The Madness Vase

The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables. Said if I could get down thirteen turnips a day I would be grounded, rooted. Said my head would not keep flying away to where the darkness lives. The psychic told me my heart carries too much weight. Said for twenty dollars she’d tell me what to do. I handed her the twenty. She said, “Stop worrying, darling. You will find a good man soon.” The first psycho therapist told me to spend three hours each day sitting in a dark closet with my eyes closed and ears plugged. I tried it once but couldn’t stop thinking about how gay it was to be sitting in the closet. The yogi told me to stretch everything but the truth. Said to focus on the out breath. Said everyone finds happiness when they care more about what they give than what they get. The pharmacist said, “Lexapro, Lamicatl, Lithium, Xanax.” The doctor said an anti-psychotic might help me forget what the trauma said. The trauma said, “Don’t write these poems. Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.” But my bones said, “Tyler Clementi jumped from the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River convinced he was entirely alone.” My bones said, “Write the poems.

The trauma said, ‘Don’t write these poems. Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.

My mouth is a fire escape. The words coming out don’t care that they are naked. There is something burning in there.

..when a war ends, what does that look like exactly? do the cells in the body stop detonating themselves? does the orphanage stop screaming for its mother? when the sand in the desert has been melted down to glass and our reflection is not something we can stand to look at does the white flag make for a perfect blindfold? yesterday i was told a story about this little girl in Iraq, six-years-old, who cannot fall asleep because when she does she dreams of nothing but the day she watched her dog eat her neighbor's corpse. if you told her war is over do you think she can sleep?

Remind me that the most fertile lands were built by the fires of volcanoes.

My mouth is a fire escape. The words coming out don't care that they are naked. There is something burning in here. When it burns I hold my own shell to my ear, listen for the parade from when I was seven, when the man who played the bagpipes wore a skirt. He was from Scotland. I wanted to move there. Wanted my spine to be the spine of an unpublished book, my faith the first and last page. The day my ribcage became monkey bars for a girl hanging on my every word they said, "You are not allowed to love her." Tried to take me by the throat to teach me, "You are not a boy." I had to unlearn their prison speak, refusing to make wishes on the star on the sheriff's chest. I started taking to the stars in the sky instead. I said, "Tell me about the big bang." The stars said, "It hurts to become.

Love isn't always magic. But if I offered my body to the magician, if I told him to cut me in half so after that I could come to you whole and ask for you back would you listen for this dark alley love song? For the winter we heated our home from the steam off our own bodies?

I wish for a heart you can see straight through, for a voice that glows in the dark, and a few really good friends to say, “That’s the way to go.

We were the letters sent to the wrong address, but opened anyway.

It's turning the thunder into grace, knowing sometimes the break in your heart is like the hole in the flute. Sometimes it's the place where the music comes through.

Let me say right now for the record, I’m still going to be here asking this world to dance, even if it keeps stepping on my holy feet. You, you stay here with me, okay? You stay here with me. Raising your bite against the bitter dark, your bright longing, your brilliant fists of loss. Friend, if the only thing we have to gain in staying is each other, my god that is plenty my god that is enough my god that is so so much for the light to give each of us at each other’s backs whispering over and over and over, “Live. Live. Live.

Picasso said he'd paint with his own wet tongue on the dusty floor of a jail cell if he had to. We have to create. It is the only thing louder than destruction. It's the only chance the bard are gonna break, our hands full of color reaching towards the sky, a brush stroke in the dark. It is not too late. That starry night is not yet dry.

I like imagining your body is Saturn, my body ten thousand rings wrapped around you.

Some days my heart beats so fast my ribcage sounds like a fucking railroad track and my breath is a train I just can't catch.

Listen, I know you run your mouth so your mind can rest.

It is incredible what kind of mess I can make with a nine-hour drive and an unanswered text.

We have all fought for our lives more than we know, survived our own questions.

I started talking to the stars in the sky instead. I said, “Tell me about the big bang.” The stars said, “It hurts to become.

If love did not exist I would be so goddamn sane my poems would be billboards. Suburbia would be enough. I would not have to gut myself to find my spine crushed into powder and brushed on her cheekbones. My hair would not be a hummingbird’s nest. My mind would not have to move so fast to rest.

Tell me we'll be naming our children Beautiful and nothing else.

This life is built almost entirely of love and losing, isn’t it?

My mother says it is totally fine if I blow off steam as long as I speak in an octave my kindness can still reach.

If you told her the war is over do you think she'd sleep?

When 28,000 buildings fall do you know how many walls are no longer there?

I listened to the bells on the door and stole more than enough bottles for myself to understand that everyone's chest is a living room wall with awkwardly placed photographs hiding fist-shaped holes.

Love, you will never lose me to the wind. You are the lightning that made me fill my chest with candles. You are the thunder clapping for the poem nobody else wants to hear. You are an icicle’s tear watering a tulip on the first day of spring. You melt me alive. You kiss me deep as my roots will reach, and I want nothing more than

Next time I will know it’s normal to have a hard time breathing when you shake the dust. We make everything so complicated. Sometimes, the message in the bottle is “Don’t drink so much — there’s too much Novocaine in our wisdom teeth already.

My grandfather went to Heaven. I know this because he taught my mother how to wiggle her ears. I know this because my mother walks the same way my grandfather did and on the days my mother cannot get out of bed her single comfort is knowing she has his blood.

Tell me how they will no longer have to hide beneath burkas. How you will wrap them in lace ‘til they are all as conveniently rape-able as women in the States.