My body is a house

My body is a house of emotions

The windows are murky so I appear clumsy to those outside

My stomach is a whirled cauldron of lilacs when your eyes smile at me

Stir in molasses with a carved wooden spoon

The wasps in my esophagus bite until my throat is too swollen to speak my truth

I love the wasps anyway

Just as I love the drum of fear that beats under my belly

And the poisoned dagger of trauma (sometimes in my head, sometimes in my left knee)

This life is raw to me

Every color my eyes touch is swallowed the bottomless sea

And I love to sit there under it and watch bright creatures and sunbeams

There is memory somehow ineffable

They give us life out of white space and then put death on the table

I wanted to give my heart to everyone

Yet it’s a shredded blanket I curl up in

Shame is a blue swollen steam that rises to my head

The yellow of guitar calluses

And the yellow of the sunflower petals that frame my face

When I see something I see it as me

When I love something I love it as me

And when I hurt, hurt is all there is

Therefore they call me selfish

Perhaps I am proud to be my own kind of selfish because it pours out molasses sweet

And I feed it to whoever

There are words too, the mind speaking to itself

The loud clack of an internal typewriter typing incessantly

Bold black font that doesn’t want to stop

She said my shoulders were deep ivy green

Entwining and twirling like the acclaimed spiral of the plump garden snail

Burying her lukewarm eggs in liminal space

I wanted to be a snail when I was a child

‘Cause they could take their time

And ‘cause the little things seemed big to them

Now I’m twenty

And I want to let the colors dance in a new way

I am proud and humbled at the same time

For in the darkness we walk inside of ourselves

Along a spiral of lanterns that lead our souls

To a new banquet of colors all our own

To touch and taste and rub our backs into