dread sunday’s swarm already. m’s welcome home party. her highschool friends all noise, boys rolling joints while their girls chant fuck! omg! so drunk! & little lizzy? loud & lonely, clumsy on a couch spilling beer on my striped sweater. ill set my stage & spin. will piss on all conversations, hike my skirt up only to shake it loose in a series of quick hip twists. i arrive only to leave. i leave only to come home to a cat with fleas, my sister smoking on the front stoop.

school slays. all this sleeplessness, stomach cramps. am already taking naps in the library, curled between stacks on nazi germany or the cold war. my classes are an intolerable bore. mainly, i slip in/out of consciousness. dream with eyes stretched wide. dream too many things. this semester’s already rendered me a smoke & mope. ive got ash in my belly. when i move, i make sifting sounds.

shoved in a backseat. head on a stranger’s knees. slit moon shining in troughs of empty light. i fight with the night. there are no stars to ask forgiveness from. no lone shade trees to curl beneath. am trapped between body & seat. the car weaves, heeds no stoplight/sign. i pray for saftey, from what, i am unsure. the car or the clumsy breaths of a stranger watching shadows in a room somewhere.

boring the bark from the trees. pet my cat till her fur shrieks. smoke a cigarette. drink rolling rock till hills, oh hills rolling within.

carey at work. steph tucked. i wait. keep house casually.

bored. drink a rolling rock. charm the moon closer to my stoop. squint from the shine. call strangers hoping they’ll answer.

pet the cat. scratch the top of my sock. complex is dead. cant even watch neighbor’s take showers, move soundlessly room to room. try reading poems; they’re swollen. lines fat with adjectives. how many ways to say lover lost, alone in a park?

the story of stillness has returned. quit my job, finished my finals which means spending days staring at the handless clock of my wall, nights sitting motionless on a stranger’s couch, gasping in a bar. at the bar, everyone’s mouth’s impossibly round, skin dirty, ashen really. when i touch them, bits of skin flake off. come midnight, i leave covered with flesh i can’t place.