It Keeps Me Alive That Anybody Could Touch Anybody

At the end of my end, I found a piece of something that used to belong to me and it used to belong to us. For all the loved ones my mother prayed over, with lips to flesh, or by a flashing ambulance light and a prayer passed down through the ether, I pass down a whispered letter to God about me. Talk to me. In my chest there is a pocket I turn to when my lips are empty. I want to scratch my skin so hard I am scared I’ll bleed. I would like for some people to be proud of me. I want people to love me tenderly. Talk to me. They don’t know what it is like to be your own undertaker and come back up from the ground. But my neighbor has taken a few down, and loved a few, and held many of himself. That night when we made photographs together in the darkroom I was sure I was going to be taken advantage of but it didn’t happen Lay a finger on me and let me know our traumas have nothing to do with each other. That is how I will trace tattoos on your skin, fertile, like when I see you from across the lawn and you walk over softly without saying anything and kiss me without smiling once. Your skin is real in the mist of the morning, and it is real in the heat of the noon sun, and when I start to bury myself I remember that

I would never ever leave you, you don’t ever leave me. I won’t let you leave. I grew up naming my daughter my strength, and found out that in that song he is just talking about money. Three refund checks later and I still have bipolar disorder. I look for that prayer and scratch open my skin on accident. It is like my apocalypses. How poetic, how poetic of me. Some mornings I leave the house without an earring or a prayer. I don’t know what it means for my life, but sometimes caressing an empty earlobe makes me feel fucked up. There sometimes isn’t anything else to hang onto besides dangling earrings. Hold my hand, please without thinking about it or letting go. I become a gospel song. I take a handful of pomegranate from the sky. My tendrils tell secrets to each other. If all the love I had was here, maybe this would be beautiful to me. I would taste it in my own mouth first. I taste love in my own gotdamn mouth first. Half the love I found in your house is fake, so cut the shit and don’t call me back anymore I’ll call myself back. My mother will leave a prayer in my voicemail. In high school I worked with flowers and thought about dying. It is the wrong story to tell in a personal statement for an internship. Sometimes the more raw I am, the more people love me, until I talk about the joyless fucking and dirt. Who will carry these bricks? You will carry these bricks, and a rose with me.