THIS IS THE YEAR OF

Forgetting is a privilege I won’t indulge this time. There is plenty to excavate, but I won’t. Once I thrust my hands into the wet flesh of a plum and got dark fruit under my nails. It took weeks to get the stains out. Every day of my adolescence I prayed to a god I only half-believed in to disappear. Felt sinful to take up so much space. Thought the holiest thing I could be was gone. Now mind you my hands still shake when I bathe in perfumes and dress in my finest, I’m still not crushing it, Haven’t turned the pill of my pain into powders yet, Still don’t understand the mechanics of swallowing it, Still don’t even know what that will do. But this is the age of expanding, This is the age of blooming and knocking over valuables with my petals. This is the age of volume and depth, When I am beholden to no one and can feign ignorance for what the painted glass was even worth. I want to remember this year by the mouth of it, I want to know it by tongue. The heart shudders and gasps, Collides and collapses, A bird in an airport, A bird in an airport, And I cup it in my hands as it beats and it thrashes, A wild thing long since jailbroken from its cage.

~ J.M.

for all the times my mouth faltered

Summer in the foothills, hot breath and sweat. Something that bruises from a distance. Something electric, under-tongued. We stared at the sky until the colors swallowed our eyes, scene went flat and our palms sent scavenging.  Ready to swallow the dark. Bones simmer in their own patched space, wider than earth. Headlights turning palm trees unholy. Praise to honey-skinned knees, how pain and heat can add weight to a name. These nights: I swear I could fall through the carpet. I swear: the sky as my head in whiplash. I think in soft-blows: the backwards melt, white tennis shoes burn soft as snow, rot like teeth. Boxes of yellow puppies. All those times when you wouldn’t look my way. Coney Island summer, the burn of the teeth. And the day swollen with light, the strawberry patch, every wound after the first was a reminder, sky broken-back and faltering.

I long to swallow answers from the tips of your fingers and the graves that you dig too easily. But you can only try so hard to Dig your toes into drying cement, or wet soil, When the forces of the universe Seem to be conspiring against How still you can stand. Often, I squint harder through keyholes, Looking for traces of the Wisps of blue smoke in your hair From the last time the sky blew you a kiss. Celestial atoms are coming into being, and I think that I am a stacked-up pillar of bird cages Rattling, metal against metal, With blood flowing the wrong way. And I think I am shallow breaths under the bleachers, Pages from a book someone stashed between the floorboards; Smudged. Crumpled. Worn. While you, oh, you are cosmic freckles And sunkissed knives. Warm, like strands of light through pale curtains. Scalding, like ghostly touches. Gunfire.

the trigger feels like home.

The only difference between an artist and a sinner is that an artist knows how to spin sin into beauty.

Talia Young

And I think what I’m trying to say is I can dress you up like a monster But I can’t make you bite me.

Excerpt from "I can’t write you as a villain if you never wanted to hurt me" by KM

Six More Weeks of Winter, Please

Six More Weeks of Winter, Please 

Punxsutawney Phil fears his shadow As much as I do, but every winter Morning is Groundhog Day for me. I don’t know how to accept My naked body, but I know Which fashions to wear this season. Even though I shatter the mirrors In my house, my silhouette stubbornly Decides I occupy too much space. Magazines teach me to squeeze My contours into smaller shapes Than Russian Nesting Dolls.  But I could be smaller. I donate leftover Meals to friends and strangers. One day I’ll make Barbie proud. I avoid public places after ice storms, Because the world becomes a runway With many cameras, broadcasting full body Shots of my reflection to heaven. God isn’t allowed to see my physique yet. I’m not lean enough for the spring thaw.

By: Christian Sammartino

what people don't realize about anchors is that there is a fine line between being safely grounded and drowning

"be my own anchor? but what if i sink with no one there to save me?"

KISSING KANYE WEST

Kanye West wrote and recorded his first single “Through the Wire” after a car accident that left him with his jaw wired shut. I kissed you back even though my heart was still leaking through its stitches. Even though you could still smell the gasoline on my breath. His track was hailed as a brilliant debut, Vibe magazine called it “teeth-clenching” and “gut-wrenching,” Pitchfork said it was “chock-full of clever,” The New York Times declared him “a wounded hero beating the odds.” Before you kissed me, I had anxiety dreams about the logistics of lip movement and tongue placement but it turns out your body figures out how to open when it needs to. Your kiss was lousy with wit, Brave and beautiful and clumsy like a savior with a drinking problem. You tasted just like a protagonist should. Did you know that Kanye was nominated for Best Rap Solo performance at the 2005 Grammys but lost to Jay-Z’s “99 Problems?” Does she know that her love story is the B-side to my blackest of records? That there’s an arena full of people still rooting for the girl who tastes hospital grade steel every time she swallows?

tennis shoes

Tongues thick, the pink of my elbows, my knees. Sometimes the white tennis shoes leaked, the grass in the backyard ankle-high. We waited for crow season, watched the sky from the overpass, the clouds yolk and fucked, stretched like hide. At night, the spilled bottles and the spaces they stiffened into, space halting and furrowed. A car slid down our avenue in blue haze, radio blaring, and its meaning fell through me. I only think of the way we broke, dry light streaming. All our days tipped over on their sides, the supermarket, waiting by the corner for you to turn me small under your tongue. Lavender evenings wrought through my mouth. Nothing hurts the same way now. I drop everything I know into the basins of my thighs. Years are lost in me. a subtle teething, bright rot of morning. In those days, the heat from asphalt thick as webs, how we never noticed. Night chipped and feeble, how I felt like something was catching up to me, waited for it to crash headlong into my back. In memories, I go half-deaf. In memories, my body is sight. Sometimes I watch the super 8 footage of your birthday, ghosts swimming on the moon. Everyone was moving in yellow light, dim and swallowed, but I couldn’t believe it. The way the bodies moved like an excuse.

