tequila-mockingbird-writes

[tequila-mockingbird-writes]

torque

canaan takes my shirt off and he looks at those faintfadedbrown bruises on me and he thinks they're hickeys. thinks i'm cheating on him. he thinks i have the timeeffortresources to arrange a college-campus affair. he is wrong.

i explain to him that they're not hickeys-- they're scratches, with a razorblade. hickeys, he should know, aren't shaped thinwirey. hickeys are round, as all loved things are. love is always fat and round and lovely. the shit i have, the hateindifference in my clothes and skin, is thinwirey.

when i tell him this, his already-dilated pupils get wider. canaan is always high, but right now he's sober enough to be turnedoffscared.

"i thought i was... thought my heart stopped. if i could have just LOOKED at the sternum..."

"you need serious help." he looks into my subconjunctival hemorrhage (i drank too much and got sick) and he puts his shirt back on.

[tequila-mockingbird-writes]

the fourth

We used to sit on the swing set and watch the hot air balloons go by on the fourth-- fireworks at night, balloons in the morning.

"Come on down!" We'd shriek to the sky. The balloons, unpiloted and unbothered, sailed over our heads and made us feel even smaller than we already were.

We'd throw our popsicle sticks over the chain-link fence, and, for the millionth time, you'd dare me to climb it.

"Let me wash my hands first," I said, turned on the hose and started scrubbing sticky blue popsicle shit off my forearms. You didn't follow suit. I notice teeth marks on my inner arm from where we fought earlier.

One hour ago, I wished you were dead. Now, you're my best friend in the world.

This is before I realized I was fat and started jamming fingers down my throat.

Before I had to wrestle a hunting knife out of your hands because you tried to slit your wrists and I was the only one home.

Before I started drinking like a fucking monster and popping meds like Skittles.

Before we realized that Dad's teeth aren't all rotten from drinking too much Mountain Dew.

Before we realized that his demons are our birthright.

We're not there, yet. Now, you have sticky blue popsicle shit all over your hands and face. I tell you to rinse them off with the hose, like I did. You refuse, so I punch you in the arm.

[tequila-mockingbird-writes]

Jolly Rancher

Do you know what it's like for a man to love you with the same bored casualty as one would extend to a Jolly Rancher or some other "lesser" candy?

This man loves you because you are present. He loves you because he is bored.

He doesn't notice the way you bite your lips and suck on your knuckles when you're nervous,

doesn't notice the way your twang only comes back when you're on the phone with your mother,

doesn't notice how your eyes never get red when you're high.

You're the only fish in his sea that's willing to listen on days he hates his mother,

the only one that cleans his messes up when he drinks himself sick,

the only one that lets him call you an idiot when you fuck something up-- you seem to fuck everything up.

the only one that accepts his unwashed erection without complaint, you bob your head up and down, moan around it, just so he knows you appreciate it.

You'll get a nose ring or you'll cut your hair and he'll leave you, I promise.

And I promise that you'll be the one in shambles,

because the biggest tragedy is,

he's the best boyfriend you've ever had.

[tequila-mockingbird-writes]

Weightloss For Dummies

Step 1: be the fat kid in elementary school, middle school, high school, and then gain a freshman 40. be the fat kid in college. go home and visit your mother. have her pinch your waist and glance at your thighs and ask you if you're pregnant.

Step 2: date a total psychopath. never introduce him to your parents, he's just misunderstood and you know they won't like him. have him hold you down and talk about how he could hurt you if he wanted to, then be thankful that you haven't done anything to make him want to. yet. have him keep going when you tell him to stop. make him apologize, but note the lack of sincerity. break up with him, tell him it's not his fault when you both know it is. take a few days to break up with him, because he argues whenever you try to get your two cents in.

Step 3: find a mood stabilizer that works for you.

Step 4: go to a friend's house, drink, wake up with a hickey on your neck. understand that he planned this. accept it.

Step 5: get off mood stabilizer, insurance no longer covers it.

Step 6: understand that there is no room for mistakes, no room for forgiveness. note that one slip up, one wrong word could make your friends, your family hate you forever.

Step 7: look around at all the happy people around you. look at the ways that your friends' boyfriends and girlfriends kiss them and squeeze them and tell them they're wonderful, so wonderful and wonder why they deserve nicholas sparks and you deserve the tear between your legs and the bruises on your neck and the handprints on your ass.

Step 8: accept that people don't love people like you. understand that you deserve everything that happens to you.

Step 9: don't get out of bed, call in sick to work, stop going to therapy. you don't have enough energy to shower, to chew, to cry. just. fucking, lay. there.

Step 10: keep fucking laying there.

Step 11: k e e p f u c k i n g l a y i n g t h e r e

Step 12: go home and visit your mother. have her pinch your waist and glance at your thighs and ask if she could fix you something to eat.

