Trust issues got me rummaging through your kitchen drawers
Counting how many knives you have to stab in my back
Do you keep them in clutch?
Snug and tight in the back pocket of the worn-out jeans you stole from your moms closet?
Like the way you keep me back there?
Feeling like your side chick
The side dish
The pit stop on a road trip rather than the destination
Trust issues got me snooping through the rooms of your life
Opening your personal drawers and boxes
Searching every inch like a state health inspector to protect the current state of my mental health
Too afraid to go into your open arms because of the knives you might hold
“I’m not a hugger,” I say
But it’s the trust issues talking
Telling me not to mistake light refracting off a knife for the glimmer of your smile
Trust issues sits next to me during our conversations
I’ve named her Marissa
She’s priss, prim
Snappy and snobby
With long silky brown hair tied into a tight ponytail which grasps her skin and pulls it back
She smells like lavish lavender
Like inherited wealth
Her voice sounds like a baby’s safety blanket
Whispering in my ear
Not to feed into your kindness because your jaws do bite
That will bite
Not to get to close because your hands are claws that do snatch
That will snatch
Telling me to beware of the jubjub bird like I’m Alice
She thinks I’m weak and helpless falling down a rabbit hole
Thinks my noodle arms don’t stand a chance against your ulterior motives
Whatever sinister ideas you sharpen your knives with
And sometimes she’s right
She must be a mother
Foreseeing an accident before it even happens
Sometimes she catches me before the fall
Before my eyes become leaking pipes, flooding my face, draining my energy
Before my delicate heart feels like a bowling ball has been dropped on it
Sometimes she catches the knife before the cut before the stab
But other times her voice isn’t loud enough in the back of my head
Or maybe she loses cell reception
And I fall
Stumbling down weak and helpless like Alice down the rabbit hole
But she’s always there to mend the scrapes on my knees
Kiss the bruises on my elbows
Sew the stab in my back, back together
Always there to tell me “I told you so” like the Virgo she is
She sticks all my broken pieces back together
Like the make-up after a break-up, it is never seamless
She always leaves the scars bare and vulnerable
Each one of them can spell out belligerence
I’m a broken vase glued back together you can run your fingers through all the cracks between my pieces
Mother Marissa says they’re a reminder to check the kitchen for knives for the day she’s not around to remind me herself
If Beale Street could talk, it wouldn’t
Midnight mischiefs in Memphis motel rooms
Crossed your heart
Hoped to die
Stuck your pinky out
Promised you wouldn’t tell a soul
Promised you’d collect my secrets and never put them on display
Never decorate the shelves of your stories with them as if they were little knick knacks
And I believed you
Sold you my secrets in exchange for your promises
Only found out they were counterfeit when I couldn’t deposit them
Only found out when I opened my phone and a little bird tweeted in my ear
Said it heard you running your mouth all over town
And to think you were insecure about your weight
Midnight mischiefs in Memphis motel rooms
Where I let you play my strings after you were done playing in the buzzing bars of Beale Street
Hum a sweet melody with every chord struck
Left in awe by the lyrics you whispered in my ear
You knew how to play me in more ways than one
Knew I’m a sucker for words
Knew I’d fall for your counterfeit promises
Thought I was dancing with an angel while obliviously striking deals with the devil with every sway of my hip
Didn’t know how far you’d fallen until I felt the burning aftermath of your touch
Felt the whispers of all those you told crawl up my spine like spiders
Felt the disbelief drag me down as if the hands of gravity were tugging on my ankles
Guess my kiss doesn’t belong in a tool box since it couldn’t screw together your loose lips
If Beale Street could talk, it wouldn’t
It wouldn’t be like you
Wouldn’t let all that it’s seen
All the secrets it’s heard whispering through it’s buildings
Spill through its mouth like blood in a horror movie
If Beale Street could talk, it’s lips would be tight
Despite what you might think goes on under its promiscuous lights
It wouldn’t utter a word about the heart I spilled onto the pages of my notebook stained by my coffee of poetry in the corner of its cafe
Wouldn’t tell it’s friends about our moments in Memphis
