In East Texas, I learned that my body
is less Girl and more Elephant Graveyard.
Here, I am the back pages of a history book;
I am a cathedral of almost-lovers.
Welcome.
I am where you go to abandon your dying.
It will be like kissing, just not as violent.
Come here to bury your dead.
All that aching must be heavy—I’ll carry it.
I have always been beast of burden:
pack animal.
Buy a family plot behind my ribcage.
Lay three generations of Not Good Enough
down to rest.
You can love me like a slot machine, here.
Shove yourself inside for the chance
of getting poetry out of it.
I can be lucky sevens, I can be anything.
I can be the first bar you got drunk in.
I can be a stomping ground for old lovers
who only loved the parts of me they could put their fingers in.
I’ll be the sycamore behind the high school soccer field
and they’ll carve their names in me with the stems
of broken wine glasses and call it love.
I can unlearn photosynthesis while they
drink fireball whiskey and tell stories of how
bad
I wanted to be touched.
Yeah. I wanted to be touched.
Guess my soda fountain heart was bad at being a wishing well;
all those copper pennies only ever tasted like blood.
And hope tastes like arcade fodder. It tastes
like the bottom of a mason jar.
Does it even count making wishes in cities
too bright to have stars?
Bodies are supposed to be temples, right?
Well I sure did ransack mine good.
In my defense, marble is marble and stone is stone.
In my defense, nobody ever taught me that I could be holy.
In my defense,
wine coolers in Texas summer can taste like praying
if you hold your mouth right.
So I’m the graveyard and not the dead.
Forget this bone business and
for god’s sake, just let me live.
My body is a temple,
and my gods
drink vodka and gin.