so tired of living my life in fear. you listen but you don't truly hear. i'm yelling and my body is jelly; shaky, frenzied and calcifying but you just keep on smiling. why are you smiling?

you tell me to talk and i'm afraid i'll bark.

what is there to talk about?

i can't cry unless the moon is blue, i work until I'm sore, 'til my muscles have been cut through and i sleep until my day's halfway over.

what is there to talk about?

you open my mouth and it's just bark, bark, bark.

get me to dance on my hind legs and you're happy

but there's something crawling under my skin, a worm, and i'll bite until i pierce my skin, then it'll be yours.

so much to talk about, yet so little.

bark, bark, bark.

I thought I saw you in the grocery store you used to work at the other day— I almost stopped to say 'Hello, how are you?'

You walked past me without a word, and it was only then that I remembered that you had made your home already in a place that I can't reach, in a grave whose address I was never given.

I only found God when you left us behind. I sat in your tiny, little church and I listened to the pastor, who barely knew your name, give a eulogy that failed to capture your memory. Who else knew you but God? How else could I get closer to a ghost than getting to know the Holy Spirit, which you had followed so assiduously?

When I see him, I'll ask you how you've been, and I hope he tells me you've enjoyed the clementines I last left you.

I think of you when January comes around, even though it's the month of my birthday and not yours, because that was the last time that I ever wanted you, and yet for being the last time, it was so violent: so violent that I begged you to stay like a dagger was being held to my heart, then cursed you for leaving like you had dug my grave with your own hands, then heaved when you turned your back to me and then heaved for so long that I gave your memory my innards.

I thought you would at least come back to say happy birthday.

I still dream of you, at the end of my really good days; a painful reminder that, maybe, you could make my really good days even better. But I know better than to entertain that thought for more than a few seconds. You were my first glimpse of heaven and my last fill of hell.

I am 23 and still drawing horses, trying to perfect the angles of their bent legs as they run wildly— wildly yet deliberately.

When I drive my mom home from the city and past a ranch, she asks me when I'm going back to school, what will my major be. I'm going seventy miles per hour and speeding through lights, imagining myself running instead like in my drawings, fast and frightened but free, the sound of my feet hitting the ground.

The next light turns red and I hit the breaks, feeling her skinny, bone-y fingers dig into the muscle of my bicep like needles. I tell her, "Soon," but the word alone gives me a cancer that gnaws on the muscles of where she holds me.

I am 23 and when I dream, I read books with no commas or periods, no ends to their stories. Words turn into strokes, pages into frames and the frames into mares. I ...

i. in the dead of night / i want to live with you

ii. move to the city with me.

iii. ???

iv. to think that we could stay the same...

v. anytime, anyplace, anyhow / you're allowed to treat me like a piece of meat / i don't care if it's been a year or sixteen

vi. apologies to future mes and yous

vii. i'll always be yours

Hell is in me because I was born in January, after the birth of Christ and before the day of love, in the awkward shadow of the new year where optimism finally stops dripping from the broken faucet and is followed instead by an emptiness that was only known to God before he spread out his hand to create the world. The Devil held me in my first moments and pressed his thumb into my wet, blood chest and planted a flame that would keep me warm throughout the winter.

Hell is in me because the fire never went out. It grew quietly, and then wildly, and then quietly again until it made a small home out of burned tissue and gasoline in the cavity protected by my ribs. It was so constant, there was nothing to do but feed it and hide away.

Hell is in me the way that I know that Heaven is in you, because you were born in March when spring is just a babe being wo...