how to survive the unsurvivable or what I do while waiting for the world to regain its color

scroll
through the photos
app on my phone
28,000 pictures and counting-
delete duplicates
the way I want to disappear myself
(but I’m not a copy)
stare
at an image that appears inarguably beautiful
or one in which I do
relish in how
my eyes see splendor
even through all the bullshit
even though somedays

they can’t

on those days

death feels

like a long awaited pause button
a door prize
I wish I could win
there are also days
that I have already won
listen
to the playlist without a single song
that sounds like sorrow.
eat

my weight in worry
or whatever

scouring for the dopamine my brain seems to have misplaced
look
at the unfinished poems
each of them a river of possible
aren’t I also
mostly water?
cry
mix the paint of my misery
into my hopelessness

laugh
at the way the colors run
like I used to from my problems
but I stand now.
root my feet
even under my grief
my world imploded
countless times
and I’m alive
to write the poems about it.

a court of gate-keeping men sit on their thrones

saying they don’t like my poems,

that they never really fucked with me anyway.

took months for the air of this

to reach me.

talking shit is like a cold front-

cold air is heavier than the warm

displaces it

disappears every hug and piece of praise

I shared with those poets

in a five year time span

and subsequently I buried my voice

out in my own backyard

after I had just unearthed it.

Wouldn’t want to bother them.

instead I robbed myself

of the ability to build worlds

because I didn’t revolve around theirs

because someone finally said

what the depths of my doubt

have always known:

that my poems are pointless

that my

wild loud soft and sharp

needn’t be collected and spoken.

I used this as a long awaited excuse

to stop

dissecting my trauma

to turn that interest

exclusively academic

sometimes I still move like

in a peer reviewed journal:

Study Examine Analyze

Delineate

Dissociate

Dissolve.

In a way

it is a lot easier

to let the trauma erode

what’s possible

convince me

that how I think is not something

that needs recorded.

This is what the autism, the adhd, and the anxiety tell me anyways.

If I don’t let the poem

string itself sensical

then I don’t have to introduce myself

to myself on a loop

If I don’t make that mental leap at therapy

I don’t have to feel my way through it.

If I don’t write the anthology,

I don’t have to cower in the shadow

of a maybe brilliant thing

I have just built and live up to it

or in the shadow of a book

no one reads

Instead, I can just be shadow

pretend it is mysterious allure

not cowardice that paints me

quiet

not disappointment

or betrayal.

If I never let anyone too close

they can’t tell the difference.

It takes so much energy

to be alive

to shut the poems down.

I thought I was doing myself

and everyone else a favor

by finally shutting up.

stayed out of the scene for years

but they don’t stay

gone-

the critics

or even the poems

so why silence myself?

for the illusion of safety?

for men?

I know I have to speak

for myself

but the longer I live,

the harder this narrative is

to do out loud.

I think myself so far into myself

that I think

in spiral

into a shell

into a relic

into the question,

am I a scholar of my own trauma

or an architect of my own fixation around it?

Then, I grab a shovel

and get back to work.

Instructions Home, after Jasmine Mans.

Break every shame clogged mirror before you begin

(that way you have already begun).

Turn left at the stoplight across from the small brick elementary school that proved to be reprieve from the kitchen table.

Make a fire of the things you used to believe of yourself.

300 ft from where you ate pistachio ice cream sundaes with at least four toppings and not enough friends, turn right not left.

Leave the seeds of self-harm unwatered

avoid being the teenager

who wrings their forearms

until they’re stop signs

stifling sobs

in their bedroom again.

Run miles in the direction of tenderness

you don’t yet think

you deserve.

you’ll know you’ve gone too far if you never lived the decades that suffocated your own voice.

You’ll know you have arrived

when you start to see yourself

when you hear your name

and it sounds like
all the flowers you’ve been giving everyone else.

The future is crowdsourced.

we pick each other

‘s brains like wildflowers.

capitalism has never been tender with us

so we are relentlessly soft

with one another.

This system leaves us for dead

but we keep bringing each other

nourishment gift-wrapped

as laughter.

we keep bringing each other

Alive.

Just because you don’t want to hear it doesn’t make it fake news.

I speak a poem about my childhood trauma and you don’t like the culpability

you say you have different opinions of my past

I say I think you mispronounced,

“this isn’t how I imagined my legacy”

mispronounced,

“I made you in my image

who are you to be a visionary

not just (my) vision?”

Mom,

I am not a free subscription.

Please

do not try me.

you didn’t like me quiet

but if I’m going to be loud

it can’t be about all the ways I was kept quiet?

you always said, “stop crying

or I’ll give you something to cry about,”

and you did

but even better

gave me something to write about.

if you wanted the story to be told differently you should have treated me differently.

the quote goes, “the ax forgets

but the tree remembers.”

and I felt that

me:

the tallest metal object in a field

you:

lightning

with amnesia.

You raised a carving.

I became living art.

You raised mockingbird.

