the lovedrunk cowgirl

All that I feared is now an afterthought.

You told me last November that

when love ends, life must bloom in her place.

Your father’s tattoo shop smells more like you

than your sweatshirts do.

Everyone there looked at me like they knew

I ran away to come straight to you.

I make wishes over beat up records

and the eyelashes that linger on your face.

I told you somewhere between heaven, hell, and Colorado

that these love songs are acid laced.

I’m breaking through blue oceans

and I’m drowning in brown eyes.

We have no ship to sink,

we have no blood to drink.

I’ve run away from my city about a thousand times.

But I’d never found home in a stranger’s smile.

you ask me if I like who I’ve become

and I wonder why you’d whisper such a brutal thing.

to you this is an innocent question-

you ask it as you kiss my cheek.

you don’t know my full name

much less the damage i’m repenting.

we’re two strangers in heaven-

tangled up in borrowed tent.

(a traveler and a liar make their bed)

“yes, I love her” I said

you tangle your fingers in the cobwebs 

that shine above my spinning head 

and for a moment you think about weaving some of your own.

I can see it in your eyes-

the way you love to leave 

(fingerprints on my neck 

and on my suntanned skin).

you swallow and sell my story 

like the pills you stole from that party.

I am the final resting place 

for the secrets you bury in warm bodies.

the sound of her name is a battle cry-

it hangs 

from her mothers mouth.

it’s branded on her father’s tongue-

he bites his, 

I bite mine as I sharpen my knives.

I wipe my blood off the counter she stained.

my baby’s gone and my voice is lost.

all that’s left of her hides 

in a heart shaped box.

in my head plays a broken record

of a word I’ll no longer say-

the one they chose from a seventies song,

the one cutting through my lips and veins.

I have given you these eyes 

a thousand times.

I seal my love in messy handwriting

and I deliver it in poor timing.

I make myself known in the 

scarves I leave behind

and in the unwritten lyrics

floating on your jawline.

I bite the cross that hangs from her neck

as I search for deliverance in an unmade bed.

Salt rolls off my skin like the last 27 years.

Her body is gospel that brings the devil to tears.

She’s consecrated in the parts of me I’ve never showed.

Most mortals fear dark places

but heaven has haunted me most.

two things I never want to go back to:

the place that raised me

and the way that I was.

I’m learning to live again.

bartering sanity and silence

for something to sink my teeth in.

I’m giving it all up again.

I’m drunk driving at dawn again.

I turn to the mirror and I tear out my broken heart.

I don’t need overpriced therapy and organic drugs

to know that I’m scared to start.

someone once asked me

what is the highest price you’d pay for love?

I kissed their fingers and 

lay them on my chest.

there are dreams stuck behind the madness.

this thing inside me-

it never rests.

the trees are frosted white

like the old credit card in your nightstand tin.

and the street behind the house we dreamed of is littered

with carcasses of cheap cigarettes.

maybe I’m grateful that this neighborhood lost itself too.

maybe I am reminiscent 

of the things you’re still addicted to.