i.
She is the cream of red lipstick smudged indiscriminately against mouths.
She is the winey mash of a kiss, designed as fermented urge.
She is the swollen veins of the earth, the beetroot bulb which stains and stains.
He is the ocean full of salt, so much salt she can’t sink.
This will be their undoing.
ii.
She opened her mother’s jewelry box and found a lock of her own hair.
She shaved her head after that.
Her mother told her to be a lady but she shoveled mud under her tongue
and let garnets colonize her womb like fire ants.
She wanted to kill herself once, but instead she ate cherries
until her fingers blushed and her ashtray was full.
iii.
She had a dream in which she was a freckle in a sea of freckles.
She had a dream in which she was tinting her hair with onion skin,
fingers sharp-smelling with papery halos.
She had a dream in which all her skin peeled off like tangerine rind,
leaving only a visceral, quaking center.
In the dream she thought, this must be what the hummingbird feels like.
In the dream she thought, this must be what it means to be a woman.
In a dream she got drunk on dandelion wine and in a brief chasm loved everything.
iv.
She had never seen so much sky as from the hospital window.
She could name the clouds.
Cirrus: albino hair, silkworms. Teenage girls who are all elbows.
The way your insides feel when you are breathless, having inhaled too much light.
Cumulus: fat tulip bulbs, risen bread dough, Gramma’s hands.
Stratus: skinny white cigarettes, the indecipherable language of scars, hotel bedsheets,
the sorrows stacked heavy, like plates waiting to fall.