I became Phoenix.

Watch me

rise.

the first person in the bloodline to analyze their trauma does so after causing their weight in it.

for years

I became the shape of my anguish. I wasn’t just hurt. I was the hurt.

when you are the wound and the salt

you would do anything to stop the hellfire you have become

but not before

you enact the pain, make it reverberate

into someone else’s lap

say heavy

say here

say here’s heavy

between kindnesses which was how you were loved, wasn’t it?

everything has a catalyst, even you.

in my family it is tradition

to forget what didn’t kill you.

If it was a trauma

We do not call it a trauma.

We don’t call it at all.

I come from two lines of hurt people who’ve spent lifetimes pretending they aren’t hurt people

I come from the ridicule I was met with after realizing this and doing something about it

I come from intense emotions and the shame thrust upon me for having them and all the places I stuffed them in response

I come from the unraveling

then the learning how to upcycle my history

I come from big hearts and bigger armor

from so much love and laughter it makes a partner tell me,

‘your heart is so vast it scares me’

my heart became this

meadow when I started

tending the weeds

that entangled my loved ones

after they grew over my own feet

because you can’t move forward like that.

I have enough space now

I have enough to be a home for myself

and still have guests over

my heart became this meadow

only after

My least favorite thing about being an artist is continually convincing myself I am not one.

Imposter syndrome taunts in a voice that sounds exactly like mine.

Anxiety hands it a microphone.

ADHD plays 52 card pick up with my thoughts-

hyperfixates on negativity.

Invisible illness renders me too damn tired

to fight back.

Capitalism builds an entire amphitheater

for the performance

finds a way to fill the seats and profit

off of my fear.

I am afraid

the art I make will be good

and I will be expected to be good at things.

I am afraid the art I make will be bad

and I will use this as definitive evidence

that I am bad.

(this binary is a false equivalency

I am learning how to surrender

instead of disregarding my creations

and my creativity.)

self-censorship is like mugging yourself.

my voice has enough soundproofing

I didn’t install

in this world hellbent on silencing

femmes, queers,

and so many of us

How can I be my own oppressor too?

the poems I have written

the art I have made

has kept me alive.

If I’m not a writer

if I’m not an artist

then how am I still here?

An eclipse creates a shadow and wonders why it looks like that

I knew you were afraid

of falling

in love.

I never said

(but I wanted to say,)

“don’t.

don’t fall in love.

stand up

in it.”

an eclipse reminds me

that when you lose

enough of something

it becomes something else.

I came to you entirely

terrifying

and at just the wrong enough time

for it to be disguised as the right one.

Time is

an unrelenting god.

the year I realized I loved you

was the same year that unloved us both

the year you lost and lost.

If grief is love out loud

you were always singing.

you are always singing.

Once, it was Johnny Cash’s Hurt at karaoke.

in a space historically hellbent on joy

you sang loss alive.

We had

four seasons

of shedding

version after version

of ourselves together

until what was left was me

wiping snot on my jean shorts

at the sight of you

swan-diving off of our story

again

as if you only feel

in control

mid-air.

I pulled you off so many ledges

but the moon pulls the tide

not the other way around.

Wouldn’t it be so much better

if no one carried anyone?

I can see us standing

Upright

walking

forward.

an eclipse isn’t forever.

it becomes and unbecomes

until it is a whole

and brand new already.

on my most hopeful days,

that is what I wish for us.

I am talking to my mom about a partner.

she stops me mid story to play

a guessing game
‘Wait! Wait! I want to get them all right!
‘Who has a kid on the way?’
‘Oh! Oh! he’s the bartender, isn’t he?’
‘Who lives in New York?’
‘What’s her name?’

this is love:
my mother
adapting in real time
to a future she couldn’t have imagined

for me.

love
abundant
ethereal
omnipotent

I wasn’t raised to think of love
in multitude.

my date and I are curled into one another on the couch
we feed each other candy
by hand

This is the future I couldn’t
have imagined for myself either

talking to my crush
about the people I love
and the ones I hope to
isn’t a thing I knew I’d find.
I ask my date, between gummy bears,

about who makes her weeks:
learning the landscapes
of my lovers is my new favorite
past time

present time

All the years I played
with my own heart for sport
c o l l a p se
when I kiss
the people I care about
or when I listen to them talk
about fucking anything.

I know each of their laughs
by heart,
their catch phrases,
(which I have accidentally stolen)
and their favorite flavors

fresh-squeezed grapefruit.
key lime.
pineapple gummy bears.
vegan icing.

someone I love
makes the best beet based juice
I’ve ever had
and tells me the color is me-
calls it by my name.
my hair isn’t even fuchsia
right now
but it makes sense
like we make sense.

someone I love
danced
in the aisle at rite aid
when I was waiting
for my prescriptions
didn’t even notice anyone else was watching
his eyes locked on me
like I make sense.

there are times I am terrified
of how the world is proving itself to be
and then there’s this.
there’s them.