Bunny Mask

The butt of the cigarette gives off more smoke than its initially corrupted form–which was once gentle, white, and elongated, protruding from in between the knuckle velvet of my pointer and middle fingers.

To my right, my brother is high on something non-material. Not a bud or a powder or even an edible, but some sort of blue light video casting a shadow from the phone to his face. From beyond the trees, the sky has grown a navy blue. 

I am trying to remember what it is to be bored the way I was when I was a child. The radio was still relevant enough to be around but not lively enough to play anything of interest. It had become a place for bored journalists to talk about their even more boring lives and take phone calls from other adults who were more bored than them. I am trying to remember what it is to be bored in the time of the backseat, picking at the headrest and being scolded when I accidentally pulled my mom’s hair. Bored in a  grocery aisle where I look at a tall, skinny woman and imagine I’m her. 

I take another drag of the cigarette and adjust the bunny mask, which began slipping from my face. I’d made the ribbon in the back too long. Around an hour ago, I was alone in my nightgown, fist-deep in glitter glue and fake whiskers. I made myself this bunny mask.

Water Snail

you died sometime in the days

i was lain in dusty 

sheets a gentle death

possibly surrounded by molded

water and a careless mind. 

and much like you i 

don’t know what to do with the 

water snail’s body. 

i sit, even now, staring at the tank,

the water dumped into the sink, 

swirling down the drain,

and the clear plastic box sits sideways

on the edge of the bowl 

with a soft mushy body

lost somewhere in the piled up

rocks. 

sun warm as my skin is,

in this wide windowed apartment,

there isn’t enough ventilation 

to let out the stench of its body.

so i try and ignore it for the time being

while i open again you and your

plays.

in my mind, i go again

to the bar where i watched

you, an omen, and more omens

and more omens and more

undulate in soft fair lighting

a task i was not fair enough to complete. 

but i don’t have to speak and you still know that. 

still i remained

and more i remained

in places i didn’t yet belong or

possibly never would. 

water snails need company too, 

the eyeless creature is not without 

the feeling of solitude  

and much like i, there is a bubble of 

dust around the body of the 

lonely snail.

with no drain large enough to flush its shell

and no will to extract its hollow body of slime, 

i plot out all of the ways to rid my house of its carcass

and decide that for now it will remain.  

but i, much like 

you died sometime in the days

i was lain in dusty 

sheets a gentle death

possibly surrounded by molded 

water and a careless mind.

20sickragdollthoughtstream.pdf

The thing about being twenty and sick and rag doll is you are pulling the twine out of your ears—the one that has been protruding from you for the past few days. You cannot hear the small hum of the cicadas or your mother’s soft lullabies beside your bed. It’s not that it’s deafening, these things just aren’t there the way they were when you were pulling the fluff from the ears of the inherited rag doll. Her soft and innocent body is freckled with fragments of your piss left behind which leeched onto her like pins and needles steal the epidermis from your grandmother's steady seamstress hands. And because this twine soaked up your brain, you feel yourself losing the humid summer childhood bedroom—a wax and hollow skull for the morning dappled with the flicker of the light polluted stars. Which is probably because these things aren’t really there either.

The senses left are the smell of the sterile metal poles surrounding you and the unsightly blueness of the paper gown’s draping figure. 

You tell the doctors, “Something bad happened.” Which is short of an answer. 

“If something bad happened, it’s best to come here immediately so we can run tests.”

“I was bathing.” The only piece of your brain left behind is the beetle’s elytra.

“That’s the worst you can do.”  

And the undulating of hospital curtains are blinding from the doctors and doctors’ doctors who have cycled in and out in search of doctors’ doctors’ doctors to provide an answer for the big god disease that grew the twine in your body. 

“She must have shoved that inside of herself!” a nurse cried a few nights ago. You chalk it up to a fire in his hair. 

A therapist is concerned that you can’t recognize a picture of your five-year-old self, because that’s not fair to the little girl flashed before your eyes or all of the faces you have forgotten in the last decade and a half. Circles and circles of itchy twine are soothing and rotting the insides, which probably look like ink blobs on a personality test. This is to say you are made up of everything surrounding you and somehow that’s philosophical and corny at the same time. 

Five and apneic and rag doll, you were dreaming on the eighth ring of Saturn and flattened rag dolls weren’t so obscure and no one smiled that smile of absurdity that they do when someone’s eyes shift differently or twine like dicks are sticking out of you. Twenty and sick and rag doll, you’re apologizing to your mother for the hospital bill and letting the twine dangle long and weightless from your soft lobes. You’re apologizing for yanking the stuffing from grandmother’s rag doll and sweating your piss into the poor girl as you ran away to the eighth ring of Saturn.