for the barren women

This is good practice for when you have kids, they say.
I'm not going to have children, I say.
You would be a great mother, they say,
as if they know
my childhood,
my young adult trauma,
my mental illness,
me.

Your only purpose is to be a mother,
echoes a voice from my past.
Somewhere between then and now I had forgotten
the only thing that makes a woman worthwhile:
her ability to have children.

I think of Michal, a childless woman.

Long before any spark of my existence was lit,

she spoke too honestly, and was punished
in the worst way her god could conceive of.

I like to imagine she was grateful to her god
that she would never be forced to have a child.

Poison

Time is a poison,
slowly seeping inside you
until you eventually die from it.
All I can decide is what I do
before Time wins.

The Night You Said I Hated You

we went to a party
i wanted to leave early
but we'd had too much to drink
and the uber cost too much

Dysfunction

The anxiety isn't just in my mind anymore.
It's in my throat, choking me, cutting off the air
and I can't breathe.

It's in my lungs, diseasing them,
filling me with the poison that lives in my head,
not just outside,
and I still can't breathe.

It's in my heart, constricting blood flow,
and I still can't breathe.

Left Behind

Fading sunlight jumps from puddle to puddle
chasing clouds
The girl on the train watches
unable to catch up

Not My Last Letter

To He Who Was Briefly My Lover,

You will never read this,
and here I am,
with all the things I will never tell you.

I won't admit I cried myself to sleep
from missing you,
or that I wanted to call
when I stranded myself at the train station.

I won't say that I miss the way you smelled
like coffee,
or the movies we played
but never watched because we were too busy
with each other.


And I won't tell you I've moved on,
that I'm into someone new. 
We were lovers so briefly
before you were gone.
And now I will be too.

From Someone Briefly Loved

Sinners

My first thought
is of the sheer quantity of people
gathered to make an unpopular point.
We walk.

As we walk, I see my present
juxtaposed over my past
moving into my future.
Temple spires reach
toward a god I no longer believe in.
That god damned me for my decisions,
condemned me for my friends,
judged me for my lack of belief.

We reach the end of our march,
the top of a hill.
I can see more from up here. 
The journey is far from over,
but we have made it this far.
We won't stop now.