more elegies for a small town

1

loneliness engulfs my thirtieth summer / I lose many things under the summer heat: a half inch of my cervix / my whimsy, and any desire for it / my grandmother / my friends / my sense of belonging / I abandon the pretense of inclusion  / life lacks meaning, enrichment / I circle my cage / slam my body against the glass / I lash out, dangerous / to anyone who gets too close / ignore the warning signs and double barriers / and you will lose a limb / I will sink my teeth into everything / mauling / I want to know how it feels / to be messy / to play the victim / stick my tongue out at turned backs / and cry bitch in response / I am feral / I think I’m about to break

2

life as a living ghost: always the hostess, never a bridesmaid. I exist only in theory, a memory of a memory you might remember someday. I fill my table as if doing so will keep me distracted from my loneliness. how else would I survive? life as a living ghost: I am giving away each part of myself, until I am gone.

3

the last three people to wrong me / to hurl insults from slurred tongues / wake up sober in jail cells / poetic karma for my own sentence / in the prison of their addictions / she says, you don’t fucking know me / and I am one part laughter, three parts rage, shaken / and poured over ice / because I know a city of strangers all too well / I know who does pills and who does coke and who does heroin / who is divorcing and who is cheating and who is stealing / and I knew she was a problem / thirteen months before assault charges and rehab / the totaled car that wasn’t hers / I hold this knowledge with my sadness / with my anger / I hold the guilt and shame of people who do not know my name 

4

hope isn’t soft here. it grows in jagged shards of broken beer bottles. I have the conscience of a wildfire;  a destructive, desolate thing. I’ve forgotten the taste of empathy. at the end of it all, I am empty. I no longer know if I want to be whole, nor if I can be.

5

I want to be soft / worthy of love / kind / I am too much, I know this / I can feel it / like watching a drink fall from an edge in slow motion / contents spilling up and over the rim / the moment it hits the ground / the ripple in the glass at contact before shattering / this is my grief / my joy / my rage / my love / I can feel it but I cannot stop it / the fracturing / and it is too much, I know this / this is what I have become here / a monster / or maybe this is who I always was / a mess of a girl / a scavenger drawn to the bloody carcass  / feasting on chaos / where do I belong / if not here? and with you / you with your own ghosts of flesh and liquor / haunting you and haunting me / there’s blood in my poetry again / and you do not deny me that small sharpness