I touched the divine and let it rot me inside out,

looked at the man and knew I could be more

with my hands mudstained and bloodstained;

Creon, you know your delusions will destroy you.

Blind crone of a mother gave me the blood in her veins and said,

“You will die for nothing, but the hopeless will make you their saint.”

Take the wedding veil and the noose;

they serve the same purpose,

Haemon your sword will save no one but yourself.

Hate the father more than yourself, hate the self you were moulded to be,

it’s still love even if it’s only found in the grave.

Hate the father that sees you as a tool,

Hate the father that gave me that stone heart;

I know my brother didn’t love me but I was divine.

I could rise above conflict with my knees in the dirt.

Sister of mine forever stuck in dawn,

another girl that could only offer words not hands not bone.

You will die for nothing.

In nothing I am eternal.

Death is divinity is more than these sun-bleached bones--

I bury my wretched brother, another victim of our crime scene life

let the guards shackle me before Creon, king of men but not women.

Antigone is remembered with the gods’ hands on her shoulders,

Justice rising in her throat and Mercy in her broken fingernails.

Antigone dies and lives eternally;

stubborn martyr of a girl who should have known better.

my bedroom mirror’s cracked and i

know it’s from the movers but sometimes

i think it was secretly from it

looking at my face.

hair falls out unnaturally and i cry every night, can someone please tell me, it’s not alright? balding would be easy if i were a man since only then is it acceptable-but now, i get the pleasure of being a teenage girl experiencing high school with the chance of being the homecoming ugly queen. hair isn’t everything, but i’d be lying if i were to say it wasn’t something. that’s why when i shower, i massage my head afterward and whisper prayers in the bathroom as if it were a cure.

mama made me, the only way

she knows how; is it considered irony

that by the second, she

had the process all figure out?

mama did things i’m not allowed to talk about, that’s what my adoptive parents told me. and i know i should forgive and forget her, because she was young and naive, simply the age 19; but it’s her fault i’m here and ending up like this. they say crazy isn’t a gene, but science can’t fool me, the likelihood of me becoming like her increases yearly.

fell off my bike too many times, grace

and balance just weren’t for me,

so they left little presents on my knees:

scars, bruises, and markings.

if there’s one thing i want, it’s the promise of youth in eternity; living forever’s only a dream if you can do it properly. so when death kisses my cheeks in farewell, claiming she’ll never visit me, only then will i pack my bags and collect lost boys like pennies. but we all know that desires just fuel the flames of inevitability, burning to ash and flying away; dreams never come true (and those who tell you otherwise simply wish to take them away from you).

you’ll never know my name

because every lover i know that does

takes it and uses it into their greedy

little game; no, my name is

mine alone to keep.

expectations are directions to disasters, so please, keep them away from me. i stopped writing them myself when i realized i wanted to be young and free. and i’ve started to ignore my body’s natural craving for mortality and outlining my heart’s drawing of infinity; childhood memories i’ve begun to cry (now i understood why my mother use to) and the itching feeling of wrinkles appear on my body.

His steelworker hands

would catch my baseball

ungloved.

We never hugged,

never needed to.

We’d shake hands,

and I’d feel who he was.

Fairylights and a Van Gogh poster,

You said kissing in my room meant kissing ‘under the stars’.

Now we’re packed tight in my single bed,

Lying like matches in a box,

Or the last two cigarettes in your pack.

Artificial starlight, now artificial moonlight,

The soft blue silhouette of your body against my alarm clock.

Smooth edges and crisp lines.

Angel wing shoulder blades, and unruly black curls.

And me, awake.

My college student body clock

And your new 9to5 job,

My weeks of 4am, black coffee assignments

And your parade of midday clients,

Your deep sleep breath,

And my acute fear of transience.

And the two of us in bed,

Alone

Together.

3 am.

It's the best time to think. To breathe and be alive.

To see the stars, out there. Blinking down on us.

To listen to loosely indie music and shuffle artists you've never heard of.

To walk around the ghost street with your friends, out for coffee or donuts.

To talk to that special person. About music, life, and the future.

It's the worst time to think. To cry and be alive.

To think dark thoughts and hover over that one chasm.

To see your fears, your mightmares on repeat.

To feel the invisible burden settle on you once again.

To feel unbelieveable lonely.

But, there is a certain spell at 3 am. It's like time has stopped, or has been streched out. Anything and everything feels possible. That's why its the best time to be dreaming.

3 am.

I have always felt just on the verge of understanding, hands outstetched to the stars above, fingertips a breath away from brushing the constellations, yet so far away.

Everything spins past at a dizzying pace, people and places, all voices lost to the wind. I can remember hot summer nights and cigarette smoke, but never faces. I remember high heels clicking against the gymnasium floor in time with the music, but never the song.

I often feel that I exist entirely in memory, drifting back and forth within the unconcious mind like a dreamer, like a parasite. My body goes through the motions. When I hover before the bathroom sink brushing my teeth, blank stare fixated on the smeared surface of the mirror, images of the past superimpose themselves over reality. She stands at my side again. Swearing she loves me, spewing hot breath and empty promises like smoke.

I stand long enough to miss the bus before I realize I'm still dreaming and spit out the toothpaste. The icy water bites in the aftermath of mint, and now I see myself trying adult toothpaste for the first time, sputtering and scrunching up my nose against the burn as my father smiles. Stepping outside, I push the memory away.

The drive is drowned out in music and daydream, and much of the day follows suit. I spend hours wading through hypothetical situations and fictional worlds, pushing reality aside until I choke on it. Nothing is interesting enough to hold my attention for long.

