I wait, but I know what I’m waiting for.
I eat roses, dust my skin with amber.
The nights are warm and full of peace, and I know
there will come a time when I mourn the loss
of quiet, and candles flickering on my white walls.
I hunger, but I know I will not starve.

I dream of you, dead, over and
over and over. Not dying— i never see the
calamity, the bus crash,
the gunshot or the gaping wound. Only
your body, somehow tiny, somehow frail,
grey and chill and silent.
Silent and I am screaming for your voice,
for the lilt of your storytelling, joketelling,
historygiving lessonteaching heckling uncling loving
voice. I scream
and it echoes. I scream into
the pallor of your immediate body
and you do not respond. No
one does. I dream of you dead.

Sometimes it is the only thing left to say
When they are deep in their throes of ecstatic rage
Fuck me harder
When they are climbing over their own feet
To queue up to rain insults and trauma and ignorance
Down into your open mouth
Fuck me harder
When the individuals who comprise the system are
No longer distinguishable as male or female or young
Or old or rich or poor or parents or people
Fuck me harder
When my soul is groveling in the pit of my stomach
And the only tactic is to wait it out, to count
Each excruciating minute out in the syrupy
Small coquettish voice I  have cultivated
Fuck me harder
When I'm tired and shredded and congealed
And limp with sweating, sweltering tides of anger
Fuck me harder

What does being triggered mean? That I am driven back into my former self? That no matter how far I push, how much I learn, how hard I work, I am still drowning in the same old shame?
I am too tired to be unsuccessful. I have been ground down into my mammalian, my reptilian response sets. Because I must go down with this ship, I know I will keep it afloat.
What I would reclaim today: the conflation of love/hate with good/evil. Love can be evil. Hate can be lovely. Love can do unlimited harm; hate can be grounding, can be creative, can be catalyzing, can produce growth. Love is why I say it is inevitable that I am pulled back into old ways, old thoughts, old hurts.
My mother wore red and went to the church of her choosing and knew a dozen things to do with a potato, but refused ten of them. What is agency if not choice? How can I say she was not culpable, or directive, or integral, or the reason why?
When I am dead I think there will be silence, and an unending staircase, leading forever, slowly, upwards.

We joke endlessly about the hyperemotionality
of female relationships-- we are crying, constantly
confiding, craving of reassurance and absolution--
so that the crime, to you, is my grief or my sorrow
but not the ways in which it was created.
If I am obliged to confess to you all
of what you'll term my sins-- including
propping up all men, and other failing systems--
then so be it, since the men are not going anywhere,
and your favorite pasttime is overseeing
and overhearing all of my Hail Marys, full of grace.