by Halsey
and bluer than a Picasso
till the blood has left them.
I will kiss your head
and rub your shoulders
and bring you ease and ecstasy
till your foggy head stops ringing like a car alarm.
I will wipe every tear.
(I like everything about you,
even the things you give away.
Like tears
and laughs
and yawns
and lost eyelashes.)
I will be there when the sun comes up,
curled in your lap
shivering
rubbing my eyes and smiling softly.
I will listen to the same sad songs
over
and over
and over again
till they vibrate in my skull
when the volume ceases.
I love the sun for shining on your skin,
I love the wind for blowing through your hair,
I love the coffee for staining your teeth
and warming your palms in the morning.
I would protect you till the end of time.
I would lie down
in the middle of a tornado
and cover you.
LIGHTHOUSE
He was almost 7 feet tall,
with black oily hair
that stuck to his forehead in patches
like a Rorschach test when he’d sweat.
His bedroom was a dark, cavernous prison
at the bottom level of the house,
separate from the rest.
This granted him,
at first, privacy.
And, at the end, protection.
I used to love
being far away from everyone else in the house,
because it meant I could keep him to myself longer.
Keep him from being distracted.
But by the final days,
I cursed the distance
and would silently pray
that the earth would cave beneath us
and the bedroom addition
would grow closer to the main house
in a tangle of excavated tree roots and tectonic plates.
I silently prayed for an earthquake
so our guests could hear him scream.
He would stuff his nose with cocaine
for days on end
until the rims of his nostrils
were caked with white,
like cement,
and bleeding sores
leaking yellow-orange pus,
from him reopening the wounds
he had burnt into his airways.
He would pace the room in circles,
with his T-shirt sticking to him
in a cold sweat,
and cry.
A cry full of pain and loathing
that twisted his face
like pottery on an unmanned wheel.
He would punch himself in the head,
banging his fist
against his forehead
and temple
until his fingers
full of rings
left pictures on his skin,
and his knuckles burst open.
He would put his bleeding hand around my neck
and press me against the wall.
His eyes would flicker back to life
like a film projector malfunctioning
in a pitch-black cinema,
and before the title card ran,
he would stare
at the space between my eyebrows,
too cowardly to make eye contact,
and say,
“I’m going to fucking kill you.”
And I would believe him.
So I would take his hand
off of my neck gently,
and wrap my arms around his head
like I was cradling a newborn
and stroke his hair
and whisper that it would be okay
and again
he would cry
that Siren’s cry
like a warning to all ships at sea.
We’d resign into a damp bed,
and his knuckles would stick to the sheets
as the blood dried
and clotted
and scabbed
and I would lie awake as he slept
snoring through his coagulated nostrils.
I would stare at the ceiling,
too afraid to let a single tear escape
lest the subtle movement
be enough to wake him
from his docile state.
When he was sleeping,
he looked beautiful.
Like an old Hollywood star.
And with his eyes shut,
and the Siren scream no longer sounding off
from his slack mouth
in the master bedroom
detached from the home,
I became a lighthouse.
Dim glow beaming from my eyes,
a man in my arms,
kerosene running low in the tower.
Praying the gods would unleash their fury
and send waves so strong
they’d crash through the hills of California.
And the ground would collapse
and bury us both in the rubble.
THE PAINTER
My aunt had a tenant
who lived in a one-floor addition above her unit.
He had a fat red face and a heavy brow
and an accent that sent splinters underneath your fingernails.
He was a painter
who specialized in pointillism portraits of cherub boys
with Fuji-apple-red cheeks, dimples, and ivy leaves between their legs.
Hours of detail and perfectionism spent focusing his attention on every little inch of their baby skin and baby limbs.
My aunt hung one in her house that I would find myself staring at.
Half intrigued by his talent and other times to sit in the stillness of the stirring in my chest as if I were looking at something forbidden.
I dreamt about his studio often.
Sometimes the screen door would hang open and the smell of oil paints and turpentine and expensive ink pens would waft down the stairs.
On hot summer days I would lie in my tank top and shorts,
my tight curls tangling themselves like a frayed rug edge in a washing machine.
I would stretch across the carpet with cheap pastels and printer paper and draw girls.
Mostly faeries.