When will I feel something real again? Will I ever?

Bad days are spent sprawled across the cold tile of my bedroom floor, unseeing eyes trained on the popcorn ceiling. I puzzle through years worth of mistakes, failed relationships, details missed in the moment. Maybe if I would have tried harder. Maybe if I could have been a better daughter, a better person, a better friend.

I smile through the burn of unshed tears, because at least that feels like something real. When they fall, searing hot against my cheeks, I think back to all those nights curled up in the dark, terror coursing through every inch of me like a virus, like something infectious and foreign. It trembles through my tiny fingers like an earthquake.

Sometimes, a flicker of light will catch my eye. I'll find a bird perched on the windowsill, or familliar faces caught in the golden light, or warm hands wrapped around my own. Becoming lost in the tumble of regret and the need to understand is easy, but I find myself eager to push through and smile at the little things, to draw myself back.

Maybe I will never reach the constellations, but I can always choose to enjoy the view.

I cannot remember what she looks like.

They say it is natural, for the details to fade with time. Receed back into depths where the ghost of her laugh still lingers, where I can still feel the bass pounding through my chest and the unspoken promises behind her smeared eyeliner.

You mean the world to me, I translate.

On autopilot, I drift through the spaces we used to occupy. Every lampshade and ratty inch of this apartment sends memories kaleidoscope-ing across the inside of my eyelids. I see her sprawled out across the matress, I see her rigid and teary-eyed in the dark, I see her head tilted back as she gargles mouthwash before the bathroom sink. She isn't there.

It seems the world wasn't enough.

Mama walks with

short, shaky steps

crunching

fallen leaves.

Her struggling breath

rattles

through her lungs

like wind across the trees.

She gently lays

a gnarled hand on wrinkled bark

whose branches are near bare

and tears

slip

down her face

betraying all her fear.

Mama is like autumn

stubbornly holding on

each day slowly

letting go

'til winters frost is come.

Gus looked out through bloodshot eyes between the bars of his prison cell. The beckoning calls of the vibrant scarlet and golden magic of fluttering leaves, seen through his window beyond the barbed wire, reminded him that he would never see the outside world again unless it was a furtive glimpse in the distance. He felt severed from life as the bones of leaves portrayed the dust of autumn’s flesh. Already, the fading amber lights in ashy yellows signified autumn’s end. Soon, it would be winter again and he would pass one more year in his cold, dank cell. Snowdrifts sporting jaunty winter clothes would be beyond his reach. It would once again feel as if spiky icicles were stabbing his heart in frozen shadows of sprinkled regret He dreamed of inhaling the brisk air and feeling human once again.

Sluggishly in his numb stupor, Gus watched two muscular death row inmates dance around each other like sweat-soaked ballerinas. Hen-scratched tattoos marked their time spent swinging their mallet fists into each other’s faces, turning noses into bloody pudding and teeth into smoothies. Inmates clustered around, shouting out bets while guards ignored them.

Gus remembered being the victim of this cruelty many times when several inmates ganged up on him but there were other pointless savageries as well. Often guards messed with him for their own amusement. One of their favorite ploys was the old “fake visit from Mom” when they would tell him that he had a surprise visitor. Even though he realized it was probably untrue, he still felt like this was the bright spot of his whole month and fell for it every time. He would do his best to clean himself up and wait patiently at his cell doors for the guards to escort him to the visitor’s room. “Oh wait,” they laughed, “we got the wrong Johnson!” And they would laugh and laugh.

Gus sighed as he struggled to remember what normalcy had been in the past but it was becoming only a vague memory. He was ashamed as he realized that vulgarity and meanness was becoming a part of his personality because he felt he was becoming ice bound, trapped in glacial recesses of his body. Anger festered as he began to formulate a plan to kill one of the other prisoners who tormented him. Secreting a magazine in his cell, he pulled out its center staple and then removed the waistband from an old pair of underwear, making it into a catapult. Next, he removed threads from his underwear and wrapped them around the staple to make a dart. Removing one of the advertising cards from the magazine, he reinforced the dart and then dipped it into a noxious mixture of human feces and urine which he heated in the light from his window concentrating it to transform it into a dangerous poison. Then, he rolled up the magazine until it was about 2 inches in circumference and attached it to the bars of his cell. As the hated inmate walked by, he retracted the catapult, inserted the deadly dart and shot it into his neck. Although the prisoner yanked the dart from his neck and said nothing, sepsis took over in the next few days and the inmate died a lingering, painful death.

Hate in chills of cold sweat began to take over Gus’ persona as he felt himself becoming a different person. Knowing he would be in this prison for many years before his death penalty would become instituted; he began to devise other methods to kill both prisoners and the treacherous guards. There was nothing to lose!

Gus closed his eyes as he remembered why he was here. He had been the cherished only son of parents who had finally given up on him and never visited. He wistfully remembered making snowmen with his Dad as he watched flurries of snowflakes outside his window.

Depressing him the most was the knowledge that he was innocent, having been wrongly convicted. He cupped his agony (like fallen leaves) in his chapped hands, wiping drops of perspiration from his forehead, knowing he was ready to take control and destroy all those who had damaged him. The future was of his own making as he felt the wickedness of his transformation take hold like the changing of the seasons. He would shape a feared reputation, like frigid snowballs, that would never be forgotten. No longer would he be burdened by memories of his former life! Smiling in anticipation, he was ready to face his world as he wrapped the thoughts of a springtime of retribution around himself in hues of a new beginning.