somedays all I do is watch the sky

I’m going to a punk rock show tomorrow and I haven’t tried to look punk rock since about tenth grade help what do I wear

Today while driving with a pretty boy I puked in a bag that immediately leaked all over me and he STILL texted me later to say he had fun with me so I must be really, really charming in the spaces between puking in bags.

December 2

You pressed flowers through summer
because you hated goodbyes,
crushed thistles and morning glories

beneath stacks of encyclopedias
in the cob-webbed corner of your garage,
and when your father left that winter

you peeled dried petals
one-by-one from their thirsty stalks,
scattered them like ashes

into the coughing dryness
of your dead-end road.

My birthday started off with a text from my dad using his wife’s phone, simply informing me that his phone was broken, so you’d think the day could only go uphill from there…

Feeling like a human trash bag lately.

The first guy to ever sexually assault me just added me on LinkedIn.

What a time we live in.

November 22 (16/30)

Drunk at Lake Michigan, 2012

An all-night diner’s neon lights
sprawled across the beach
beside our half-buried toes,
faintly illuminating cherry pits
we spit and planted into damp sand.  

We sacrificed everything we loved
or regretted to the pulsing waves,
our stumbling confessions swallowed
into lapping blackness
or regurgitated along the bank
into wind-dried dunes and tall grass.

Home always tasted bitter
like driftwood, sweet
like the saltless air we packed
into boxes when we moved away.

Now, in a city wrapped in rivers
we feel landlocked,
lost as parking lot seagulls
who sob into trash bins
and wonder when the burning
cement will thaw.

November 20

My grandmother died
the same year the city
demolished the paper mill
whose pungent musk
wound its way through
my childhood—

seeping through curtained
windows of a bedroom
painted pale yellow,
catching in piles of acorns
my sisters collected,
my grandfather mowing
the lawn out back.

People crowded the streets
to see the building implode.
Century-old cement
buckled from within, and
as it fell, they praised it
for crumbling toward the sea.