Naked and freckled with long straight flowing hair.
I drew what I wanted to be, and what was forbidden to me.
I wondered if all artists did the same.
I would lie there and the fragrance of his studio would travel beneath the door through the crack where the draft came through in the winter.
I was never allowed in the painter’s studio.
It was a dream that was separated from me by a dark staircase that bled into oblivion like a nightmare where you couldn’t move.
My eldest cousin strictly forbade me to enter the dark chasm.
I never saw him look the painter in the eye.
The staircase to the studio loomed like a stranger in a subway station.
It was a yawning fissure that I believed, if I could simply cross,
I would become a real artist too.
My family fought about the painter.
I would hide under the table in the spare room, while angry voices took the shape of shadows and bounced off the tile in the kitchen. I heard some strangers’ names.
We didn’t know much about the painter,
But we knew he had 3 children.
An older daughter named Rebecca who was born addicted to heroin, with longing coursing through veins that couldn’t recognize what was absent from her new life. Too young to understand why she had an erratic aching wound in her heart.
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We knew his other two children were about my age.
But they never came around.
One day I was playing in the yard alone.
Kicking pebbles with my Skechers and pacing between the broken basketball hoop and the fence that curtained my aunt’s dead-end road from a used-car lot, he called to me from the roof.
He was working in vanilla-ice-cream-colored dickies, covered in haphazard smears of color, and holding 2 dirty glasses of sweet tea, and invited me upstairs.
So with the conviction of a child exploring terrain formerly unavailable to her,
I accepted the invitation and began the approach up the stairs.
This would be it.
I would burst through the door and run my fingertips across the glossy tubes of oil, and feel the brush hairs separate and fan out across my palm, and I would unlock the secrets to becoming a real artist. Like the painter.
But artists love what is forbidden to them, a fact I learned too young; too early.
I don’t remember being in his studio.
It’s an empty cartridge in my memory. I just remember walking down the stairs like I was holding a basketball between my legs in a relay race, and crawling back onto my aunt’s carpet in the corner like a dying dog who didn’t want to be seen.
Years later I was a 15-year-old on Christmas vacation when he came downstairs to our unit to make a plate of old ham and cold mashed potatoes.
My aunt was a kind woman who always offered her leftovers.
My eldest cousin sat in an armchair across the room and I watched his eyes follow the painter’s journey to the microwave.
I saw the darkness of the staircase, and the emptiness of a memory erased in my cousin’s eyes. The same foot planted, firm stare I gave the painter when his back was turned.
My cousin and I had many things in common.
The same furrowed brow, the same short temper, charming gummy smile, and aversion to touch.
And in all of these things I could finally see the difference
between what is the blood and what is learned.
I knew my cousin had walked the same stairs, he had smelled the oil and touched the brushes, and now we both sat on an antique carpet, cursing the same thing the painter stole from us.
I looked up at the wall, at the little naked child made of tiny tiny dots still held captive behind a glass frame on my aunt’s wall,
and I wondered what the painter had stolen from that little boy too.
MIND THE GAP
Flying above the quaint little houses under Heathrow.
London looks dirty,
but I keep this epiphany to myself in the baggage claim.
I land to a red-faced drunk at an outdoor pub.
He swaggers with unwavering confidence.
The brewing tension of a street fight.
Each step is like broken glass exploding on cobblestone that has
seen quarrels centuries old.
Slated in nostalgic hubris.
A nation birthed the oldest child.
It’s too cold,
and too mean.
But poets,
they hate everything.
So I keep calm
And
FUCK OFF.
GUTS
I got this bad habit
where I don’t think before I speak.
I fall in love like every week.
I keep a pistol when I sleep
inside my mouth
so I don’t fight my tongue
for saying all these things,
like how I saw you in my dreams.
(I really did)
I’m getting bad at it.
So I just numb myself instead.
I’ll cut my hair and dye it red,
and hope you get it through your head
that I’m in love
and it’s bleeding through my skull,
but I’ve been hurt before
so I can’t tell you
that I
keep this image
in my mind
of you sleeping
late at night.
I count the lashes
on your eyes,
keep my legs
between your thighs.
I could never tell you,
even though I’d like to.
I swear this never happens.
You know I’ve got a way with words.
