grave letters ✓

08

paint a gruesome crime scene in the shrouded corner of the girl's bathroom- class of 98' with rotten lemon figs and blasphemous profanities- checkered shirts and four different personalities in your head, butting temples; you ache to drown the trauma with unlicensed prescriptions of oxycodone and chloric hallucinations in oversized bathtubs.

oh, irene, my six feet tall body and your seventeen pages soaked in violent rain- rendezvous with graveyard ghosts you introduced as your blood brothers while your fingers explored the glittered veins along the honeycombs on my hips. my knotted nerves tethered around your decaying canines- spitting venom; you were a child of the moon- i called you moon child: it was a sickness, deep in your lilac bones providing a broken home for the tumor cells dancing on my ribs.

chant 99 names of god and one for you- cut the blue flesh off of my scarred thighs and through the crook of my hammering neck to feed your berserk bloodlust, only because on monday mornings, you climbed on to the metallic tables in the cafeteria that creaked a little too loud and preached about quid pro quo and its bewildering wonders.

nice eyes but they lied- stealing glances in the cerulean hallways and stealing kisses underneath the ancient staircases bedazzled with chewing gums from my mama's class of 77'.

friends with benefits but we were never friends, irene- 'cause once you love somebody, you can never be just friends.

sex with no strings but your strings asphyxiated my blemished lungs; so tight that chrysanthemums bloomed from my ears and the daily nosebleeds involuntarily watered them enough for the poisoned waters to overflow from your oversized bathtub and drown every petal in my green garden till i wailed from my papa's balcony with no silk to cover my beaten breasts.

we loved to suffer- foolish teenagers with grunge aesthetics, caught in the euphoric side effects of high school and all its melancholic-glory that we never quite cared enough to fasten the seatbelts in your cousin gary's old trailer.

sneak outs and make-outs, pretentious declarations of 'love' and jumping over your daddy's white picket fence- dig my fingernails into your bareback and licking cocaine stains along the eyelids of those that dared to daydream and abandon the beauty of haunting nightmares to forget the bloody loneliness slowly tearing our bodies apart.

shove my nicotine tongue down your vodka-induced throat and whisper- right person, wrong time.