I never knew how much I could love another human being until I had my son. It was eighteen hours of hard, painful labor to complete bliss all in the matter of seconds. There is no other love, or happiness for a mother like myself. Thirteen years later, the joy keeps on giving as I watch him grow into the handsome young man he's become.

i miss you.

it hasn’t rained since,

the skies sunny with a happiness

i will never feel again.

to breathe air no longer inhaled by

your sweet lungs

is not air i want to live by.

you are my lifeline,

but your life has been stolen

by the greediest hands of death.

i’ve always been told to play it safe so i

created tumult in our lives,

created messes in vain with the

promise of tomorrow.

and what now? where is my tomorrow?

i’m so sorry baby.

i’m still hoping for a tomorrow,

for the day i’ll see you again, and you’ll

pull me into your hugs i made a home in and whisper,

i miss you, too.

I wish you would remember

just my sun soaked skin

and stock photo laughs.

But really I suppose

my venom and my night shadow

is much more interesting.

Lick your lips and remember me as burning

Remember me as tongue on thighs

As keratin-ripped hips

As teeth against clavicle

As venom

As dripping

As sacre bleu, spilt

Remember me as screaming

As yawps

As oxygen-lacking

Keep me in your mind as tempest-settled

Prostrated defeat

Forget my deluge

My downpour

My cataract-rushing rhetoric

You as finale

Gasoline, match to my flits and titters

Tidal wave to my inhale

Gravity against wingless flight

Anaphora ending

Anaphora splayed

Anaphora halting

Faltered

Faulted

Frenzied

Frenzied

Lick your lips and remember me as

Frenzied

Frantic

Fanatic

As frenzied, frantic

As gravity against flightless finale

As flightless

As frantic

Remember me as faulted

As finale

As burning

we could never be nothing

(but—) (sometimes) (...i wish we were)

(it's easier that way)

I have always weighed myself. Sometimes in pain and ache. Occasionally in an inundating lust for loss. But most often in disgust. Today I saw the scales tip in favor of a tidy 30 pounds of abhorrence. And I think of how just 30 pounds back I still weighed at least 10 too many. And before that it may have been 5 and occasionally 10 but it has never been a thin, slim zero. The integers have never been positive in my favor. I am negative in self-worth. I am fractions, overwhelmed. 5s over 3s. I am the space that I fill, and it has always been too much, though I am still somehow never quite enough. And I sometimes wonder if that is because I have left my more worthy pieces drowning in porcelain pools and occasionally scattered across untouched plates. I have clawed to the back of my throat searching for the gods that might dwell there, and I have always come up short, retching out demons and hail and plagues. My mouth pours only self-taught lies and acid suicides. And my stomach often growls. Discontent turning of aching hell hounds, attention-starved. And I am scratching the sky for wishing-stars, wanting for hands that might be large enough to hold me so that when I compare them to the mirror, I seem to disappear in contrast. But I only ever find the hands that leave me littered in violence. The ones that welt red and blossom indigo and violet. My skin, constellations with velvet bruises as the always-too-heavy backdrop. More visible than ever. My mind, raw meat. And all of me too little to fill up anyone but myself, all overfilled, too much. Until I spew it from my pits. And the next time my nails touch the wet cave of my mouth, in search of reoccurring dreams, I hope that they whisper a prayer to that devil inside. Come forth and swallow me whole. Let me ache inside you, for once. Me as null. Me as void. Me, disappearing. Me, disappeared. Swallow me whole. Swallow me whole.