i learned a lesson on a saturday night in the bed of somebody i don’t talk to anymore.
the lights were a dance floor and the skin behind my skull trailed down my spine like arctic water. 

her heart was beating a song, and mine was beating a 128. 

that time i greened out at a childhood best friend’s house while watching the shining 

years of touching the space where my
heart sits, wayward, shriveled, and tracing my ribcage with the same fear of touching sin. now it feels as
divine as bone and flesh can be. sin has a sweetness, has a way of welcoming no other does. 

i kneel at the dyke altar

the inflammatory disease of the free
spirit bottled; ship in a bottle
i bother you the way growth
disturbs the balance of the concrete

self-imposed whirlpool

you can probably guess by now that my 
first boyfriend wasn’t really my first boyfriend
at all; more like the falcon’s first keeper 
a forest’s first fire. 

first boyfriend 

“I have to go get my masters. I haven’t even been in love yet,” Esther’s pleading to whoever is listening at precisely 4:56 AM. “Please let us be okay. Let it pass. We’ve done nothing wrong.”

faulkner street

a childhood room with four walls and a neatly made, pristine bed in the middle 
		attacks possible from all sides


a personal index of monsters from childhood to adulthood 

my hands do not slip and i spot myself and begin to fly. 
	the pure magic of dancing, of movement so fluid i begin to believe i’ve escaped my human vessel into the process of passing from gas to liquid to solid.


animal dance

the child has ripped its way out, curled around carnage


miscarriage

but when i sink to the floor, i still see blood. i still wish i was eaten more than 

halfway.

marrowbone & wild thing unfit for all this

we were girls together so that we could be so much more, you and i.

high-school girlcrushed 


                                                                                         i am a woman-thing, 

                                                                    and i am scared that my days are numbered. 

woman-thing

you have been loved thin, and i not loved enough

vampire

to feel the juice of forbidden fruit drip languidly down our chins
stick under our fingernails
and mindlessly suck the seeds from the skin with the core lodging our throats open for more
and why live
if not to devour?

del (she/he)

Selected work