my cat's been rolling in gasoline. he says he likes the way it smells, like plastic and magic and unhealth and pretty. says he likes how paper feels under his skin, pressing him flat, a skipping stone or a wallet against some try-hard's newscolumn.

to me it just feels like dying. i feel heavy and slick, stumbling all over myself and losing my bones further behind a barricade.

you're telling me how your mother died, i'm still thinking of the sturdy brown boxes that will hold every thread of my life, if i should take my mother's tape measure with me or if i should save up a handful of cash and buy my own scale, not the s***ty kind that are off by six pounds, but the kind with the digital read out that measures to the ounce and is never wrong, kind of like god. offer me as an olive branch to him, knotted between two talons. use me in your forgiveness.

my bicameral heart st-stammering a miserable apology, it's not that i lied so much as i forgot to tell the truth. it's not that my love has sunken to the seabed so much as my eyes have forgotten how to see. it's not that i've given up so much as i've been made to give up