What Poems Do You Keep Close To Your Chest Like A Weak Deck Of Cards? Terrified Anyone Should Know Your

Smaller hearts beat faster, ever faster. Run rabbit run ever faster, ever faster. I’ll cut your finger cut your thumb, wear a plaster, wear a plaster. I’ll tell your secrets to the room, such disaster, such disaster.

Forgive me gentle heart, I didn’t mean to be a bastard.

What empties you?

The way I hold my tongue around my maga father as we watch movies in silence, and I wonder why I’m so forgiving of his alcoholism and not my mother’s toxic positivity.

The way I point out the birds eating peanuts my grandmother put out for them, when all I want to do is scream in my grandparent’s faces and shake their shoulders to turn Fox News off and wake up from their stupor.

I want to wake up too. I don’t want to know their hatred so intimately. I don’t want to love monsters, anymore.

The touch of your coat as you trot on by.

The green of your eyes as you gaze at the sky.

The scratch of your claws as you knock on my door.

I miss that sound dearly

for I do not hear it anymore.

I was 12 the first time I was catcalled. A middle school boy I’d never met found his eyes lingering on the hem of my school uniform’s skirt. I wish I’d worn the long navy blue pants instead. I wish I’d worn a cock and balls as well to keep more boy’s eyes far away from me. But there was no way for me to avoid the screaming missile of womanhood. All I could do was listen to my girlhood ripping itself out of my fingers; my fingers that used to hold dolls now holding my tongue. A brutal silence I wore as woolen armor to protect me, and enrage me all the same with its intrepid itch. I shouldn’t have had to be quiet in the face of boys lusting after me, so eager to pursue manhood that they mutilate my girlhood. It shouldn’t have been taken from me by someone who used to see me as a cooties carrier, or on good days, a friend. I can barely remember all that they said now, but I cannot shake the feeling their nasty words gave me. I shouldn’t have had to understand what it meant to be a woman before I bled. But the world is not kind to its creators. Every foul mouthed boy crawled his way out of a woman, only to seek another to whittle down into a Venus doll. The boy ogled me alongside my two friends. He too, was not alone. He asked his friend toddling alongside him with an audacious voice which of us they preferred. “I like the tall one,” he said as if choosing flowers to pick from the ground. An act of collection, of killing the thing you covet. My friend piped up and said, “we’re not objects on a shelf,” but I still felt their eyes burning into our backsides. The boy and his friends spat words at us under their breath that I cannot remember, and we walked into the middle school gates feeling heavier than before. Unwillingly we were no longer school girls, but vessels of sexuality tempting men and exciting boys. I felt my crotch turn from a place I peed from to an open wound. I felt my skin tighten, I was trapped in a budding teen girl’s body when I yearned to keep my childhood just a little bit longer. I was 12 the day before. But in a matter of sentences I was dragged into womanhood, and I lamented having known girlhood at all.

-diary of a former girl

I don’t mind when her leather jacket burns my finger tips, that’s just the summer sun gettin’ jealous of us making love in this old red truck. A lick of hell on the way to heaven don’t scare me. Only being without her does.

-Confessions of a Southern Belle

Is the joy of wearing anyone’s face, dawning any voice on command worth more to you than possessing your own? Then by all means act your life away. Express yourself in characters, distilled emotions and memories of yours, collect awards, applause, whatever it is you think will fix you, make you happy. And when the curtain is called and the limelight dims and you sit with your viewer of one and struggle to communicate to other people in real life without the hug of a facade, I want you to remember that you wanted this. You wanted to be shucked and hollowed out to be filled with the adoration of millions. Don’t step down now. There’s nothing worth returning to anyway.

-Diary of an actress

The stars will not judge me. They knew me before I was an atom of an idea, and they brought me here to this moment now, in something I cannot imagine as anything else but an act of love.

Share with me your shame, distill your weakness so that I may drink it like wine. Your secrets are precious to me, nothing shocks a man like me.

Eyebrows thin as wire and lips black and dotted with white latex highlights; Lottie was unmistakable.

She kept her hair short to her ears and curled like cat tails, determined to spend one of her nine lives dying fast and young. Fur cheap and puffed up over her head, she strutted down fourth avenue like fire dripped from her heels. Her eyes were naturally half shut and her neck was as thick as a wrist; she had a way of easing people into spilling all their darkest secrets to her. I was not among them. As a friend of Lottie, she switched off her siren like personality for me, to spare me I think. Maybe she felt comfortable enough to drop the act, or like I was too lowly for her to bother dawning a mask for. Either way she got me into the best dinner spots and didn’t let me spend a dime on anything. I had to appreciate her for that.

-a Friend of Lottie’s

Sirens often eat out of hatred, not love. So when the sailor girl asked the siren if she found her appetizing, she shook her head with a tight lipped grin. The human took it as rejection, her eyes falling to her hands and picking at the callouses she found unsightly, not understanding she had just shown her affection for her. That hiding one’s teeth was a gentle act of favor the merfolk used.