poems from my heart and I
I kiss my heart’s cold face until she cries and is warm from that feeling. She is as beautiful and grotesque as me but we haven’t always talked. My heart is messy w emotion and she grows her teeth back one day at a time just like I need her to. Mostly we have an understanding but sometimes I catch her in corners w a nail file, mouth gaping as she sharpens the canines. I ask her what she fears most and my heart just shrugs. She plays aloof wearing a leather jacket, kicks gravel until my feet are swollen. This is the evolution of my emotional body as only she and I know it. Her teeth will shed, they will grow back through my gums, and we both will wake, then we both will die; it’s happened thousands of times.
My heart reads a famous rapist’s non-apology apology letter for the 4th time this week. She puts our Ipad down and looks at me square in the face: “All your heroes are rapists.” She dislodges herself from my chest and exits the room. She gets mad when I feverishly touch myself to bad men and their bad art and bad lives but I can’t always help it. Complacency settles itself in my chest, where my heart just left; it is easy to live without her sometimes. It is easy to live as a human shell, it is easy to let a man rape you and not realize it is rape for 7 years.
The skin of my heart
is so thin
that when I press my face
into her body
I enter the heart realm
and see
all the hearts
that exist in my heart.
Each red hand is braided tightly,
muscle clumps bruting
against her containment
sewn to the wall with steel
and ribbon, they all wear crowns.
She cannot let them out, this is just
schoolgirl fun, this is just
keeping the community safe
this is just
humane catharsis.
My heart hoards these hearts
I think
out of love.
Hearts who have known her,
gifted deep gazes, dug into us
like wolves
burying their own shit
to see what sprouts.
She pats my head in her lap
unknowing I can see through,
how she leaks,
how she pumps the life of tigers
loves them precious
like a bloodthirsty lamb.
My heart and I stay up all night talking about my brother. I ask her if that’s when she learned to use our body to make boys feel better. I rephrase the question once I see her reaction: “Is this when you learned to love in spite of pain?” Her hand is small in mine; we were both so young once.
My heart has demons
and I have sex with them.
I find them on pornhub and dwelling
inside boring men; she doesn’t understand
why I rip her open to pour this black
into our vessel,
that girls have needs and one of them
is to be destroyed.
If I were to remove myself from this skin
I think she could see that I’m a demon, too.
I owe her this honesty, but it’s hard.
Sometimes I want to be found out. I whisper
into the particles,
breath dancing in this dark air:
as many as my angels there are leech like things
deeply addicted to my marrow.