[tequila-mockingbird-writes]

i'm still alive because i'm a pussy

I can feel this sadness eating me alive,

digesting me,

sending me down its wet gullet,

and catapulting me into the dark

I splash around in the acid,

with greasy pizza boxes and empty liquor bottles floating with me,

my friends

I swim naked in her womb-- she is my creator, my finisher

I love her,

and I hate her

But I decide to stay another day,

just to spite the hateful cunt

[tequila-mockingbird-writes]

SIDEWALK

MONDAY

I saw a dead squirrel on my way to work today

Her jaws fixed open, flies buzzing around her, her

Face contorted in a perpetual scream, and I

almost jumped out of my skin when I saw her like that

Did something bigger than her,

Stronger than her,

Older than her

hold her down?

Did they hold her arms over her head?

Did she scream? Could sound come out?

My boss, she took one look at me and said:

"honey, i get it. trust me, i get it."

TUESDAY

I passed her again today,

Her ivory bones stuck out at all angles

The smell made me want to cross the street

Her blood was dried up, all rusty

Did her mother try to keep this from happening?

Does she know her baby's splattered across the sidewalk?

That people step over her,

Gag at the flies surrounding her?

The Dead Squirrel rots publicly, painfully

On my own sidewalk,

I still bleed out where nobody can see me

My own mother hasn't found me yet

WEDNESDAY

Not even the flies want her now,

Her bones have been picked clean

Rain has washed away the rust, the only evidence that she bled

But she's still here, I hate seeing her

I want to put her in a box,

Then take her home with me,

Like I can somehow save her from The Sidewalk

And the monsters that put us there

[tequila-mockingbird-writes]

i did you a favor by not having s3x with you

i thought about you pulling my jeans down past my creamy thighs

how you’d glance at those faint, white lines

where there used to be angry, red welts

and i said no, spared you the awkwardness

i’m starting to get a reputation

with my painted fingernails, and

a purple box of condoms in my shopping cart,

like a scarlet letter A stapled to my breast

i was banned from two frat houses

words dripping from my lips like chunky, lukewarm soup

legs too wobbly to make it up the stairs,

back of my throat stained with hooch-flavored puke

i wasn’t surprised when you left my room,

satisfied, i suppose, but still disappointed

returned to your dorm

and never called me again

[tequila-mockingbird-writes]

The Summer Of Manifestos

When we were poor,

and unemployed

And you'd sit on my bed reading Marx, smoking cigs

while I'd write poems about you in my mind

When they turned off our AC, and our water heater broke

We'd take cold showers when the skeeters bit

My darling, my antithesis

You spent our last dime on a gram of weed

We smoked until the sun came up

[tequila-mockingbird-writes]

“Gender is a shell game. What is a man? Whatever a woman isn’t. What is a woman? Whatever a man is not. Tap on it and it’s hollow. Look under the shells: it’s not there”

— Naomi Alderman, The Power  (via sonnywortzik)

[tequila-mockingbird-writes]

Whit

sweet contusions, kiss my ribs

my fair arms,

rounded tits

white, bloated stomach

there’s a gas station slushy

sloshing around inside my head

icy, lemon-flavored liquid

threatens to 

spill out from my ears

drip from my nose

leak from my eyes

I dance with Pink Whitney all night

as we descend into a frantic waltz

she jerks me in each and every

direction,

pulls me into a violent kiss,

which warms my chest and

leaves me empty

empty as her blocky glass frame

i’ll never drink again

[tequila-mockingbird-writes]

Formal Diagnosis: Bipolar I

Back when the downs were just Slumps and the ups were just Spirals, I was under the impression that I was Special. Maybe, just maybe, there were some remnants of genius underneath a few layers of ickiness. Maybe I’d create something incredible, maybe there was a Plath or a Van Gogh under the layers.

I spent the eve of my eighteenth birthday hotboxing one of my friend’s cars and watching the glowing green numbers on his dashboard clock. The three men around me, one being my boyfriend, giggled and passed his bong around and around. I was new, so I made a point of studying the intricacies of this maneuver. They told me to be careful– I was the asthmatic that previously limited himself to cigarettes– they didn’t want me greening out.

By this point, I had accepted that I was not a geode. I was not Special– the layers didn’t hide a crystal. If anything, I was a Jawbreaker. The only thing that the layers hid were more layers– I was icky all over.

They passed the bong to me. I took a single hit and wheezed into a coughing fit. Eyes watering, lungs burning, I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. They watched as I writhed in agony, eventually lurching forward and throwing up in my buddy’s backseat. 

Vomit soaking into my jeans, I watched as the glowing green 11:59 turned to 12:00.

Happy Birthday, the clock spelled out, This Is Adulthood.

I spent the next few months in a Slump, popping the pills that were supposed to suppress them. I’d smoke clove cigarettes and Mary Jane from the comfort of my own dorm bed, much to my Catholic roommate’s chagrin. Maybe I’d drop some ashes on the bedspread, set the whole building alight.

I don’t think I would’ve cared. I had no reason to.

“Literally everything,” I told my psychiatrist, “just feels like stale tortilla chips.”

She wrote me a prescription for more pills.