April 2012
24 posts
Weight of Water
Sing me down to the water,
your throat, a home to damp leaves.
I crawl into that space of rain and darkness
when I am running away from what.
You know what my eyes cannot let go of.
The brother who died before he could scream
a greeting into the world, the stinging slap against
my lips that fed me the force of a million kisses.
There is so much violence behind every act of love.
I wonder...
18-30 dog days
I forgot the number of razorblades I swallowed last night.
When the morning descends against the floorboards of my room,
my throat burns with battlescars. I remember screaming you down
as you grabbed a bag with clothes falling out of it and ran to catch a cab.
You chose to leave. So I grabbed all of our photo frames and smashed them
against the bathroom tiles, glass showering the floor like...
11 tags
17-30 north
The world is a sky of song
only my mother knows the words to.
The whales ask her for her secret.
When she obliges, the constellations
convulse against God’s collarbone—
all of those echos ricocheting against
the Milky Way, daring the moon to become full.
I’m always looking up, to find the way back home.
8 tags
16-30 graveyard shift
I’m a mass grave of muscle and bone and teeth.
And you’re the same idiot who thought graveyards
are holding places for the damned, that if you
snuck out of the house at midnight to fall asleep
across one of the freshly dug mounds of soil,
you’d be reborn into something other than yourself.
I don’t speak to the moon much these days, but when I did,
she always said:...
the24project: The Birds - Husnah Khan →
the24project:
The Birds
My body was sick for yours, so I crawled into bed and cried. I didn’t care who heard me, ignored the knocking against the door. The sunlight came and went. When the rain arrived, I could hardly breathe. Chills curled around my spine as if it was labeled “shelter.” My eyes were swollen…
6 tags
(15-30) immunity
You will not hurt me. And because you will not hurt me,
I know that you will be the one who will leave behind scars
as deep as canyons, black holes as wide as rivers.
I wonder how much knowing we will ever own,
how much of me you will remember, how much of you I will not drown.
So many moments spent wishing for something more,
those are the periods of time where I will lose you.
And in my...
8 tags
french kiss (14-30)
the tongue of the switchblade
blushes my blue veins red. across
the tiles, blood blooms brilliantly.
flushed skin on floor. so much mouth
on mouth, even the knife is tired.
6 tags
13-30
Your heart says Yes to my smile.
My lips say Uh huh to your neck.
Our bed says no to the day. So we
stay inside and let our hands do all
the traveling - your shoulderblade,
my backbone, all the areas of the mattress
occupied by our skin and muscle and limbs.
The sunlight slants across your face as my fingers
wrap around your torso like the tentacles of a jellyfish.
I wait for the body...
5 tags
A Wildness in the Wind (12-30)
You return. You do not come back as you were.
I walk by a spot that we once claimed as our own.
There is a wildness in the wind and the way she
teases my neck into bowing beneath the sky.
I remember the weight of your hand in mine.
I remember the waiting that came with night,
the morning could never be born soon enough.
There is a light above my bedroom window,
she never strays too far...
Wild Horses (11-30)
You made my stomach feel like a meadow home to wild horses
that ran in circles beneath a sky as blue as my favorite pair of jeans.
When I saw your approaching form, the horses would gallop my heart
into a frenzied state, and by the time your palms reached mine, my skin
was sweat and salt and so much shame. Your tongue-in-cheek laughter
made my cheeks flush with a gentle fire. We watched the...
4 tags
The Gardeners (10-30)
Speak the language I do, let the syllables grime your lips
into bruised and battered. I have stories beneath the skin
that will make your feet want to start running. You will want
to look for a vein and ask me for a sharpened box-cutter.
I’ll slide one out from beneath my tongue. There are things
that I can tell you that will make me want to break the way
the sun does in the...
7 tags
Forgive Me (9-30)
When I tell you that I’m sorry, what I really mean is:
‘I had your heart in my hands.
I didn’t mean to hold on so tight.’
If there is bruising,
forgive my fingers.
If there is breaking,
forgive my passion.
“Come sleep with me: We won’t make Love, Love will make us.”
– Julio Cortázar (via philphys)
5 tags
Elementary School Lessons (#8-30)
Today, our last day, this will be our last day together.
Or not together, already apart, but trying to make it work.
What does not work is broken. I learned this when I was six.
My teacher told me to set aside the severed sticks and grab new ones.
“Those popsicle sticks won’t hold up your house,” she warned.
I always wanted to build a house, was always building rooms
I...
9 tags
What You Could Tell Me (7-30)
how have you broken yourself
at the seams, what roads did
your feet wander down, and
when will the unraveling end?
there are so many suns caught
in the bed of your eyelashes, it
hardly takes a prism to know the
weight of that much light. i have
forgotten what your smile tastes like
but i remember that it used to make me
think of freshly cut oranges gleaming so
generously besides the...
2 tags
heartsickness
“did you say you were lonely? i was just about to miss you.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFhJiKGfmrg
Day 4: Tattoos/Cover Me
iibrahim:
“There is too much skin
and not nearly enough ink,”
she whispered to me.
5 tags
After Life (NaWriPoMo #6)
(After Ed Mabrey’s “What Comes After Dust”)
What comes after dust?
What comes after You Fuckin’ Whore,
What comes after She Had It Coming,
What comes after slut?
What comes after his fist against her face,
what comes after your mother sobbing in the shower,
what comes after enough?
What comes after years of getting bullied,
what comes after locker room laughter,
...
3 tags
something broken (NaWriPoMo #5)
Something broken something I once had
fractured by someone I loved. Next year
I will remember the blunt force of this anger
the bull-headed rage, the blue-bodied temper,
and the trauma my mind was left to rummage
through like a dumpster diver hoping with all heart
that something was left behind and could be salvaged.
I know that what is gone cannot be rescued- the boat
that has sunk into...
4 tags
things i cannot tell you (NaWriPoMo 4-30)
Although we don’t speak anymore,
you still cross the paths of my mind
and I wonder how long you will continue
to haunt the house of my body.
Remember how the nighttime used to stretch
itself into morning, and we hardly realized
save for the shadows on the walls that
became lighter to the point of disappearance?
We dug up graves with our laughter,
uncovered the tombstones beneath...
3 tags
the holiest room (NaWriPoMo #3)
*I miss your neck between my teeth.
I wonder if you know the season
of my longing. You are the river
my feet would like to step inside of,
during the summertime, when the gaping
windows let in no breeze to lick
the nape of my neck and only the calls
of birds mating and nesting come through.
I count the minutes we spend speaking
on the phone, the still darkness of
my 3am room lit only...
6 tags
Christmas in July: A Letter of Longing to Autumn...
I want you like I want Christmas in July
and I know that’s sacrilegious of me to say,
but you should probably blame my love of
flannel, soy peppermint mochas, and Mariah
Carey’s infamous Christmas single for this
cheesy comparison. After the end of winter,
when the grass begins to gleam green again
beneath the cloudless sky and the sun decides
to finally come out of hiding,...
5 tags
come close (NaWriPoMo #1)
I want to bruise your body
the way bullets do when they
graze skin, remove your breaths
from the lining of your esophagus
until you swallow down speechlessness.
Even if this will end, tell me that
we’ll witness the change in seasons
and when we look back, we will think
about the summer folding into fall
and how our memories burned bright
beneath the silent sun.