Our midnight mischiefs in Memphis motel rooms
It wouldn’t laugh at how James Baldwin didn’t script our story
At how I’m not Tish and you’re not Fonny and this
This isn’t love
I still sit listening to the music from buzzing bars on Beale street
I’m a puppet to the melody it moves me in ways you could never
It’s during these midnight moments I’m buzzing bars when I realize that Beale street is talking
Just not gossiping
Memories of us is a sleep paralysis demon in the dark corner of my room
It’s 3 AM and I can’t sleep
I’m a restless whirlpool tangled in my sheets
And the demon makes it’s way over in graceful malice
Dressed in dirty looks and snarky comments
Which smells like bad news
Like heartbreak
Like that sinking feeling at the bottom of your stomach
It reeks like rubbing alcohol
Slithers into bed with me
Spoons me in his scales
Slime and grime collide
Confine me
He makes me swallow my cries like broccoli
Like “Don’t make me go over there and feed you myself”
Like “chew...and now swallow”
“I said swallow”
And I do
Complied to abide
They burn going down my throat like raw lemonade
That tastes like our last argument
Like the end of our relationship
He whispers our memories in my ear like bedtime stories
In between salacious sighs
I can feel his slithery snakey tongue tickle my terrified tragus
Remembering hurts
My brain is on fire
Yet I can’t seem to burn our memories
Can’t seem to turn them into ash
To ash dust to dust
Because you’re not dead to me
Yet
I bet you think this poem is about you
And I wish I could look into your crystallized snake eyes
And tell you it isn’t
Not this one but the other one
Not both
Not all three
Not all four
Trying to disguise the fact that I miss you with every diss
Wish I could say that I don’t have a whole portion of my notebook dedicated to you
Just to dig a grave to bury you in
Because I’m smarter than to waste my time on you again
Because late at night when I can’t sleep I remember
I remember that before I hated you
Before I hated you, you knew how to make me laugh
How I thought I made a friend for life
How I could peel back all my layers and stand in nude vulnerability in front of you
And I almost throw up my swallowed cries
Almost let every single memory flood out of my body in a tsunami of tears
Every poem is a lit match
Burning away my feelings
The memories
The good times
The day the thought of you began to piss me off
The sound of your voice
The syllables in your name
The image of your face
Every poem is burning sage
Ridding my mind of your evil spirits
Of the psycho you really are
Of the way you made me feel worthless
Like loose change thrown into wishing wells
Like loose change, you don’t bother to pick up when it falls on the floor
Like loose change that gets stepped on in the city that never sleeps
Smothered by the dirt and germs underneath people’s feet
I lay cocooned in pain
The demon fades away with every flickering droop of my eyelids
Knowing his mission is complete
As I pray for sleep to take me away
In hopes that maybe I will have forgotten all about you by morning
I am in love
I know, sounds like a cliche
17
Naive and inexperienced
What do I know?
What do I know?
Well, let me tell you
I fell when I was six years old
In a first grade classroom
With a thick number 2 pencil and the beige paper with solid red and blue lines and a dotted blue line in between
That’s when it started
But if we’re being real
It started six years prior
Started when I was born and brought out into the world
A world of words
Words which I birth
Words which I foster
Words which consume me
That flow through my body like a river
Emptying out into the ocean of the world
Through the delta that is my pen
Snippets of my mind
Messages in a bottle
Waiting to be washed ashore
Waiting to be discovered
Some of which float out of my mouth
Others which are still hiding in the sands of my google drive
Not seen or known of by any other soul
Whether they’ll be discovered or not
I write them anyway
Because you see
Have you ever felt like you were born to do something?
I was born to write
To create stories and poems
To scuba dive into emotions
To eat, live, breathe, love and produce
Words
Words which have me mad about song lyrics
Which wake me up at 7:30 on a Saturday morning
Because to me there is no better way to spend a Saturday morning than at a writing workshop
Why? Because it’s true what they say
Love really does make you do crazy things
And boy, have I become insane
You know when they say that the goal isn't to live forever but to create something that will?