A Reflection on Coming Out Disguised as a Series of Letters to Atlas

Dear Atlas, I know you have been bearing this burden for so long that your shoulders can no longer remember what freedom tastes like, can no longer remember what it was like before you carried a secret the size of the whole sky. Dear Atlas, I know you feel safer shouldering your load alone, because the sky needs to be carried and you can’t bring yourself to trust someone else with something quite as heavy as this. Dear Atlas, I know you are terrified. The sky isn’t becoming any smaller, and you are growing tired. Your shoulders burn like a sunset, and your strength is coming to an end. But Atlas, dear- Don’t you know we were never meant to carry the sky alone? Dear Atlas, Don’t you know that love is someone lending you their shoulders when you are too tired to carry all your sky? Dear Atlas, Don’t you know that love is a sunrise and mornings taste like freedom? Dear Atlas, Don’t you know that I love you with your secrets that span horizons? Dear Atlas, I love you. You can rest now.  

My dear little girl, What happened to you? What have you done To your beautiful old self? Last night you stayed awake Until 3am because Your friend needed you You talked words of courage And self-acceptance Of having faith and taking a risk Because love is not something You deserve or you work hard to get Love simply happens to you And if you are lucky enough To have stumbled upon it It is not only your call but also your duty To try and make it work. Your friend cried down your neck And you did not mind because You know how essential it is to let Those purifying tears run down your cheeks But she tenuously smiled when she left Thanking you because now she knew What she had to do. You slumped on your bed And curled up around the red pillow, The softest that you own. Your stomach felt empty and Your throat ached and itched Like it used to do after you poured Your wasted years and the chances You had not dared to take Into the toilet in front of you. Last night felt kind of the same Didn’t it, my little girl? You spilled all of your Hope and strength and kindness All over her soul Because she didn’t have her own And now you’re lying on your bed Completely spent and deflated With nothing left to believe in. You’re home, but your heart aches with How much you wish You could become so intangible So ethereal as to not be needing a house In the first place. So you close your pretty eyes I remember how vivid they always were And dream of crawling back To your underground burrow Far below mediocre people’s life expectations level Where your ratty security blanket Has been awaiting your return And is getting ready to Suffocate you in your now deliberately Dreamless slumber. My dear little girl, I shall not try to hang you back here Any longer than you want to. I wish you would linger some more But I know you won’t Because you’ve already set fire to Everything you had in you And people have chased your burning smoke away Not understanding how it was Your last present for their pitiless spirits. Don’t be afraid now, We both know you’ve endured Much worse than this. I hope these parting words will reach you, Wherever it is that you’re heading to And bring you a shadow of the joyful smile That you always blessed me with During the days we spent together. My dear little girl, Goodbye. Descend the staircase that has presented itself At your feet and may the black Unforgiving earth welcome you back With mercy and keep warm The body that you never learned how to love And the heart you never let anyone touch. Not even yourself.

M.B, My Dear Little girl 

My darling, look at how we love us. Look at how our teeth clash every time we kiss and how we’ll never stop. Look at your thumb tracing shapes on my back and tell me we’ll stay like this forever. Tell me.

love letters I’ll never send, (1/?), v.g

Winter Weather Advisory

Winter Weather Advisory 

The national weather service has issued A winter weather advisory concerning Your quadrant of the American Heartland. Adopt coping methods from your inner Child when cold fronts transform states Into commonwealths of blizzards.  Buy dollar store coffee filters With your pocket change. Snip paper hearts into an igloo cooler Until you harvest one for every patient On the national transplant list. Write single sentence love letters Addressed to anyone who forgets they are Not blots of ink in an avalanche of names.

Fold them like fortune cookie proverbs. Find a niche in your ice chest as you wait For the ribcage of your hometown to thaw.  Plant your blessings in the soil With tree seedlings on Arbor Day. Roots will compost your gifts, spreading kind Words beneath the county, until a whole forest Builds your message into its branches.

By: Christian Sammartino

the people who want to hear behind closed doors are the ones whose chests aren't concave with the weight of every secret

11/12/14 "oh no, i'm sad again"

he’s pushing you into bed and convincing you that you’re falling into love.

excerpt from “the devil’s got nothin’ on him” by KM

SHOOTING RANGE

Loving you is a dream from my childhood. Your body is the shooting range my father drives me to in his all-black pickup on Sunday morning. He’s never taken me to fire guns but in the dream I am ten years old in overalls and he presses a finger to his lips with a smile. Don’t tell your mother. My heart is the loaded gun he hands me when we get inside. It’s a rifle that fits perfectly in my hands with a trigger I am terrified to pull. My lower lip trembles but he tells me that weaponry runs in the family. As if knowing that your imminent destruction is hereditary makes the recoil hurt less. If my mother loves like a gardener overwatering a cactus, My father loves like a trained assassin. Perhaps I was doomed to destroy you— To drive a bullet straight into your chest cavity and try to clean the scar with enough water to flood a greenhouse. In a harshly lit kitchen on South Orchard Street you tap your beer bottle to my wine glass— The better to dress your wounds with. The backyard is dark and people are drunk on perceived remedies, So intoxicated that they fire into each other and plan on blaming it on liquor in the morning. I wish my musket was alcohol’s fault. That it wasn’t hardwired into my circuitry from before I knew the word for “gun.” When you kiss me, my hands sweat on the trigger. Something goes off inside me and I mistake it for fireworks.

~ J. M.