Paperweight Poetry

I want to write you letters, to buy you flowers, to run my fingers through your hair. I know nothing about love, but I know how to do if perfectly, I think I would be a really good lover, I would be good at loving you. I have a lot of thoughts and feelings from watching films and reading books. I wish we could love each other without our bodies. My body can't quite fit around this soul, it is too large in some places and too small in others. I stretch and pull like taffy but there are too many miles of skin. I wish our souls could meet without our bodies, so you wouldn't know the tragedy of analyzing my eyes, the glances, the motion of limbs or lack of it. I wish you knew the buzzing ball of light and energy that is my soul, before you knew the vessels, skin, and hair that cover it. I want to draw you over me like a blanket and whisper to the universe in the space between our souls; and write you letters, and buy you flowers, and run my fingers through your hair...

I have bought every loofa, exfoliating glove, scrub brush, shave lotion, and hair removal cream, but I can never scrub or shave some things off of me. I cannot scrub the shame of my body, no matter how hard I push, I cannot scrub off all the miles of looping skin and lumpy cellulite, the gnarled twists of varicose veins, the deep swells of bruises rising from unknown places like ravens, I cannot shave off all of the hair, it just keeps growing back and coming back like a daily reminder pinned to the world's bulletin board of my tireless grotesquity in my raw and unadulterated form. I cannot scrub the stench of sexual assault off of me, or all the purple perfect fingerprint impressions you left on my skin. I cannot scrub the feeling of you off of me or shave away the shame that I wasn't strong enough to fight you off, the helplessness, I cannot scrub the feeling of weakness, of my body being powerless against yours, my voice, my protests, only eggshells to yours....

Let us choose our words like a child chooses crayons, calling them by their names of apricot, instead of what we see, orange. Let us peel off their paper coats and draw sailboats in the inner wool, so now we can roll them against the pages we tore from the backs of books, making wide inundations of color that mushroom across the page, so that we forget that the rivers we created were once only a stiff rivulet between a child’s fingers. Let us choose our words like a child chooses crayons, as fastidiously as Renoir dismissed his brushstrokes from his hand to the swathe of canvas as vast and ballooning, liberated and pregnable as the tract of a whale’s belly. Let us choose our words like a non-native speaker, who dares not call a fountain a toilet, and takes care in plucking words like searching for and paying full price for unbruised pears. Let us choose our words like a crayon, a Renoir brushstroke, an unbruised pear, and pay full pri...

I want to ring the doorbell of kindergarten as though the world is about to end, and express my condolences to my mother for the six-year old styled truth that I am growing up, and come to an agreement with the alphabet that it’ll just have to stick in my mind as I recontextualize construction paper and crayons in a new class where I have no friends and render invisible revolution on the playground of my mind which means that now I sit on the bench and I’ll scribble your name madly in binders with unicorn stickers until I learn to pickpocket books from cars and library shelves, sniffing the old librarian’s fingers and binding glue off the pages, see myself wider in the mirror so that I flip off hunger and set it to music, negotiating with yogurt cups and the fingers around my wrist, then insincerely apologizing to my mattress for the punk albums I stow in its chest. I offer obsolete garbage talk to my father as a sacrifice to his mediocrity, movi...

Let us not forget the miles it took for us to get here; how long it took to stop getting cozy with chaos, to stop planting any seed we caught from the wind in the garden of our hearts. And let us not forget the first time you turned off the light and sat alone in the dark and you felt safe; because once you’ve survived it’s like having all your first’s again except no one is there to hold your hand, so let us not forget the first time you ate after it happened, I think it was a strawberry Pop-Tart, the first words that you said, even if they were as quiet as dove wings, they were words, the first time you wrote a sentence, even if you forgot the commas, then took a shower and brushed your hair. And let us not base these “first’s” on the fact that this is the first time you walked to your car and no one hurt you, but instead it is the first time you got behind the wheel and you drove, until the sky bled out like a beautiful gunshot wound, ...