i wish that my sadness was like a peach pit hardness hidden in my soft to excise with a sharp knife. I never get through november without wanting to die, but at least this time I am trying to vomit it up, arsenic in the apple seeds, cyanide in the cherries.

I have been eating my poems alive to feed the grief in my stomach, feeding them to it line by line, word by word, l e t t e r by l e t t e r. it keeps me breathing but it keeps the sadness breathing, too, its teeth in my lungs, fists tangled up in my guts. does it come forth from november, grey, or does november come for it? lost child, orphaned thing, clinging to life in my ribcage but keeping me as prisoner.

here is where the fruit rots, the ground drought-thirsty drinking all the cider made from our neglect, tasting the regret of having missed the season again. when we say 'next year,' how many of us mean it, and how many are making space in their chests for the beasts that come in on november's back?

this year there is nothing hard in me to find with that sharp knife, just november clouds, space for the poems that decomposed for something that never grew. just the lingered peach-pit sweetness, taunting, ready to feed itself to november poem by poem, leaving nothing for me.

—november // for @julykings prompts #7

when they start taking the children

I am sitting on the number three bus and crying. This is not the first time I’ve cried on a bus, and not even the first time I’ve cried on this particular bus. Daughter is playing on my headphones and my phone is at 21% and this afternoon the Park Ranger at Saint Anthony Falls said the president is trying to close down the Army Corps of Engineers.

I'm not crying about the Army Corps of Engineers. I'm crying because there are children in cages and people are arguing semantics about the word “fence" versus “wall.” I'm crying because my Jewish father, a second generation immigrant whose grandparents still spoke Romanian and Hungarian and Yiddish, still thinks Mexicans are trying to steal his jobs. He dealt with me dating a mixed-race person, barely, but I could never introduce him to my girlfriend. I'm crying because that same mixed race ex-partner is the one who checked in with me, queer Jewish neurodivergent woman (that's four targets on my back). They asked about the internment camps, asked, “How are you doing with all this?” even though they're a trans person of color living in Texas who told me three days ago, “An immigration lawyer told me I'd have a good chance of being able to emigrate to Canada.”

I'm crying because I told them to go if they had the chance. Because they said I should, too. Because I wanted to tell them to come up I-35 through Minnesota and grab me on their way North, but instead I said, “I can't. I have people here.”

People like my two trans best friends. My chronically ill mother. My mentally ill Jewish brother. People like my pregnant-possible friends, who watch the Handmaid’s Tale and then go drink afterwards, because how the fuck else are we supposed to deal with that? People like the youth of color I've worked with, like the youth with cognitive differences who can't speak, like the youth who tell me they’re queer, they're sick, they're afraid they'll be next.

I'm afraid I'll be next. I want to write my cousin in Germany and ask if she'll take me. I want to drop out of school, take a Greyhound to Texas, and chain myself to an internment camp door. I want to clear out the closet under our stairs and build a false wall good enough to hide behind. I want to stand on a highway bridge with a noose hanging from the fence and a sign in red paint that says, “Who will be next?”

Suddenly, I am looking at my coworkers and neighbors and wondering, If we had lived in Nazi Germany, would they have helped protect me? I’m wondering, Since we live in a fascist country, are we going to protect others?

Never again is supposed to mean never again. I know someone whose parents crossed the Alps on foot to escape Europe. Both my grandfathers served in World War II. Was it all for nothing? Are human beings going to do this until we’re all extinct? I took an entire college history course about the Holocaust. The final paper and underlying theme was, “Was the Holocaust an unavoidable consequence of modernity?”

I don’t remember my answer, but if I had to write the paper now, I would wrote the word WHY? over and over for a hundred pages. Why are we doing this? Why are we still doing this?

Niemoller wrote about no one being left to stand up. 

I wonder who will be left to write about the time when there is no one left to take?

I've been away from social media and writing mostly fanfiction when I'm not focused on school, but here's a poem I found in my phone memos from last week. I hope everyone's winter has some warmth in it somewhere.

Another part of chapbook poem draft. I've never written about this person or situation after it happened and it's intimidating but liberating. If you are in a relationship and feel violated, speak up, speak to others, and leave as soon as you can. Don't let them convinced you your discomfort doesn't matter

Another work in progress for what will hopefully be a chapbook sometime in 2018. I've got some elaborate and exciting plans to make this maybe-book into a part of a bigger project as well, so look out for that!