Words are what I'll leave behind when I'm gone
Like hidden treasure
So when I'm gone I won't ever really be gone
Part of me will remain
My words will forever live on
I may seem quiet on the outside
I assure you, I’m not
There is more than what meets the eye
While I am many things
I am first and foremost a writer
Give me a pen and it’s on guard
I fell when I was six years old
My oh my, did I fall hard
Fell hard for words
My first true love
I’m surprised I haven’t suffered a heart attack yet
Not because of age or an unhealthy diet
But because I collect people in my heart who are like gluten and cholesterol
Clogging up my arteries
They’ve infested the rooms of my heart like rowdy party kids at an airbnb
But I gave them the keys and let them stay
Locking my heart with the key of my pen
An attempt to forget them
Forget the girls who criticize boys for playing games when they’re the games masters
Not the of board kind or the video kind
Holding all the right pieces to play with your mind
While keeping their plastic poker face intact
Playing their get out of jail free card each time
They stick knives in backs like they’re a character in Clue
Murdering somebody’s character
Forget the boys who aren’t worthy enough to be called a prince
But swagger like they’ve got class
Like they’ve got charm
Acting like they could sweep you off your feet with every unsolicited slide into your DMs
And they could until their arms grow tired and their legs grow weak and they drop you like loose change
On the street ready to be eagerly picked up by somebody else whose eyes are keen enough to spot your shining worth
As these boys drive off into the sunset on their sweet ride
Their white horse that sounds like dollar signs every time it roars
To the next girl in the next kingdom in the next DM
Mirror mirror on the wall who’s the biggest player of them all
Forget the game masters, the players, the way they made me feel like a pawn
I place them in the casket of my poetry
Set them in the grave I saved just for them in the pages of my notebook
Bury them in my words
Trying to forget them
The caveat of the art is that the heart
Never forgets
So that's where they stay
The people they used to be living within me
Clogging up my arteries
Giving me heartburn every time I look back on our down fall
The way our game ended
Picking on the scabs of the past
The people they used to be living with me
Bleeding through every time I pick the scab so hard it comes off
Going through old photos and videos
Replaying the good times
Reading through our messages
Reminiscing in a day dream of all the missed sunsets on white horses I could’ve had
Game masters and players
Living within me
Living with me
And when the time comes dying with me
Or maybe they won’t die at all
Still breathing in the poems I left behind
In the pictures and messages I hoard
Collecting people and moments of the past
The past that I carry around with me
Not like baggage but like life lessons
See the thing is
No two of these people are the same
Because thanks to them I know not to make the same mistake twice
13 years
13 years in the Broward County Public School system
13 years spent going in and out of classrooms going through my predictable mundane suburban routine
13 years starting at the clock waiting for 13 years to go by with every stroke of the minute hand
13 years of marriage to education
There was no courtship forced into the system before I could comprehend what school was
13 years has worn me down like an old tire
I am an old tire
Been traveling this road called "school" for 13 years
This road of waking up at 6 every morning to spend 7 hours at a desk peddling my brain
Creating calluses on my hands essay after essay on topics I don't care about
Not a mathlete but 6 AM plus 7 school hours equals 13
13 years of filling my notebooks with doodles and poetry rather than notes and math problems
Never learning how to solve my own problems
That's the problem
Being physically present for every single lesson but mentally I've "left the chat"
I wonder if I was ever really motivated or if it was just the excitement of being new
Of being a seedling
Waiting 13 years to sprout
Didn't know how long 13 years actually is
Didn't even start counting down until the 7th grade
When I first started bickering with my education the way loveless couples do
Felt my brain and my energy being dragged like dead weight through mud
We were once a happy couple
The early years of our relationship were like running down a hill
Smooth sailing bliss and butterflies
But as the years went by it began to feel like going up a hill on a bike
My legs n0ot strong enough to peddle so hard
My stamina nonexistent
I gradually lost interest
Fell out of the honeymoon stage with school as the butterflies in my stomach flew away
Even though my lovey-dovey feelings have faded
I could never break up with my education
13 may be unlucky but I have been so lucky to have had the opportunity to spend 13 years getting an education
So in desks, I will sit
Staying in my head
Staring at clocks
Waiting until the very last minute to start an assignment
With every minute that goes by I can feel my diploma in my hands
Hear my heels walk across the stage
Feel the end of 13 years
Knowing I'll be getting a divorce in 4
For now, I'm keeping the vow I made 13 years ago
The writer in me is a pimp
Ready and eager to exploit you and the way you made me feel
To throw so much shade your way you’ll never see the light of day again
Only slivers of once golden bliss creeping out from under shabby motel room doors
After you’re stripped down naked and vulnerable in front of the audience I sold you to
However the sensible girl in me
The one who just wants to delete your name from her brain
And pretend that you were last night’s drunken mistake that “didn’t happen”
Does not want to waste these words on a girl she used to know
Although I know you don’t deserve it I’ll always choose to pimp you out
Like I did to others in the past
Like I’ll do to others in the future
Because it writes my poetry
Regardless of who deserves my words
So here it goes, here’s your poem
Erasing you is an empty corkboard
It is me burning the pictures that once adorned it
Despite my mother’s objections
NO
Those words are Cinderella’s lost slipper and my pain is her step sister’s foot too big to squeeze into it so I decided on something like this...
