i. My tits are getting smaller.
ii. If you don't know what it is to be 56 hours without sleep in a daisy field of war torn sleepwalkers, clutching a young goose to your side, convinced with brine blanketed sailors rope reddening your gums that the sausage fat flies buzzing holes in your cheeks and planting their larvae in your ears is the raw definition of love, then you don't know what it is to be a girl.
iii. My clothes are falling off me like witches off of their broomsticks. Waning with the skeletal crescent moon, I crouched behind Orion and drew a shooting star with it and killed the dinosaurs in one fell swoop. They're getting smaller. My honey swollen girlhood spiraling down the kitchen sink. The water bugs feasting on it like city bound men.
iv. All she wanted was a friend, what a pity, what a shame. What a South Dakota basket case, what a goddamn waste of breath.
v. I should've made an anthem from that flatline. I should've ended up on the MISSING flier with a pushpin in my forehead, a cautionary tale and a dare all at once. The urban legend standing like a waterlogged scarecrow between two pairs of young hips. the reason for your vomit in the gutter, and your little brother whimpering not knowing how to help you out of this. A psych ward hallucination climbing your walls with my porcelain head screwed on backwards, just that girl from your high school who killed herself. I should've just stayed that way, sipping graveyard nettle tea with a corpse bride and my grandpa in the cemetery where we lay to rest.
vi. a knee knocking sense of fight turned my cotton afterlife inside out. My heart. Alive and kicking and thrashing like a fish inside the dishwasher. I was supposed to break my neck on a bus bench when I fell from that rain cloud. Now I'm just a girl with wings too small to take me anywhere but a freak show.
vii. There are brambles in my best socks, broken lantern oil spreading between my cold toes. Isn't this how hypothermia sets in? Heart beat like a frightened rabbit, then just kind of numb. I almost died once, and sure, I thank my lucky stars the upstream current didn't want me, the chlorox didn't love me back. I wasn't ready then. But this is now. And I left the milk out and it's getting sour, it is attracting flies.
viii. There's a witch in the woods I think I have words for.
ix. She climbs the fat bellied sky with nothing but her teeth and sanity as you barely outrun that seasonal depression everybody's talking about. Happy? Sad. Or something in the middle. Like when you read me the letter you were going to send to your mother in Heaven. Like the bike ride distance between our houses. Like the magnolian summer storms we hid from under a firefly infested pillow fort. Our chalk drawings washed away, our knees black with lighting stings.
x. there is no such thing as me and you. only a prickly sensation, and then pulling out the thorn. the whistling sound of my mother calling me home for supper.
xi. You let go of my hand by morning.