Would you believe I was watching Doomsday Preppers when I wrote this? Some apocalyptic fragments while I attempt, in vain, to sleep.

I'm frequently starting poems and writing down lines and symbolism for the first time since before I wrote Crazy Beautiful Life. I hope 2018 brings enough material for a chapbook. If you had a book of my poetry, what kind of things would you want in it?

A fragment from my Google Drive.

Five Times Micah Died (And One Time He Lived)

Part of The Real Unholy Trinity Universe, which I write with @shiverofjoy​ and @brushingpast​. This piece is just by me.

Prompt: Work Song for our Hozier Series

Warnings: Blood, gore, injury, suicide, death

When my time comes around Lay me gently in the cold dark earth No grave can hold my body down I'll crawl home to her My baby never fret none About what my hands and my body done If the lord don't forgive me I'd still have my baby and my babe would have me

one.

The room is spinning. It’s hard to get his eyes to focus, but out of his peripheral vision--which is pulsing red with his heartbeat, is that bad? It’s probably bad--he can see the scrawl of permanent marker across his formerly cream-colored bedroom walls. The three-headed beast with his friends faces on it seems to move, as if it’s shouting from the plaster and paint.

How much blood did he have to lose before the goddamn voices fucking stopped?

water and rocks // journal pages

I get to leave school early the week before my final exams. It feels good to be on the number 3 bus again, like I am home. The sun is out and the air seems almost warm enough to take of my leggings from under my shorts. The first real push of summer after it snowed on May Day. I am on my way to my wilderness guiding company, and like I do often, I am reflecting on how strange it is that I always find myself there. My life goes in circles. At fifteen I have my first “coming of age” experience, do something that none of my friends are doing, and six years later I am back in that place. Guides led me across the stones at Itasca State Park where the Mississippi starts; six years later I am the guide, bringing other 15-year-olds over the same rocks. The guiding company warehouse felt like home when I first saw it–everything open and big and ready for adventure. I feel this way now. I hope the feeling stays in me the way it has stayed in the warehouse, with its cedar-strip boats and oldies playing on the ancient mounted speakers on the walls. My bus crosses the Mississippi River on the Washington Avenue bridge and there is a stone in my stomach. We cross the Mississippi River and I am suddenly reminded of its power over me. We cross the Mississippi River and the river never even sees us. It wouldn’t care, even if it could. A week ago, Chris, a coworker, was swept over Saint Anthony Falls. No one has seen him since. They are doing a foot search along the riverbanks on Friday, his friends from the University and his family. I will probably be at the warehouse, seeing him between the shelves–bright neon hat that we all wear, braces on his teeth bared in a genuine smile. Another coworker, a park ranger, wrote a piece more eloquent than I ever could. I think, I wrote a book about someone who disappeared; I can rest my voice. I can stay quiet about this one. But I can’t, no more than I can keep my silence about Wade, a poet and friend of mine in Austin, Texas who killed himself days after I learned about my coworker being lost in the water. And Joe himself, subject of the only book I will probably ever write, his ghost seeming to get stronger the closer we get to the day of his death. They stand somewhere inside my head, and every time I turn to greet them, I find that they have just left. On Friday, I get to paddle the river for the first time since October, and in another life, Chris will be in the backs of our canoes with us, his stern paddle proving his power over the water, at least for a while. On Saturday, it will be a year without Joe, and my best friend and I will spray paint the walls of the overpass until we feel better. My boyfriend and I will walk around his neighborhood until the sun comes up. In another life, Joe will be laughing at us and shouting obscene suggestions about what to draw, will be walking with us and deciding which way we should go in the dark. In less than two weeks, I’ll be in Austin, where I once stood on the tiny balcony of Wade’s apartment and could stare straight at the capitol building down the street. In another life, Wade will be there with his baseball cap on backwards and a cigarette to lend me, if I want it. One day I will stop coming back to the rocks in the river. There will be new teenagers crossing its head, new guides making sure they don’t slip on the rocks. Chris will still be laughing on the river. Joe will still be grinning somewhere in a tree. In a bar in Austin, Wade will be having a drink with his fake ID. Time will flow on without them, until it has swept over them enough that they will be sand, and no one will remember their names. No one but the river. Nothing but the stones.