I’d put a million in a verse,
but still can’t bring myself
to face what I feel.
I’m scared of something real.
I should spit it out
and maybe get the guts to tell you.
LAUNDROMAT
My mother would round up my brother and me,
Laundry baskets on her hips,
Like the National Geographic portrait of a mother
Carrying water
And her babies
We would march foot by foot
in the scorching heat
to the Laundromat
At the bottom of the hill
Of the apartment cul-de-sac.
The hill was massive.
It would be slick with ice and snow in the winter
And the big kids would sled down it
On homemade toboggans
Made of cardboard boxes
And laundry baskets.
Little rocket ships
For the poor kids.
We’d dive to the bottom
and ricochet across the parking lot
where the hill opened up into lawless concrete and pavement.
The wind would slice our cheeks raw red like sushi.
And beautiful girls
with beautiful button noses
turned pink like peppermint candy
would cheer from the landing.
In the summer the hill wasn’t so charming.
My little brother is dragging his sneakers across the curb
nasty little thumbsucker
He used a pacifier till he was 5
And even as he slept,
his mouth would pucker and suck on nothing
Oedipus baby. Mama’s boy.
I spit mine out the first time someone tried to put it in my mouth
I wouldn’t be silenced
Infanticide!
We are marching
To the Laundromat.
We arrive and immediately
I run to a familiar friend.
A big black cracked leather couch
with yellow stuffing seeping from duct-taped holes.
It looks like a giant monster
in the dark corner under the decaying lights.
I stick my arm inside
And fear large teeth will bite it off at the elbow.
I imagine myself pulling out my arm
and it bleeding like a stick of salami.
The first time I ever saw a whole lot of blood
was when my babysitter Jessie
invited her friends over to my house
while my mother was at work.
She told me to shut my trap
and she’d let me watch any movie I wanted on TV.
I picked The Shawshank Redemption.
They sat outside the apartment complex
and 3 boys arrived and smoked cigarettes on the porch
One girl came inside.
She was bleeding between the legs.
Dripping in thick strips like the syrup
I used to make strawberry milk
She asked to borrow a pair of pants
I was half her size
I pictured her bleeding legs
and imagined my arm dripping with the same crimson.
I waved my pretend amputated stub around
screaming for my mother.
She didn’t turn around.
She threw our still-damp clothes in the basket
And we marched back up the hill.
THUMBELINA
I am so
thankful that your mouthful of 88 piano keys
charmed itself into my ear.
I am so lucky to have a handful of chocolate brown hair
in a bushel,
bunched up,
brushing my fingertips when you lie in my lap.
Your mouth slack and your pink lips parted ever so slightly.
Your rose-colored cheeks
and green eyes
and tan nose
and chestnut freckles
and blue-violet veins beneath the skin;
all the good colors of some angel
in a Renaissance painting.
Your eyelashes so soft and long
I close my eyes
and imagine them
brushing up and down the length of my body.
If only I could be so small
to lie in your eyelashes
as a hammock.
Swim in the whites of your eyes.
Dive off the Cupid’s bow of your lip.
Hang with two hands
from the corner of your smile
like Peter Pan from a clock tower.
Dance and splash
in the tiny brown puddles
of every single freckle.
Crawl into the lobe of your ear
and hide in the seashell cavern
where I can hear the ocean
and whisper it back to you.
Your face brings me all the joy of the entire world,
right to my bed.
Right to my hands.
Right in the breath like a tide in your chest.
STUDIO CITY
I can’t tell how to condense my life into 100 words
For a piece of paper
For someone to hold and have and abandon.
Really does a number on your identity.
It’s not hard. It just hurts.
Because it bursts out of me like hot lava.
I find a million dandelions blowing through my head
and they are beautiful
But when they come at you like one furious wave
(a few times a day)
They stick in your nose and eyes and ears
You explode from the inside out
Like a time lapse of a decaying animal.
I don’t want to walk around department stores
that smell like wax crayons
too bright
so everybody looks like a cartoon
Bleeding colors
And breaking the fourth wall
and I fucking hate parallel parking
the silence of Hollywood is deafening
and I will die if I keep eating every meal purchased from the store.
I feel like I’m made of plastic
I breathe and it doesn’t reach my lungs
I eat and I don’t taste