Starting with the lies that hid behind your hazel eyes
Baggage you disguised by sensationalized damage
You call it depression
I call it invention of your indiscretion
A cry for attention in attempt to pry affection
You have mastered manipulation
Captured sophistication
And I somehow never saw it coming
Your games mind-numbing
Never knew you were so cunning
My calmness succumbing
Happiness stolen
Pain swollen
You’re an evil omen woven into my loathsome poem of a memory
From friend to frenemy to enemy all due to treachery
You cleverly put my trust into jeopardy
All that we discussed misconstrued
The truth skewed
Now I’m rude and crude as we feud
You put me in a bad mood
Left me with a bitter taste in my mouth whenever I speak your name
Couldn’t tame the blame covering me in unexpected shame
Now I know that was the aim of your claim
What’d you have to gain?
London bridges is a children’s rhyme
It’s only when they grow up do they commit the crime
and burn them down
Like a clown
You lack in bravery
Exposing my “fakery”
Is this real enough for you now?
Surprise I’m Muhammad Ali
KAPOW
It was a weak punch on your part to get involved with a poet
and you know it
I never understood what it meant when people say somebody is difficult to love
But when I don’t know when or how to shut up
And keep talking, the shovel of my words dig the hole of the argument deeper and deeper
Deep enough to bury my dignity in regrettable sentences formed by the particles of a poor choice of words
Topped with a headstone that says “here lies a girl who likes to argue”
And when you don’t speak to me for what feels like days on end afterward
Your deafening silence leaves me feeling like
I’m
Difficult to
Love
It’s mid August and moisture and life are bleak in the desert
My grandmother sits in her armchair that binds her slowly wilting
Her petals falling one by one
Her empty eyes stare at the TV while my father stares at her
His sharp features and poker face demeanor are kneaded away like they’re clay
His eyes are soft and if eyes really are a window into the soul then I see a stray dog when he looks at her
A stray dog who is not used to living on the streets yet and is still trying to figure out how to survive
He chews on the scraps of her weak and barely uttered words
Roaming lost through the streets of hospice care in the place he once called home still in search for home
Sniffing the sidewalks for the scent of anything familiar
But home has faded away like new car smell
The kitchen counter no longer a place for challah dough or Thanksgiving meals or Passover meals or any meals for that matter
But now a place to store medicine with names none of us can pronounce
Pain killer after pain killer after pain killer
Which can only seem to numb the pain on my grandma’s sore and weak body
But cannot numb my father’s hurt
Cannot numb my grandmother’s mental awareness that all she can do is vegetate
And wait until the day there is a knock on the door but when my grandfather opens it it won’t be the hospice nurse but the Grim Reaper ready to take 56 years of his life away
He has no mercy
But then again neither does cancer
No mercy for my grandmother
Who’s lived all these years just to become Taylor Swift’s 2008 VMA speech cut short by cancer dressed up like a rapper except there is no Beyoncé more deserving of life
No mercy for my grandfather
Who’s become atlas carrying the weight of my grandmother’s care, her every need on his shoulders
Despite his bad knee
No mercy for my father
A stray dog who life has thrown in the kennel
Laid him out on a cutting board like a serial killer prepping his kill
Life starts to cut him slowly
As the pain of losing his mother
The woman who bore him
The woman who raised him
Starts to sink in
Life leaves him with his stray dog cries
Bleeding loss and lost
It’s mid October and water is still bleak in the desert
Life ironically is plentiful
My stray dog father collects rocks like it’s wood for a campfire
They spill out of his hands as he tries to grasp on to the object that is the closest he’ll ever be to his mother again
And I lack the ability to comfort such a stray
Lack the resources to take him in as my own
All I can do is feel sorry
I’d rather feel the wrath of his angry bark than see him weep in silence
