardenias, laughs until she cries chrysanthemums. I lay at her feet and roll in riches, sit up and amethysts and opals come unstuck from my skin, rolling under the couch.

"But it's a curse!" she exclaims, and that sets off fresh rounds of laughter and falling percussive treasure punctuated by hyacinth hiccups and crystal clears of the throat.

"It could be worse," I whisper, and snakes slither from the nest of my chest.

beneath the habit

Show me on the doll where the Spirit touched you.