I remember childhood as the dirt on my feet and how my gold anklets jingled when I ran across the street. The red strings tied around my wrists, the first apartment we grew up in. Summers full of bug bites and melted ice cream. Sleeping parents and car alarms. I want to give that to someone. Continue reading
He asks if the roar of the engine is loud and I want to say like the belly of a slouching beast, because it’s not all false, but instead I say how close we come to the sun. His hand spans my back in slow circles, and he tells me again to open it. And I say, I tried, it wasn’t a success.
Kissing him, there’s an urgency, and the feeling that if I don’t leave the house now, it’ll burn down around us.
Continue reading
Dante come to life
in ripped thumbnail blood fresh from a circuit
around the lightless insides of my skin
at six quarts a minute; mostly all me
and a bit of something not very nice.
Continue reading
In touching we opened a door we could not close and did not want to. I said sleep in my bed
but I meant tonight not every night still there she was every night I just kept sinking to the bottom like a stone
Continue reading
If ever there came a moment you wanted someone to tell you to stay, to unpack, to quash any lingering doubts, it is now. But of course these moments only happen in films, the earnest entreaties sputtered out over a sorrowful score. You anticipate his response in that dramatized scenario: “I don’t want that kind of power over anyone else.” Continue reading
But in September, when all the tourists have left town, the beach at night exudes the shuddery, gut-strung pleasure of abandoned space.
Not that it’s entirely deserted. Down here we loiter with intent.
Continue reading
i know you would like that:
alien sand packed thick in my throat
or salt sucking the teeth out my mouth.
don’t matter, huh? you just want me undone,
any one of nature’s big legged rickshaw pullers
can get the glory of dragging my undersong through to silent finish.
Continue reading
I’m building a nest to give birth to nothing in.
I’m ripping fur from my chest like rabbits do.
I’m down with down. I’m your dream girl but only if you stay up all night thinking about other stuff.
Continue reading
Yet if there is a rip in the fabric of the universe, as some scientists speculate, a tear through which time and space can dissolve into nothing, it is also a gateway to the body of a woman who birthed all these planets looking like heads freed from their bodies. Continue reading
She climbed the stairs. She found her ledge, that hiding spot. That safety. She sat down not knowing what to do next, but preparing for something. Considering. Brain space tangled up in the logic of if she should do this. She was no longer safe in her life, could no longer find that space of solace.
She walked up five flights to find it.
Continue reading
The James Franco Review 