I grew up in the town that received the first distress signal saying the Titanic was going down. It was the only thing we were ever renowned for. In fact, we prided ourselves on our failure to save the sinking, which is maybe part of the reason I prided myself on drinking my first fifth of whiskey at twelve years old. It’s cold where I come from. I learned to drown young.
Like Pac-Man, she swallows my ghosts.
I ask you about being happy the same way my high school friends ask me about being gay. ‘So what do you people do exactly? I mean, how do you do it?
You are the best thing that has every happened to you.
Science just proved that an atom can exist in two places at one time and I believe people are not always only at the scene of their crimes. Even the worst of us, I trust, are often also somewhere holy, somewhere kind.
I imagine what the flower wanted to say to the first human trying to name half its petals love me nots: “No. That is not how anything grows.
I stopped calling myself a pacifist when I heard Gandhi told women they should not physically fight off their rapists. I believe there is such a thing as a nonviolent fist.
We have cried so hard our tears have left scars on our cheekbones.
Next time I will know it’s normal to have a hard time breathing when you shake the dust. We make everything so complicated. Sometimes, the message in the bottle is “Don’t drink so much – there’s too much Novocaine in our wisdom teeth already.
I think of happy when I think of you.
I keep remembering being fifteen at Disneyland wearing my best friend’s hoodie like it was my boyfriend’s class ring. How many years it took me just to touch her face. How many years I sent praying my heart could play dead ‘til the threat was gone. ‘Til the world changed. ‘Til history was history.
All living is storm chasing. Every good heart has lost its roof. Let the walls collapse at your feet. Scream, ‘Timber,’ when they ask how you are. ‘Fine’ is the suckiest word. It is the opposite of ’here.
I swear to god if I had an Adam’s apple, I’d tell her to peel it and take a bite.
When the truth isn’t hopeful, the telling of it is.
When the first responders entered the Pulse Nightclub after the massacre in Orlando, they walked through the horrific scene of bodies and called out, “If you’re alive, raise your hand.” I was sweeping in a hotel in the midwest at the time but I imagine in that exact moment my hand twitched in my sleep – some unconscious part of me aware, that I had a pulse. That I was alive.
Any feminist who has ever taken the high road will tell you the high road gets backed up and sometimes we need to take a detour straight through the belly of uncensored rage.
I decided I was going to read only social justice poetry through my entire set. But when I was making my set list it hit me that the simple existence of the word ‘she’ in my love poem made it a political poem. Isn’t that criminal? Isn’t it criminal that love is a political thing? That the heart is a political thing?
I know David argued with the chisel. I know he said, ‘Make me softer.
Patriarchy taught me how to take a punch better than I could take a compliment.
I suppose I love this life, in spire of my clenched fist.