It’s a weird feeling
Visiting a graveyard
Knowing that the person you once knew is rotting beneath your feet
She was here a second ago
I swear I’m not lying
She was here a second ago
I turned by back
And it was stabbed
And like that she was gone
When I look in the mirror sometimes I see all the different girls I have been
Their ghosts fogging up the glass
Writing like little girls in the mirror reminders of who they were
Urging me not to be as naive
I look down and see my skin begin to shed
The girl who once had patience is making her departure from my body
From my soul
The girl who wanted to make this relationship work as bad as a poor man wants to win the lottery
Tomorrow when I wake up and go another day without talking to you
I won’t feel like I’ve reached an all time low
Because the girl who felt that way will be a fossil in my history
With her departure
My patience is lost
My desperate desire to keep you strapped in my life as if you were in a toddler’s car seat
Is lost
The girl who wanted to be your friend
Lost
All the tears I have shed over you while counting all the different ways you break up with me in a day
Evaporated
I will be someone new
She’ll still be naive
But no so much to text you constantly panhandling for your friendship
She will not beg
That girl is lost for good
She was here a second ago
I swear I’m not lying
She was here a second ago
I turned by back
And it was stabbed
And like that she was gone
My grandma was an orchid of a woman
Possessing the refined elegance of princesses in stories
Of her intricate embroidery that adorned the walls of her home
Elegant even when she wasn't in bloom
Withering with dulling colors
But beautiful nonetheless
A matriarch with wings of steel
But calm and patient under the warmth of golden firelight
Letting her delicate fine china fingers guide me through the steps of beginner embroidery
A hobby in which I gained more memories from than skill or interest
An orchid of a woman kept alive through orchids which overcrowd the dining room windowsill
Orchids that are sprinkled from the dinning room to the front lawn
As if she had never stepped foot out of our house
Out of our lives
I caught myself wondering when childhood ended
Perhaps it was the first day of middle school when I first heard swear words buzz through lips into my ears like bees collecting pollen
Like a lost foreigner trying to navigate through foregein lands
Met with forgein urban dictionary tongues
Lands I'd soon know well enough to call my own
Tongues that'd take over mine and rub off on me like I was a scratch off lottery ticket
Scratching of the sweet residue of purity and elementary school
The prim middle class utopia I grew up in
Or perhaps the end came before that
Came the day I unknowingly picked up my barbies for the last time to carry out reality tv worthy storylines of my imagination
Set them down when I was done and let the days turn into weeks turn into months turn into years turn into forever
I became a mother who abandoned her children, creations of her own, and never touched them again
Becoming more interested in fandoms of books, bands, and boys
They say to cherish your youth
Your childhood
But the fine print on the bottom of that advice is that children are too young to realize that their time of blissful ignorant innocence is magical
Too young to realize that they should savor every fleeting second like the potato chip crumbs at the bottom of the bag
Too young to realize that "when I grow up" will turn from distant dreams into reality faster than they can form their curious questions
Perhaps the end came on my thirteenth birthday
When I made way for a new era marking the end of an old one
The year in which my body decided that I would no longer be a child
Sculpting my childish psychicalities into that of a woman
Before I was even old enough to call myself a woman
Childhood ended somewhere between then and now
And I didn't even notice
Distracted by my eagerness for years to pass me by like I was waiting for the bus on the side of a busy street
The bus that would take me to adulthood
The wheels on the bus go round and round spinning childhood dreams of "when I grow up"
"When I grow up"
When I grow up I'm going to be...wanting this lost time back