Each time that I look into a mirror, I only see a sad china doll with cracked paint around the eyes,

A little girl with lipstick smeared against her mouth, a fever dream.

How easily I walk the line, my bedroom eyes on a broken face –

And my jaw always tells the same story:

Bubblegum and butterscotch lollipops cracked like broken glass between my teeth,

Bite down hard enough and it is almost like I am eating my own pain:

The summer that I was seven years old, each slow day a dream,

Spread myself against the sidewalk and hope to melt.

He touched parts of me that I didn't know I had and now I cannot get over it.

I cannot get him out of me.

Melt into anything other than the wish that the blood in my cotton underwear

Came in the shape of cancer, of numbered days.

What else could be this hard asphalt shape that has unfurled in the pit of my stomach?

This gnawing emptiness that never goes anywhere, with jaws that refuse to stop chewing

Even when my fullness has turned me into a broken faucet.

How the vomit spews from my nose, how it makes love to my fingers;

How it turns violent when I do not love it back.

I am the type of hollow that only grows,

The kind of empty that is scared to be full,

The kind of empty that has forgotten how to take a breath and mean it.

I curl my fingers, I think like a man:

Maybe if I reach far enough inside myself, I will find something worth pulling out.

I like to think that I will always know something about myself that they will not,

Like how I tuck the pieces left of me into the places between the blood and ghost and memory.

I crawled so deep inside of myself that even I cannot find my way back out.

I crawled so deep inside of myself that I do not know where my breaths go now,

When my chest has grown too heavy to carry them.

Where do I go when there is no home to be found inside this body?

Where do I go when the world has grown dark?

Who do I call when not even I remember the sound of my voice?