Much like Rome, the City of San Francisco 

does not allow burials inside city walls

—The laws of priests and real estate investors

are funny things.

But both are built up 

over a mountain of refuse.

Slipping every year further

 into their own garbage, and the sea

creeps up to meet them.

I thought of deep breaths

like a sweet tooth, 

something cool and filling 

to give as a gift

when you have smoked yourself 

soft and greedy.

It turns out

I just have asthma.

Much like Rome, the roads to San Francisco 

dotted with the dead, 

are one long breath,

one wish rent,

how much air

can we hold, for bodies

when we cannot spare the space?

We are sinking.

We are sinking I and can’t quite

put my finger on where the hypocrisy

meets the necropoles meets 

the water bill and bottles

my hair in the shower drain

grey blue and black

for the trash bins up and up,

the arguments I have with my dad

about how much recycling 

gets recycled,

who is lying to us 

and whose fault is that.

When I finally run out of air

my sister takes me 

to the pet cemetery

at Crissy Field:

These graves don’t 

need much space. 

Today I learned

that our nails grow

at the same rate 

the continents move,

except that I’m always 

biting them down.

I learned that landfills

are for slowing decomp,

that older trash makes 

more stable ground.

And we discover death in stages.

is the most ridiculous question 

I could possibly ask myself 

and I have been waiting

for someone to ask me.

So I’m glad you did, and I’m glad I laughed. 

I’m glad it was cold and my feet hurt

and when we kissed later, it meant

less than I thought it would because

the icy rain on the sidewalk

turned to snow in your bed and tonight,

tonight you can be my younger self.

And I want to tell you— 

No, I want to shake you and scream,

of course it wasn’t.

But we both know that would be a lie, 

which is not to say that it was

(worth it, that is)

but is just to say that I have never cared 

for science fiction and even if I could

open a worm hole through time

(or whatever the fuck)

and climb through to the universe

where none of this had ever happened,

hunt down myself in that universe, 

tally up our hurts and put them on the scale

even then I would not know, because 

there is no me

in that world.

Don’t tell any therapists I said this

but of course

of course

there is no me without them.

I’m sorry,

but its true.

This person would not exist,

not as i am,

without them.

“Was it worth it” implies that there is a world

where I cut my losses,

got out while I could, 

made a different choice when I saw this: 

exactly this,

down the road. 

where I, (the mother)

Did not look at myself (the child) and say,

Well this is one mistake

she just has to make.

But then, I would never smell 

like vanilla and cloves. 

—because, of course, I never did:

I started wearing vanilla on my wrists after 

they said that, and what do cloves even smell like? —

In this world she (the child) would have grown up

by herself, would smell of something completely different, 

and she would be a stranger to me.

Which is why, when I dye my hair black

so that they don’t wont recognize me 

in the dim light across a crowded bar,

of course

I don’t recognize myself either. 

And, I guess,

it is why, I’ll answer

No.

It isn't worth it.

And yes, I know you will love her anyway. 

Sleep Starts

In the transitional stage 

between waking and sleeping,

muscles will often tense up at random

as they sink into the stillness of your body.

This, according to my doctor,

is perfectly normal.

For a long time, though, 

I thought it was only you:

your korous limbs draped

over me like kindling

clutching for a fractured moment,

bringing me into your sleeping world.

Yours is the only sleeping self that I have known.

This, in the same way that kisses taste like your mouth,

And I don’t know what teeth-marks would look like 

if they weren’t slightly crooked.

Like I would never know how to twine my fingers

with hands that didn’t have our matching scars.

I am twenty years old, and I still don’t know

how to be touched. I hold my breath 

at a stranger’s handshake, when I can’t escape

a hug, I take inventory of my skin, hide 

inside myself and count the seconds

till my release and, so I don’t know why

then, I can only settle back into my breath 

when it floats up around me in

the circle of your arms. 

Why your hands on my skin are the soft, tangled exception.

why you can feel my headache in your hands and why,

even though every cell  in our bodies has replaced itself 

in the time that I have loved you—

We have shed our skins and grown new selves—

when we touch on the edges of sleep, your arm

slides under the curve in my waist I always 

say I carved out 

just for you.

the first time i cried 

in front of my first boyfriend

my mom went out

and bought me plan b.

i took it anyway.

swallowed

it like a key i was hiding

from myself, 

like cayenne vitamins

and a finger down my throat.

like I could possibly make

myself emptier. 

it ravaged my virgin

body, of course.

for nights, i was sick

and bleeding and

she wrapped me

in a blanket

far away from what

had not yet happened.

and I cried for 

killing the skinny girl

who still lived on in spite

the doctor made me look at my BMI today and that is what I have chosen to stress out about instead of climate change. 

david attenborough gives me just another couple decades, but I'm still worried about wrinkling my eyes when I apply eyeliner and, besides that, I am ugly right here and now. 

between that and my neurology i was sure i would not get to the point of translating my major into a job but i’ve still never gotten a b and then there’s my search history: 

how much does it cost to be committed to a psychiatric hospital

does my insurance cover those socks they give you

 when you’re a danger to yourself or others 

so i try to go vegan, of course, because of my carbon footprint and the meat industry makes my toes curl but you know maybe i won’t eat today at all because the world is ending and it won’t hurry up already so maybe some chicken nuggets are okay. there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

i won't have kids but the temperature keeps rising because no one cares if we skip school on fridays but most importantly someone took the scale out of the trash and now I sleep with it under my pillow

She loves the spiders. 

It is easy to see when you watch

her long veined hands

across the piano,

the click of her nails on the keys

louder in my mind than the notes.

And so the corners of our house 

are softened by silver string

and dozens of glittering eyes watching

everything as they spin above and below.

because spiders are the weavers, of course—

the mothers, the healers, living in my dust.

Swaddling specks in silver

caught merciless in the light of my window,

the first thing I see in the morning. 

graceful and delicate and harder than heights

they are the many-legged multitaskers.

Their skeleton inside out

to make room for something soft

I imagine the inside of a spider

looks like my mother’s car. 

Cushioned by a sea of string,

yarn padding beneath the pedals,

softening the edges with the mess 

of something maybe needed.

So that when it gets dark, we

can drape tapestries over the windows

to trap the warmth of our words 

tangled in the loom.

If you please-

Sacrifice me to the God of Op-Ed articles and

scatter my ashes in a soap box

back in the stock room of some 

on campus bar. 

Read my eulogy through a megaphone

in a shrill, strident shriek. 

At the service, I sure hope

you play the top-40 radio,

and slurp refreshments

 in single use plastics, 

just to see if I will wake up 

and scoff.

Self Portrait

I want to eat paint. Not 

yellow— 

pink. And not

to be brighter inside 

but for that lips

and fingers moment of something 

sticky loosening the rusty

hinge between letters and meaning,

to dig my tongue in the bubble gum ghast

of summer on my skin.

like vanilla and cloves—

something sharp, alcoholic

dabbed behind my ears like

dirt under my fingernails

soft hair, cracked knuckles and too many showers:

like a letter to myself and the oxygen

I take up, the smell

of a place where fires burn and die, a

voice through the telephone wire

unrecognizable on the answering machine,

as if it still has to coil

around

and around 

and around 

my fingers.