crooked as corkscrews

i. You fight because it is the most intimate act you can think of, the way blood flows from one body and spills onto the other, the way your bones collapse on impact, a meteorite fist landing in your concave crater cheek.

ii. There are no skeletons in your closet–they’re stuffed into the confession booth beside the altar to which you have chained yourself, and they rattle and they shake like a warning when you feel yourself drifting too far. (You are unsure whether this is because you are pious or because god is something you can see without a working pair of eyes.)

iii. Your memories are flame-licked and stained with blood, you’ve learned to read the wind and it whispers secrets into your ears. You know there is a pair of lips waiting to swallow you whole, heart and all; the shifts in the air tell you that you are gravitating in the wrong direction.

iv. There is a compass tattooed to your insides and still you are hopelessly lost. Heaven and Hell are warring inside you, always brutal, always merciless. If you fall, does it mean that you, too, were once an angel?

I think I like myself a little broken,
with rough edges, a little harder
to grasp. I like poetry
better than therapy anyway.
The poems never judge me
for healing wrong.

When I haven’t been kissed in a long time, I create civil disturbances, then insult the cops who show up, till one of them grabs me by the collar and hurls me up against the squad car, so I can remember, at least for a moment, what it’s like to be touched.