emsoileau

all these years later i keep remembering: realizing i said yes not because i even understood what it meant or what i was asking for, but because i didn't know no was an option. i was fucked up, so i said yes, more, again; you were fucked up, so you kept taking. it has been nineteen years since the first time and all i've learned in that long stretch is that yes means nothing and i don't want this is a country i can't conceive of. you will never know how many yeses i have not meant because of you, and i will never know what you would have done had i said no-- except hurt me worse, because it was yet another way life had denied you. i gue

these days life can be contained in the plastic bowl of the safest piece of stemaware i own. it swims in the rosy sea, tapping at the roundness, wondering when it can surface. i curl myself into awkward shapes trying to find a hole to let it out into but i can't find one. i am too large, the darkness too expansive.  we don't have room. i contain only enough depth, lately, for depressing songs i can't bring myself to sing anymore despite the pressure i know i'd release ideas uselessly aspiring to fruition they won't see, urges canceled with the click of invisible mice resting against my right hand because my wrists hurt too much to press

i'll never forgive myself at fourteen and sixteen for not being a hothouse bloom. my nails are dirty and as bloodstained now as they were then and the taste of that earth reminds me how i once thought i would grow-- thought i was a rose, thorned and vivid furled-- complicated. thought i was something like an ugly duckling: destined to bloom into something uglier and more complex, like all my favorite poems. i thought someday i could make someone hurt, like i did. instead, i grew up. i did not bloom. i merely gorged on dead leaves and stale mulch til i was swollen with desperation to become, broken nails scrabbling at the roots of bigger t

what doesn’t kill you is biding its time. dear butterfly: isn’t it ironic, heartbreaker that you were, that all this time when your mother clung to you in her bed and yours when your brother made you angry & the boys knocked knocked knocked     and your fists knocked knocked knocked all those girls, trying to take back pieces of hearts to armor yours, your heart was breaking? isn’t it funny how our grandfather’s fossil watches    (the ones our mothers fought over so viciously) were unequal to the ticking in your chest? & we could not hear it over your loud voice      and the bass in your car. we could not hear it

...i lied.    i'm sorry; you were so precious in your blankets, so new   seasoned yet unfinished, so ready to initiate, to reinvent-- clutching your covers and smiling a little          i could not bear to break your heart i'm sorry i was glad when you never opened your eyes again   never saw what makes us all older:           the dissolution of hope.                                               i lied. i told you you could wake up now i said your dream had come true. i lied,         i'm sorry      but there's still a chance and we will all knit together someday like you wanted all along one life, one love,      

your breaths-- each one a note in different octaves, mailed to me unsigned and smelling of rain

one wonders why it is considered ideal to have hair the color of bee spit; is it the bee's knees because bees have no knees, and cannot kneel? i couldn't tell you but walking around with wool on your head instead colored like the earth streaked with silver in memory of past droughts is an experience. i look in the mirror too much without seeing. the vodka's empty and my hands itch and burn, the air smells of the bleach from cleaning the fridge and all i know today is i am burnt sienna or toffee or caramel wood. i am wood, and wood holds more together than bee spit, and bees cannot build homes made of wood, which means despite the bl