I have an affinity for women screaming on musical tracks

Where does this come from?

From my mother’s mother?

From the rot placed in her womb?

Woe to the man

Who rises up

May he be cut down swift

And from my mother’s mother

I will use this inherited anger to tear,

His guts out

With my teeth

the water was glowing last night

we kicked it up and sat in it til our asses got cold

held your hand in the midnight waves

moon's gone, but that's alright

the four of us

cataclysmic occasionally socially anxious altogether dangerous messes

screaming when seaweed touched somebody's ankle

it's the kind of blue you only see in movies

tiny angry phytoplankton and algae

all lit up

my legs glittered in the dark like good fiction

rocks stubbed your toes

one of us sat up on the log, gnawing on the inside of their cheek,

afraid of the water

get in, come on,

get in, quick, look kick your foot

the water is glowing,

we don't have forever

i, the caged animal

no point of light

what fear a man like you

brings upon me

poor little lamb

baptized in rivers beyond understanding

always the wound and

never the shining bride

sanctified in rivers of violence

lord, bless this union, for this girl is only fourteen and may our bloodguilt wash out (for we have killed and called it a wedding)

oh, you’re so ill repentant

there in your cage

Give me that good poison,

the kind that cuts,

make my blood ferrous

may god fill my lips with ash

I am the crone

I am the daughter

I am the wife

I will be no man’s blood sacrifice.

i am trying to communicate to you the feeling of grief

i can tell you that we're roasting over god's firepit

and i am a stuck pig,

oozing oil everywhere

i can tell you that grief

is my cat pushing her paw out to be touched one last time through the bars of her carrier

and the sterile smell of euthanasia

i can tell you that grief

is the look on my father's face,

when he hears the word 'mother'

i can tell you that grief,

is when i catch my love enduring beyond existence

i want to grab you by the shoulders and direct you to a pit in the dirt and say, 'here, look, there is my grief. it's in this hole, right here.'

i want to show you

but grief is not a hole, or a sucking chest wound

grief is middling,

it is a piece of sidewalk with the water running through it

and thunder and lightning striking two miles away

i can tell you that grief

isn't all sadness

but more so,

absence

I wanted to be touched

The worst part about God reaching inside of you and rummaging around is that he won’t do it again.

Adam, the first man, understood this,

God prodding into his ribs for something to take.

Such violation—

The universe is touching you and you have no recourse—

But the worst part, isn’t that your organs are being parsed over like fruits—no, poor Adam, the worst part is the first time is the last time,

Lie to me, please,

Touch me and make me feel like a person.

I am in danger and I know it because I am counting carnations.

I am thinking of all the colors a flower can be, of crossbreeds, and animal crossing

I am lying in my sleeping bag with a flashlight in one hand and a knife in the other.

I know I am in danger because the sun is setting and there are sixteen strange men shrieking around me

And they’re drunk to all hell and twice as high and stalking around the tent

I am texting my best friend with one bar and the crescendo of a snapping heartbeat (they keep on shining their lights thru! / lord, lay me down to sleep like my brother and my father please, they both sleep so gently)

Because I am thinking of carnations, I am thinking of mantras

I am whispering to myself without words, move fast, move accurately,

be quiet, be still, that’s it, you are asleep, as far as they are concerned you are dead, you are the pink and red carnations over a grave that doesn’t exist at this elevation,

I am danger because half of them are buck naked and coked out and high on MDMA and civilization is four miles away in the deep downhill dark

I am watching their flashlights, three feet away, angry, ‘they’re taking up like four fucking miles of camping space’

The word for what they are doing is tormenting

They are pressing their hands against the tent, they are surrounding us with the bulk of them, they are rummaging through our things and they are whispering faintly, so close to me, they see me sitting and they are waiting for me to fall asleep, they are messing with my damp clothes outside, and they are shining their flashlights inside, and they are slurring and shouting and screaming

I am in danger because I am watching dancing shadows and I am just a girl with a knife and a flashlight and shoes outside

And carnations come in white and pink and red and yellow and sometimes purple

I am counting because there’s fuck else to do and we’re in a lake basin and they’re yelling so i’m listening to their echoing

I am placing names to voices—Chaz, Joshua, T-Bone—I am counting yards between the campsites behind us and 9 feet away from us

Move fast, move accurately,

I feel the fear in my teeth

I am counting

I am counting footsteps and people and I am counting campsites and wisping flashes of light and counting my phone battery at 21% and as each guy in the tent to the left drifts asleep

When you’re in enough danger, your body buzzes, your body buzzes and you don’t realize it,

you’re hijacked by impulses—

Sibling and father, now aware,

We’ve got one chance, be quiet, no light, don’t use any light, we’re surrounded by all sides,

Put your shoes on, no—not the flip flops, grab your sleeping bag, put your clothes on, no, don’t take your backpack, grab the car keys,

I’m not tying my shoes fast enough and why are they wet and i am shaking with fear and rage

I am pushing my brother forwards, down towards the lake,

I am thinking of the ground and the pine needles and carnations as we walk so carefully so quickly away

And we stumble like deer over driftwood and fallen logs

And we are in the dark, crawling over the lake like refugees, hoping, praying, that there will be no tripping

