Rush Out

I want words.
This way, I just bleed through.
There has only been
one conversation,
vein split at fifteen,
our aortas twinned.

Your finger waist wastes in me,
a wraith consumed,
my jaw blown by every flailing limb.
The hunger in your hands
crusts to my bones as barnacles to rock,
as lichens crust to spongy bark
and calcify.

Evenly we'll distribute saltines to geese,
shredded lettuce to the warring gulls.
The rest I rest with you.
We pour, drowsy,
into muddled blankets on the floor
and crack joints, join pelvises,
our bowls of noodles growing chill.

Anatomy of a Fish Hook

He taught me to fish. It fit:
His red fingertips stretched a net out from my palm's center,
shooting treble hooks to jostle amongst themselves in my gut,
a bladed amoeba punching pores into the acid membrane.

I snapped the twig into perfect fragments.

"Have you ever been molested?"
This, a question for clipboard forms,
the boiled Y/N of waiting room rape.
It trips from the throat of droning intake
without a space for adjectives or expletives,
falling in white sheets to muffle ligaments.
When he forced them out onto the library patio,
the words pushed apart our wicker rocking-chairs,
hung heavy in the afternoon.
A virgin cowering pink beneath a whore,
a child facing her first double-dog dare,
I felt the hooks glow.

Their mesenteric heat hovered in clouds between the pancakes
stacked to fatten our infrequent afternoons,
curdling the frost of my Vanilla Bean.
It cauterized patches of my stomach lining,
my fledgling conscience curled into a fetus crushed up
against the inside of my forehead
and coughed itself quietly to death.

I began to have trouble sleeping.
The phone's buzzing slid up my thighs
when scotch moved him to stutter about hugging,
wanting to start, being unable to stop.
I acted my fourteen years and let the euphemisms
glide into their proper slots.

When the bridge shook,
his hand on my back was tongue to flesh.
His wife's placid knife-eyes and the skin
that pimpled beneath her khakis
clipped the glances we strung out as monofilament
over fast-breaking blintzes.

In increments our language grew taut,
snapping in tandem with the flies knotted to their nylon lines.
I splintered into lucent scales.