My book is a world.
It has description which takes up my brain.
Turns it into a world into a graveyard into space?
It could be a real one it could be a fake. My book is a world it is a place.
Where I can be me and meet the characters face to face.
I can join the characters for adventure or live in sorrow and pain, my book is a world and helps describes what I am feeling.
My book is a world, happy, sad or scared I can have an adventure or simply be impaired.
Every day when I read whether I learn or I feel, I read to be me and not be ordeal.
My book is a world the world simply unfolds into a place around me a story is told.

Black tiles, and if I look long enough I can make them swim,
A game between me, myself,
And black tiles on the bathroom floor,
The only game to play when doubled over crying
Trying not to hurt so much,
Trying not to hate so much, but not that kind of hurt, not only.
My stomach contorting into new shapes,
I used to beg to die, beg God to die before I knew what
Either of those words meant
(Always one for melodrama.)
It used to scare her, what to do when
Waiting isn't painless.
I don't have that hurt anymore, not much anymore, but
I still shout that same sentiment.
Things stay the same, even if they change, even as they change
Nothing has truly changed.
Doubled over crying,
Arms, fingers like taut strings, trying to pull myself back into recognizable shapes,
Tears on black tiles on the bathroom floor,
Black tiles swimming.
Head banging,
I wanted her to notice me.
Pity is a thing one has to earn.
Sitting on a windowsill and thinking about concrete,
To young to operate outside of the allowed.
Secrets behind desks, screaming in pencil,
Erasable.
Nothing I've said has ever been true.
A home never to be lived in, towers
The neighbor cut the wires with safety scissors and
Gonna conjure up this time.
Nothing I've said has ever not been lies.
Every corner holds something for her, and it comes back to this, every time.
Before this I hadn't known her voice
And I said her name,
Tried to call her off and she didn't hear me,
Her eyes were filled with red and hate and hurt,
I need to be called off.
Cutting comments, I always know just what to say.
The sweet aftertaste of a fight I didn't want to win.
Someone was always going to get hurt.
Acid stains on black tiles,
Black tiles on the bathroom floor,
Tear stains in the grout between the tiles on the bathroom floor,
Memorizing the patterns of the tiles on the floor.
Someone was always going to get hurt.

We speak—hard white seeds,
little waxing moons
that slip

into turned soil
like polished stones
into a child’s pocket.

Pot bean,
succotash,
soup.

Our farmer
sowed us on
the coastal plain,

stood at the rumps
of his three bays
that ploughed the fields,

obedient troika
even his young sons
could drive.

The fields, cupped
on three sides
by mountains,

on the fourth—open
to the loamy ocean
with its tides of till and sow.

Buttery, earthy,
100 years ago
from this unlikely place

we fed most
of the world.
People were crazy for us.