I wanted that, a reckless beauty; dauntless and inundating the room. I inflict myself on myself. Still. Hasty yes and yes and yes. I thought, even when surrounded, that I was alone. What is there really to learn from Troy, besides isolation begets permeability?

Sacrifice begets visibility; I am never more dazzling than when I’m sucking my own knife clean. I sprinted towards the light, nobody knew I was absent. Past that, desire begets a gash in the memory. I remember teeth, and how the blood didn’t leave my neck. Pooled instead. Bruised constellation. Botched hanging. Loud islands of regret. Too drunk. I make terrible prey. Mutter yes as if it can mean anything.

Oh teeth, my one clean memory, little disorganized search lamps, I count you as my audience; the way stars are beautiful until they are revealed as planes; the way what is touched erodes into an unremarkable darkness; the way the light of what is gone; reaches dim, reaches still.

FRANK OCEAN SIGHTING #268: FRANK OCEAN IS RUMORED TO SPEAK OF RIVERS WHICH IS LIKELY A LIE (DISC 1)

Junior year come around

& in my dorm room

animal level desire makes me

more me      in some ways

My savage tongue drizzles

onto an empty bed

Empty          except me

nothing new

to splinter the obese quiet

Lonely & holding court with stains

Drake vibrates through the next wall

lust got loose in the hallway

sex echoes between melodies

I thumb at flakes of paint

I ain’t got nobody    no music

No woman    no man

this makes me the anomaly

again      My man handsome

as anything that don’t quite exist

My man just the hum glazing my fist

Beneath my nails    olive coats of landscape

Gossip tells us there’s two discs

Rumor tells us it’s posthumous

Sense should’ve told me not to sleep

with this white girl     knowing history

like I do     yet here     me frightened

me jutting my hips in the dull light

Gossip tells us one of the discs

is River      Booze shuffled off her lips

It never met my mouth     I quivered inside her

loneliness     she told me    You need to quit being

such uh bitch & fuck me       I obeyed     then exited

For weeks it goes like that

this memory I shudder to call

abuse      Yet it was

the story is gauze

I already bled through it

She called me a coward

for each of my refusals

I ask myself    why I stayed

The sex was bad    I was scared

of her solitude    her fragile quiet

her desire for me to be hers outside

Some vases shatter   get filled with gold

Some vases shatter   just become fractures

that hold my eyes    as I drop the lid over them

Leave their little trauma in the hallway

My whole body an Achilles Heel

momma’s ever tender failing

destined for a puncture’s fame

The album was a hoax

I was just as depressed as before

& now mother to half a secret