wanekalily

isn’t it curious how your fingers fit perfectly between each of my sclerous ribs, or how your breath mimics mine with belated accuracy                         (count each breath and you’ll run out of fingers.) don’t you remember the fairytales?                           (and they both lived happily ever after, until after ran out and the monogamy became as non-existent as  the magic.) you were never one for myths. with discerning eyes, you’d plant kisses along the ridges of my back across my shoulders and the hollow beneath my jaw, questioning my pastel skin and every involuntary blink. “I am not a myth.”

If I wrote you a lullaby with verses of moonlit, fogged breath and a chorus of heartbeats- would you fall asleep with our melody in your palms? I lie awake at night and watch traffic lights outside my window shout RED into the peace quiet and occasional hazy rev of traffic. I lie awake and shiver through layers and wish to silent stars it wasn’t winter, wish the nighttime cool wouldn’t paint quite so many goose bumps on my skin and make my eyelids so cold. I lie awake at night and night-dream without sleep- about you and all your eyelashes and beautiful wordings. I like the way your collarbone lies horizontally beneath your neck,

I couldn’t bring myself to bury her. I couldn’t bring myself to empty the ground of dirt and of earthworms and of the spindly weed roots, and fill in the ochre gap with her body. Her coffee-cream fur held her tiny skeleton from falling out when they hit her. I try not to think of miniature beat-less hearts and mute lungs. I never saw her dead, but I can imagine. They found her on the median strip. Breathless and still by the endless whoosh of traffic. In my mind I see Mum’s face; I see her heart throbbing at her feet and her cradling the dog, like a precious baby to her chest. I see the love flowing down her withered cheeks

sometimes I think I’m just a mess of badly drawn lines. I’m just scrawled veins beneath paper rough skin, I wear poorly sketched scars on my thighs [skin deep red pen lines] and even my smile is lop-sided- but he never seemed to notice. my skin [spread like thick icing over my skeleton] is a monotonous pattern of pores, a stretch of the world the sun never kissed. I can’t see the beauty in multitudes of freckles and chipped fingernails- but he does. ‘why do you love me?’ ‘you make me happy.’ I never could figure out just how. was it my illegible love notes, or the tiny hearts I drew into his bare back wi

Love wasn’t in the air the night you unbuttoned my shirt and kissed my skin. No, love definitely wasn’t in the air the night we spent in heat of moments, sweating and tumbling and fumbling on your father’s bed. It was anywhere but there. Does love go on vacation? I ponder and make fleshy butterflies from my outstretched fingers. Probably. I can’t remember much but I can remember the beginning. The burn of acid bleeding and gushing past my tongue and down my throat. The noises and then your silence. The clumsiness and then the awkward kisses. You had a garden of dark hair growing from your scalp and dirt eyes. You had a

I have a monster living underneath my bed. He’s made up of burnt frog skin, white-red cobweb veined eyes and a collection of missing pebble teeth. Sometimes we play scrabble. (The first time he was just a mechanical hum beneath the bowing wooden planks, he was just a faint smell of green and he was just a hot cloud of fog around my lips. It’s the wind, it’s the wind, I breathed. Then he breathed back, heavy and loud and monster-like; AM NOT.) He always spoke in capitals; MONSTERS ARE MUCH TOO SCARY FOR LOWER-CASED LETTERS, he informed me one night under pink covers. I shined the flashlight into his eyes until they changed co

you make me sick. you make my stomach fold in on itself and press out against the lining of my flesh. you put lumps in my throat and you tie strings to my tear glands and tug until the world is just a panoply of blurred lines, hazy colour and bokeh. you made me do this.  you put the knife in my fingers and you told me to tear, you said you would care if i hurt myself like this. you said you’d care if i opened my flesh up for you like a gift of blood and flesh and tissue. but you never really did. i like being small, i like being the blue eyed girl sitting amidst background noise, rubber band arms holding the necks of her legs together.

i Hear my joints dislocate, coming apart at the notion of sunlight. It falls and it settles in pictures of loveliness, golden tree branches and hints of leaves; of autumn, of spring. I am so tall in the water. My legs are never-ending, crooked lines of peachskin- watching my fingers draw out ripples until they strain and buckle and fall into the cool. I’ll touch my toes and loop my figure and I’ll make giant ripples, abhorring fallen leaves and sending shivers of blue through his legs. It’s a faded crimson red holding my breasts, tugging my hips and leaving my ribcage bare to the current. It’s smudged lipstick and smear

She’s the little girl with flaxen curls at four pm flouncing down her driveway with her hands buried in her pockets, lips pressed out like she’s whistling. You’ll watch her out your window, with your tea lukewarm on the sill, and splutter a cough; fogging up the glass just enough to miss her smile. You saw her once, twice eating petals off the roses in your garden. You’ve forgotten how to converse with children, you cussed between the wheezing and she stared right past like you were simply a knurled twig catching the wind in its leaves. One morning you found her; purple stockings, blush mittens and a head of sunlight cur

Look at her; she’s a porcelain doll with never-ending milk legs all stapled to the bed, thirteen years young with forty-eight years suffocating her figure. He’s right up to her baby lips, offering cigarette breath and grinding his stubble on her cheeks, it reminds her of gravel and she closes her eyelids as it falls across her neck, inhaling the cloud of dust. The curtains are draped across the sky, dried blood red casting shadows she can’t tell the ends of. A dim flicker of a light and maybe a filter of moonshine illuminate the crevasses of his eyelids, forehead and awry mouth. His skin tastes of sweat and earth. She was wit