Don’t slip, walk carefully, walk slowly

We are moving fast now, we are on the other side of the lake and we are darting through trees,

We are moving fast because we have to

I am ducking beneath and I am used to the dark because there’s no choice not to be

Climbing up to the rock on the far side of the lake, closest to the island sitting in the center, what should’ve been our campsite to be, a place to see everything,

We are whispering

From up here we will surely see them coming

My phone is at 18% and I am sending GPS coordinates to my best friend and telling them that if I don’t contact them by 4 am to

CALL 911

I am crouching low and hiding behind a tree because there can be no light, we cannot let them see, we cannot let them see where we might be,

No light, no light, say it over to yourself until you feel it

I am in danger and I am clutching onto the thought of carnations

I am standing watch while my brother and father are sleeping

I will see them coming,

I will see their lights bouncing

And I will hear them moving

God knows they understand fuck all about subtlety

You reach a point of such quiet,

where you aren’t breathing, your lungs are moving and there’s oxygen reaching, but it’s soft and insistent

like summer rain or anger

I am seething and it’s so quiet I’m listening to individual ripples in the water

I am staring at the sky and the faint cloudy bands of the milky way, because it is dark but I still can see their dying light this far away

And the stars are beautiful and everything is cold and awful

I am aligning the stars with the horizon line,

when that one dips an hour has passed

look that one’s gone and that means it’s 1 am

go back to sleep, now,

I know the rocks and the dirt hurt, brother,

both of you go back to bed

The stars are falling

And I am watching

I will watch until the morning, I promise you,

I won’t let anything

bad happen.

Frog daughter,

you were so beautiful once

you are not allowed to be natural

nor are you allowed to be artificial

Oh poor tadpole baby,

baptized in rivers of convention before you were born

wondering “why aren’t i pretty”

“why don’t i look like the white girls on tv”

they put borax in the water and convinced you the poison was your fault

until it was a conviction,

until it was pure and unequivocal hatred

told you to “reclaim” your femininity

when you weren’t even aware you’d lost it

they took your skin and sold it back to you at 15% off

they stole your body and your beauty and marketed it back to you wholesale

they ranked you by mid to fuckable—porn category to fetish and now you can’t even exist—

Poor frog daughter,

always watched and never wanted

you were so beautiful once.

The most natural inclination in the world is to be upset because you want something.

I am upset at myself for going back to bad habits,

I am upset at myself for wanting to touch the stove burner a second time

I want the lemonade from six years ago and the sunlight when I was thirteen and everything I can’t have

What you want is fundamentally different from what you need

I am clutching at my chest with a racing heart and the sudden realization that I may die in my sleep and all I want to do is go back to when I was three (nevermind the bad parts or the black spots in memory)

And none of this mattered

I am upset at myself for chipping a tooth again

I am upset at myself for scraping my chin for the thousandth time

What I need is bactine, bandaids, and maybe therapy or maybe I should take up drinking or maybe I should consider learning

It is upsetting to find yourself wanting,

downright humiliating

Look at all this hunger,

whatever will you do with it?

You were born when all the alarms went off. Three days after, the power was slammed shut by an avalanche and we sat in the dark because propane was mighty expensive in ’05.

You were born from your crying mother, and like any good imitator, took after her and began screaming.

Your very first entry into this world was a howl.

You were born when snow was still on the ground, even though the crocuses were coming up. You were born, on the edge of nowhere and somewhere, caught between the juncture of the furthest edge of the world and modernity.

When they bundled you up, they bundled you tight, cause the winter, just like you, had a tendency to bite. You didn’t have your teeth yet, but we knew it, because, goddamn, was it in your lineage.

You were born in a bathtub. You were born drowning. You weren’t born dead and you weren’t born alive. You were born dying. You were born under a bad sign in a birthing center, ten minutes and ten thousand dollars from a hospital. You were new and perfect like a good exit wound. And you were new and perfect to hold, to cherish, to wrestle into the dirt, to toss into the snow, to cradle.

When we took you home to that trailer park and you slept in the car seat, we hefted you with one arm inside and laid you down to sleep on the couch with the radio played low. You slept through the snowstorm, the salmon killing, the crocuses blooming in the front yard, and the gunshots, and the car crashes, and the drunk neighbors.

And you slept through the avalanche, too.

Nothing bad has happened yet.

Everything bad has already happened.

For the first time in a long time, the world is calm

Yes, the waves are cold and scrutinizing and imperceptibly fast

But we can taste the mist,

The four of us

The coastline stretches on for miles

I take pictures of all of you, because I don’t know how else to love you

Two of us, wise beyond our years

Two of us, young and free

I stood in the saltwater waiting for you here

It was too cold to swim and I laughed when one of you forgot your shirt and wandering eyes followed you in confusion when it started to rain

We got wet anyways

Stripped down to my underwear in forty degree weather

Soaked jeans and sandpaper flip flops and

we’re all just children masquerading the grown—

listening to Jimi Hendrix on the ride home and talking about the election

The fog’s coming up on the edges of the world

But that’s okay, because, just for a moment, we’ll be here