you are beautiful.

the emo in me has officially died.

the king of carrot flowers

your mom would stick a fork right into daddy's shoulder
and dad would throw the garbage all across the floor
as we would lay and learn what each other's bodies were for

and this is the room one afternoon i knew i could love you
and from above you how i sank into your soul
into that secret place where no one dares to go

and your mom would drink until she was no longer speaking
and dad would dream of all the different ways to die
each one a little more than he could dare to try

you're the reason i live.

i was inspired enough to actually write something meaningful,
but now that i've stopped crying i have no idea what was going on in my head.

easing myself: life is so easy

and i am ready.

Sleep may cause turbulence.

I love trying to pet my cat
when he's too busy keeping clean
so his eyes widen and ignore me
whilst searching
for something in the room that could offer
a decent excuse in avoiding my touch.

What I wrote on my bedsheet:
ink smells like
rotten mango skin
& this cotton knows all the
puke underneath

Lightening keeps flashing in front of my eyes. Maybe it's a hidden camera. Maybe a dolphin just got electrocuted.

this is not everything we've got so far

we were opening our limbs out to
be vulnerable for
what's falling from the sky.
we were rotating and gliding like poison does
in my glass.

deers spy on us when we're sinking in dusty couches
just to make sure we don't break each other's spines.

this artificial fruit juice tastes like deer jerky,
my hair is getting too long,
i should saw it off with safety scissors
or a rusty chair leg.

when i smile, my eyes ripen and die
like bright balloon plums on overdrive
(it's cyclical and anti-cosmetic).
but when my lips are stained red, my eyes explode
in a crazy spinning way
with a liveliness that makeup can't ever afford.

sometimes all you need to do is
touch at the chunky bile stains on your school clothes
so you can finally feel safe.

the power inside you raced against your ages,
your ages of growth,
cracking through your blood and skin
begging to come out
and be something more.

you look like a stripped tree of your own muscles and bones,
(not anyone else's)
sitting behind a fully-stocked hardware store,
with rings daily disturbed
but still trying to grow.

stop calling yourself names.

sometimes we drive through dangers
that we can't see before&after.
they're not made of uptight harelips,
cornered children
or apple wastes,
but close.

i know what i'm talking about, but probably won't
6 years from now.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

Zeus liberated all living things from an egg. Ex ovo omnia. The white flew up to become the sky, the yolk descended into earth. And on Greek Easter, we still play the egg-cracking game. Jimmy Papanikolas holds his egg out, passive, as Chapter Eleven rams his egg against it. Always only one egg cracks. "I win!" shouts Chapter Eleven. Now Milton selects an egg from the bowl. "This looks like a good one. Built like a Brinks truck." He holds it out. Chapter Eleven prepares to ram it. But before anything happens, my mother taps my father on the back. She has a thermometer in her mouth.

As dinner dishes are cleared from the table downstairs, my parents ascend hand in hand to their bedroom. As Desdemona cracks her egg against Lefty's, my parents shuck off a strict minimum of clothing. As Sourmelina, back from New Mexico for the holidays, plays the egg game with Mrs. Watson, my father lets out a small groan, rolls sideways off my mother, and declares, "That should do it."

The bedroom grows still. Inside my mother, a billion sperm swim upstream, males in the lead. They carry not only instructions about eye color, height, nose shape, enzyme production, microphage resistance, but a story, too. Against a black background they swim, a long white silken thread spinning itself out. The thread began on a day two hundred and fifty years ago, when the biology gods, for their own amusement, monkeyed with a gene on a baby's fifth chromosome. That baby passed the mutation on to her son, who passed it on to his two daughters, who passed it on to three of their children (my great-great-greats, etc.), until finally it ended up in the bodies of my grandparents. Hitching a ride, the gene descended a mountain and left a village behind. It got trapped in a burning city and escaped, speaking bad French. Crossing the ocean, it faked a romance, circled a ship's deck, and made love in a lifeboat. It had its braids cut off. It took a train to Detroit and moved into a house on Hurlbut; it consulted dream books and opened an underground speakeasy; it got a job at Temple No. 1 . . . And then the gene moved on again, into new bodies . . . it joined the Boy Scouts and painted its toenails red; it played "Begin the Beguine" out the back window; it went off the war and stayed at home, watching newsreels; it took an entrance exam; posed like the movie magazines; received a death sentence and made a deal with St. Christopher; it dated a future priest and broke off an engagement; it was saved by a bosun's chair . . . always moving ahead, rushing along, only a few more curves left in the track now, Annapolis and a submarine chaser . . . until the biology gods knew this was their time, this was what they'd been waiting for, and as a spoon swung and a yia yia worried, my destiny fell into place . . . On March 20, 1954, Chapter Eleven arrived and the biology gods shook their heads, nope, sorry . . . But there was still time, everything was in place, the roller coaster was in free fall and there was no stopping it now, my father was seeing visions of little girls and my mother was praying to a Christ Pantocrator she didn't entirely believe in, until finally - right this minute! - on Greek Easter, 1959, it's about the happen. The gene is about to meet its twin.

As sperm meets egg, I feel a jolt. There's a loud sound, a sonic boom as my world cracks. I feel myself shift, already losing bits of my prenatal omniscience, tumbling toward the blank slate of personhood. (With the shred of all-knowingness I have left, I see my grandfather, Lefty Stephanides, on the night of my birth nine months from now, turning a demitasse cup upside down on a saucer. I see his coffee grounds forming a sign as pain explodes in his temple and he topples to the floor.) Again the sperm rams my capsule; and I realize I can't put it off any longer. The lease on my terrific little apartment is finally up and I’m being evicted. So I raise one fist (male-typically) and begin to beat on the walls of my eggshell until it cracks. Then, slippery as a yolk, I dive headfirst into the world.

"I'm sorry, little baby girl," my mother said in bed, touching her belly and already speaking to me. "I wanted it to be more romantic."